"I'm Not Crazy"

I.

When I was Eleven years old a man came into my house and shot my step brother in the mouth while I was watching.

I know that's a blunt way to start things off, but I think that everything will be easier to understand with that part out of the way. Context is helpful. In therapy, they tell you that contextualizing your own story is key to understanding and healing from it. You have to understand all the details; all the whys. There has to be a reason that you are the way that you are. Everything is a reaction. We are all just the product of a few tiny things strung together in the cosmos.

Unfortunately, it's more complicated than that, because I may have already lied to you. It's not an intentional lie. It's just that some things are muddled. Some things are confusing. Some things are actually impossible to disseminate in a way that makes sense.

I've spent my entire life trying to make it all seem accurate in my head. I want to tell the story in a way that's truthful. Subjective truth isn't enough. It can't be my truth, or their truth, or the truth that was chosen by consensus. There can't be multiple truths. Truth doesn't work that way.

When I was Eleven, my stepbrother shot himself in the mouth while I was standing there. I was close enough to get blood on my face; hot, metallic and sticky. Don't let me try to make you believe that something else happened. That is the whole truth. All the evidence pointed to it. The doors were locked from the inside. There was no forced entry. The gun belonged to him. I was just a scared child, said the forensic psychologist. Children make things up when they are afraid. Children rewire their brains to paint pictures that make more sense than what they are seeing.

I loved my brother, they said. I couldn't understand why he would do something like that, they said. I had to make up a fictitious version to understand the trauma, they said.

So don't trust me, because I can't tell you the truth. I am a liar. Lies bleed out of me like fresh blood. My skin is so stained in them that they can't even look at me anymore.

That's in the past though and this is the new now. I didn't live in Redding anymore. I didn't have to be surrounded my those pieces of the past. I was free of it all; everything.

In the new now I was a psychology major at Cal State University in Los Angeles. I didn't tell any of my various mental health practitioners that I was going to be studying psychology, because I thought they'd see it as a conflict of interest. They'd see it as proof of an obsessive personality in me. They'd see it as proof that I wasn't ready to be on my own.

College was mine, though. Nothing in my life had ever truly been mine until college. It was my choice to attend. I enrolled through my own efforts. I had to cherish a thing like that.

I was going to school through a state funded program in California that paid tuition and housing for those who had been involved in the foster care system. Even though I wasn't a traditional foster care child, I'd still spent enough time in the system between the ages of 11 and 18 that I was deemed a good fit. It wasn't that I was in many typical foster homes exactly, but I was a ward of the state and it was close enough to the same thing. When I decided to go to school, the house mother in the residential home had pushed back before relenting to my incessant requests. She helped me fill out the applications. She questioned why I would want to relocate to the biggest urban sprawl in the state. She narrowed her eyes at the notion that I could and would live alone despite the fact that I was nearing 21 and would age out of the program anyways. She helped me apply for the funding and grants and housing.

I liked the university. I didn't have much by way of public education to compare it to, but I thought I liked it. I liked being around other people in my own invisible way. I liked to be in rooms full of other people, my face hidden behind the curtain of my dark hair, while I listened in on conversations I never would have been able to hear before. It was a city campus, so it was always busy. There was always so much to see and hear as a quiet observer.