Group homes are not the same as children’s homes
I don’t need to think about where this post is going to lead. It’s only me afterall. A person who has felt drawn to the art expression of “writing” longer than I can remember processing any other expression of being.
During childhood, it was the consumption of book after book after book that helped me block out all the adversity I couldn’t control growing up. After binge audio-ing Julia Fox’s book, “Down The Drain”, within 24 hours, I became nostalgically in a trance similar to how I was reading “A Million Little Pieces” for the first time in elementary school. Regardless of what unfolded about that author’s untruths later exposed, I was always bored of the typical child-friendly fantasy book. They weren’t dark enough. They weren’t real enough.
In elementary school, I always felt safe being alone for hours in any library’s adult section. Particularly the book sections where authors, decades past my age, recanted their memoirs about experiences with poverty, gang violence, drugs, addiction, and abuse. I found solace in each author’s many failed attempts in their journey to finding freedom and meaning in life.
I learned being alive was the only signal that you still have the chance to figure out your purpose. I began to understand it was a gift to design and create your own special story. Where I grew up, your story was insignificant. No matter what you did, you deserved to be unacknowledged, unimportant, and incapable of figuring things out by yourself. And why try? You are no one.
Lemony Snicket's “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” was the closest genre to “darkness” that I could openly talk about with my 3rd and 4th-grade peers without getting odd looks. There wasn’t much I could say to most kids my age without feeling dejected. I found the less I spoke, the less rejection I got. This is why my sanctuary became any library I could sneak my way into.
To create less suffering, I chose to have less friends because then I had to have less conversations about what was hurting me the most. I realized that there weren’t many friends in my school that suffered from some of the same conflicts I would experience. I would befriend, however, always the other outcasts growing up because I never wanted anyone to feel as alone how I did. Like the girl in my 4th grade Catholic school, who would sporadically fall into unpredictable seizures. I would always need to diagonally cross my arms around her shoulders on the ground to prevent her flailing arms from causing trauma to her body. This usually happened if not every day, a few times a week. Even if she was richer than me and reminded me that I was less than her on the socioeconomic scale. Or like the only Bangeldesh boy in a predominantly white and hispanic catholic school who competitively read books with me in the library during our lunchtime breaks.
Even still, I found myself becoming easily annoyed with any person who tried to get close to me. It was always my MO to avoid any routine way of walking within school campuses so any potential wanna-be-friend would stay in my grey space. It was safer that way. I only wanted to coexist in places that felt safe and that was always with a book in my hand and people 20 feet away. Plus, I wasn’t done trying to figure out how my story would go. There’s nothing to say to anyone when you’re still collecting data on what needs to be discovered.
I don't know why my family was fixated on the idea that only through suffering could one find value or meaning in life. Perhaps it was the cold European influence or the outcast perspective we operated within as poor, white, but still privileged individuals in the United States. Religion, especially Catholicism, can also have a nihilistic way of making you believe that if you're not suffering enough, you're not worthy of love or eventual salvation.
Regardless, it was through my readiness commitment in grade school that ignorantly prepared me for what I was to experience in middle school. Of all the things I felt, I wanted to become a moderator of the chaos, hopefully, leading people to their own safe resolution of being within themselves. The naivety of my elementary scholarism gave me the false sense of confidence to handle issues related to poverty, addiction, and abuse, even within my own first-hand experience. Mostly without any of my family knowing. I was more than drawn to it. I was subconsciously seeking it out in hopes I would find some meaning in the numbing abyss I was existing in.
It's still unclear to me whether the explicit content from these books inflated my ego to the point where I felt competent in handling each moment that unfolded before me. To this day, I have no regrets about holding space for others in toxic and uncontrollable situations. After all, what can you or I do when things happen right in front of you at such a young age other than adapt or act? Two heads on problem-solving can sometimes be better than one.
Like when I befriended the popular girl in school that everyone knew to be happy and carefree with their confidence. There wasn’t any number of times that you could ride the bus to flirt with the boys all night at the mall that could drown out the reality of going back home to their two toxic parents screaming at the top of their lungs and punching holes in the wall in the ghetto.
Friend after friend after friend, I found my way to becoming the closest with a girl who grew up in a group home less than a mile from my home. She was in a residential neighborhood “group home” that supported 9 other girls, with state staff workers pretending to be either their very strict parents like mine, who had a better sense of humor, or the typical case manager “friend” or “foe”.
In this space, I was finally accepted. I even got a new name the head of their group, who was also lesbian, labeled as “Fred”. Little did I understand that she was actually sexualizing me with the slogan “Freddy got fingered”. But nonetheless, no one hurt me, touched me, or degraded me as the scenarios with my siblings or parents at home did. So I accepted my new name, despite my lanky, awkward white girl demeanor in their mixed group.
It was during this phase that the foreshadowing of my own “children’s home” experience would transpire. My mother always had a way of saying, with her Glen Miller chardonnay breath, that if I didn’t stop “acting out”, she would send me to a similar place as my friend from the group home was. But I didn’t care. I found the 10 brave girls, and their case managers, to be a light into an alternative life that can unfold as a result of childhood adversity. I had hope that I could find my own way to freedom.
Being the youngest of 6 kids, the 4th out of all the girls, I never knew what girl bonding was because we were groomed for competition. The first time I learned how generational trauma can infiltrate people’s children’s lives was from my dad. He always became frustrated when describing how my mom’s mom would take every chance to project something negative toward her. Whether it was about her looks, weight, or competence. He felt that she was always trying to get out of the damaging repercussions of that.
Even despite some of the similarities my older sister had with walking a fine line with the law by running away from home, hopping neighborhood walls to get away from cops, or bouncing checks, I felt more comfortable staying with the girls at the group home. The group home girl’s honesty with me on their pasts with drugs, stealing, and creating chaos had more reasoning to me than some of my sister’s ignorance on race privilege, arrogance, and self-fulfilling prophecies. I was over the semantics of it all, and was seeking genuine connection and validation in this world I was becoming deeply disassociated from.
It wouldn’t be until 2 years later that I finally was referred to live at a children’s home from 14 years old to 17. What I always think about, and eventually became an honor student in philosophy for, is how can you look for something if it’s in the dark. How can you ask the questions to know certain answers if you don’t know what you need to ask for? If you’re blind going into something, then there is a reason we talk about miracles. I can never be more grateful for the pillars in my life that became a beacon towards a better, higher, lighter, whatever you want to call it, kind of direction towards health, balance, and bliss.
Thank you for reading some of these stories as I vent out some of the circumstances that have filled up my life to be as I am. I’m still figuring it out, but as I learn more about history, psychology, politics, religion, spirituality, science, and theories, I just wish to create authentic meaning for myself. I’m always growing and evolving to know more. I’m grateful to be here and I hope that you and I can figure out more of this all together, for however long that is for. But no matter what, I’m grateful to be here able to seekout all the answers to the questions I can. Thank you for being here with me.