f a m i l y ——

• "i brought you into this world so i can take you out"
• "i'll give you something to cry about"
• coughing in the car when my mother was driving me to school in middle school because all the windows were up and she was smoking and she started screaming at me for trying to judge her and guilt trip her for smoking so she grabbed my face and blew smoke directly at me and said "i hope you choke"
• despite child and family services being called on my mother several times, my brother and i were only spoken to by a social worker one time and despite that i told her my parents smoked weed and spent all their money on illegal drugs and my mother verbally and physically abused me, the social worker did absolutely nothing because the physical abuse wasn't visible and we weren't being starved
• living in a remodeled garage for 3 years where the only door in the "house" was the front door and the shower was outside
• my mother holding the fact that she didn't have me aborted even though my grandfather wanted her to over my head when i was being "ungrateful"
• my mother privately threatening to physically hurt me if i didn't lie to the police telling them she did nothing wrong when they were coming in to arrest her because she stole her boyfriend's credit card and rented a hotel with it and he called the police
• my mother's reaction to finding out i was a "lesbian" by me confessing that i'd been sexually abused by girls as a child was "oh so you're a lesbian so you can do that to this girl you're dating now too?"
  • followed by her locking me in my bedroom and forbidding me to use electricity, speak, eat, or use the bathroom for the rest of the day
• my stepfather actively encouraging my mother to abuse my little brother and i instead of him when she was on one of her rampages
• not being allowed to come inside at all during the entire daylight hours, not even to get water or barely even to use the bathroom, during the summer growing up
• sleeping on the floor my entire first year of high school because my younger brother broke his bed from jumping on it and my parents didn't want to buy me a new one

s c h o o l ——

• despite being in a public school we received abstinence education and absolutely no actual sexual education even from a personal health perspective
  • because we received no sexual education in school and i had no functional guardians to discuss my physical health with, i tried to mutilate my own genitals with scissors in high school because i thought it was weird/abnormal
• going to my guidance counselor for help when i was having a very bad time mentally in junior year and the first thing he did was ask me if i was high
• having a meeting with my teachers and my grandfather in junior year because i was having a nervous breakdown from the pressure of my ap classes and got told that i would get absolutely nowhere in life if i took "normal" classes because i wouldn't learn anything. what do they have basic classes for then?
• my ap english professor telling me that i should be focusing on my studies and gave me a failing grade anyway when i wrote on a test that i hadn't read the book we were being tested on because i'd found out my biological father committed su*cide and i wasn't really in a great place mentally
• not being allowed to choose orange juice for your school breakfast drink unless you had a doctor's note that you were lactose intolerant
• one of teachers in kindergarten getting pissed at me for asking for help opening my capri sun most of the time and telling me i needed to open them myself or stop bringing them because she wasn't going to help me anymore
• students not being allowed to choose the salad bar as the line to get their lunch from in elementary school
• teacher shortage in high school was so severe that the softball coach also taught drivers education and the soccer coach also taught sociology
• the fact that, in the entirety of my public school career, if you didn't have money or some form of welfare and couldn't bring your lunch to school you simply had to starve, even though you were literally a child and inherently dependent