After being told by my Grandma at 6 I would give my soul away after she "Read my palm," going to Baptist church where my great aunt was a Sunday school teacher at, and cheering for the team my mother coached.. I spent my formative years in survival mode, trying to search for ways to be good enough all while being beaten by my Father what felt like daily. To the point where I lied to CPS at age 9, telling them that I did not have bruises on my back and butt. As a young teen, the family dynamics shifted, we the sublet room at wherever we were living at the time, we had parties every night, I started drinking and smoking with my parents and there friends at 12. Idolizing that, I dived head first into the drug scene straight out the gate getting into high-school. Dating drug dealers, sneaking out.. doing psychedelics routinely as part of a personal soul exploration and then eventually giving myself drug induced psychosis.

Things only getting more serious as I got older, social isolation, then family abandonment. I had recently moved back home after getting a car... after being homeless, with not even a phone.. at 20, in February of 2021, when my Mother came home drunk and threw the bowl of ravioli at my face, it was meant to be my dinner, breaking my teeth. Mental breakdown is half the word for it considering by the end of March I was on my knees in execution stance begging law enforcement bawling for them to "just shoot me in the head." Being charged with public intoxication..

I got help after that.. Was diagnosed with bipolar manic/ depressive disorder. Went to therapy, chose an unmedicated approach, because medications I had tried or was put on only made me even less socially apt, where I would be described as a zombie.. Then, after all that, my mom died in February of 2023.. It triggered a whole new wave of social isolation.. That I feel ready to break free from..

Im 25 now... I have a new job that I started in December, then promptly got promoted in April.. However; everything I've let build up over the years has made it to where I'm lacking in some departments as a coworker and manager...

I want to make it over this hill, to where the people who accept me already are.. to where the version of me that I've been waiting to meet is.

If you read all of this I appreciate you... Thank you for listening to me share my underlying damage with you in a open space... Its hard to explain over and over again... Going to therapy and being told to talk to friends, then being told by people you consider friends to go to therapy.... When all you're really doing is telling a story and everyone looks mortified. You can't change what happened, you just want people to understand.. when you say the wrong thing over and over again, because you have been living in what would best be described as a cave for the better parts of the last decade... you tend to shut up... but that only leads to your body wanting to shut down, having panic attacks, manic episodes... relying on a vape that you can feel hurting you more slowly.... Im tired...aren't you?