From Day One

•My Understanding•

My mother gave up the hard drugs to win the battle of custody. She did that. She WON.

She felt so strong until it wasn't enough anymore. When things get difficult, the easiest thing to turn to is giving up, or numbing everything. My mother turned back to her gang roots, joining back up with the Hells Angels, and becoming a man named Randy's bitch. My mother snuck drugs into prison for that man at 17, and was abused by him even younger. She went through hell, but she felt wild and free, a dangerous feeling in this world. People let go of their feelings through carefreeness and intoxication.

12 years old, I went to check the mail, my mother was asleep, drunk, and I was grabbed by a guy I knew, so I wasn't afraid. He was 17, and I trusted him. His name was Scott. Yes, that was his real name. I won't say his last name for a reason, but I will say that he raped me that night. I trusted him and he threw it away. He also told me that if I told anyone, he would tell his father, and his father would kill me and my mother, so I was quiet about it. It took a toll on me, I shut down. I changed my identity, all of it. I finally changed to identify as male. I didn't want to be sexualized, I didn't want to be touched, just left alone. I wanted to be left alone.

Somewhere in between here, I don't quite remember when, but I was living in a small town-house with my mother, grandmother and my two brothers, when a man started coming around the house. I already knew that he was probably my mother's significant other, and I accepted him as a father figure pretty quickly.

I was picked on a lot, I used to go to school smelling like smoke and alcohol. Parents, to this day tell their birthed ones not to hang around me because I look like a bad person. I used to make friends by CHANCE, but when their parents met me, that was the last time I saw those kids. I grew up alone because I was judged upon first glance.

At 14 years old, I had a school bus pass, and I was running weed across the city to get money to put food on the table for my siblings. I had to steal bread from the dollar store to help my family eat.

The guilt and distaste that comes with being a thief to survive is a feeling I will never wash off my hands. Do I regret it? No, my siblings and I had no other means to eat, my mother was on welfare, and my grandmother on disability. Together, they weren't making enough to last the whole month, plus the drug habit, and food, clothes, school supplies, all of that. I had to do that for Alec, Brandon and I for years.

At 16, I went to a catholic school, St.Pauls Catholic High School.
I had come out with thoughts of being a boy, and the students—including my GIRLFRIEND, at the time, hung me in the girls bathroom.

If the bar above the door to the stall hadn't snapped off, I may have died that day, but I didn't. I left that school behind and dropped out of school out of fear for a year that March Break.

I didn't go back to school until Christmas break ended the next year. I started going to the school I go to now; Elizabeth Wyn Wood Alternative Program.

Yeah, an alternate school for the kids that can't make it in regular high school. I met my best friends there, and my worst enemies there too.

The first year I got there, I made friends really quickly: a small group that called ourselves 'The Color Gang', even going as far as to wear rainbow bandannas.

It was cute and all, I had a lot of fun for the beginning of the year, until one of my 'friends' decided that he wanted me for himself, and tried to get between me and my CURRENT fiancé, Raemond. He went onto my google account, and used MY GOOGLE HANGOUTS while I was on a Hangouts VIDEO CALL with Rae, and started typing messages to Rae about how I was lying about being transgender, and that I was lying about 'insert culprits name' raping me, WHICH I NEVER TOLD ANYONE THAT THIS BITCH FRIEND OF MINE GOT TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT WHILE HE WAS DRINKING AND TRIED TO SEXUALLY ASSAULT ME SO THAT WAS BULLSHIT.

I gave him a chance to change how he acted, I told him to stop and he got worse until he started obsessively telling me that he would fix the problem and the only thing I could think was that he was going to try and hurt Rae, so I cut him off. I saw that same friend on the streets a week or two later, and found out from his mother that he had attacked her and had been acting aggressive lately, so I didn't reconnect.

After that friend, the rest of that friend group I had gotten pretty bad. While sitting in class, we were allowed to take a break, so Brianna and I went with our mugs of tea, into the school yard—which isn't big— to sit in the grass for a bit. We talked about how she wanted to die, and this girl—she was the type to mean something when she said it. She had already been to the hospital plenty of times to save her life.

When we were told to go inside, she said she would catch up with me, so I agreed, figuring she wanted a moment or two longer in the sun before getting back to work. Instead, five minutes later, the teacher pushed open the side door to the classroom that led outside, and she was gone, the mug alone sat in the grass.

When I saw that, I dropped mine, and it shattered on the cement just away from our door, and I fell to the ground screaming and crying.

Teachers found her behind the big grocery store across the street, overdosing on anything she could find that would kill her.

I didn't hear from her, no one mentioned her name after that day, and I still feel sick to my stomach thinking about it.

After that, Adrienne drifted away, her cousin was the one that tried to get Rae out of my life and take his place. She blamed me for him being on the streets and wouldn't listen to me. I didn't reconnect with her until last year briefly, where I helped her move out of her mother's house.

Claudia was never really around anyway, I called her my twin sister because I had known her as long as I knew Rae it Elliott, and we looked so alike before my transition—like twins—that we played that joke. Well, Claudia got attached to drugs, and an abusive boyfriend, and she disappeared from my radar next. To this day my mother asks about her.

That left Kira and Tom. They knew each other from a different school before Wyn Wood, and that made me feel outnumbered already. To be honest, Kira cut us out quickly after an incident that involved one person going nuts when they got high from a bong. She still goes to the school, but she cut me out.

Tom spent a little more time around me. Often he came to my house, and we hung out as often as we could. One day, Tom dropped me entirely too. It was two days later that child services showed up at our door again.

Tom had told them that we had terrible living conditions, and tried to get all of the children taken away. At this point, it was four of us.

Feeling betrayed, I tried to cut everyone out of my life, and fell into only trusting Rae, and Elliott, two people I had known for years at this point, and felt safe around.
They were the only two people I spoke to for two good years, before I started interacting with people again.