Sorry in advance for the long post.
I’m only nineteen years old, and ever since I was born, my life was less than ideal.
I was born in an incredibly poor, incredibly rural mountain town that was hours from any type of city. I’m talking nearly an hour to the nearest Walmart or any kind of shopping center. In my hometown, there were 3 stoplights, three fast food restaurants, two local restaurants, one grocery store, two gas stations, a dollar store, and lots of churches. Nearest community college is 45 minutes in the other direction. We had no middle school or pre-k. You would not find anything close to modern infrastructure unless you drove incredibly far away from our podunk little settlement.
Growing up in this kind of environment was incredibly rough for me. There is no diversity of ideas or culture, and everyone treats their religion as something akin to a cult. If you were not Christian, people believed you were mentally ill. Almost every single person in my family believes that a lack of faith is an illness, quite literally. Most people in my town were alcoholics or drug addicts, simply because there was no way to escape the lifestyle. The majority of my neighbors were stuck in a kind of purgatory, too poor to move away to a real town or city, but too rich to know how to spend their money in such a stifling atmosphere. Thus, this majority sought out some kind of thrill, whether it be drugs, alcohol, friday night football, or dangerous motor sports. But the most popular pastime was addiction.
My father was one of those alcoholics. My mother worked in a medical center 2 hours from our home, and she had nothing to do with her firstborn child. All of my childhood memories involve my father or my grandparents. My parents split up when I was two years old, and thus began the tug of war over my fate that took place between my maternal and paternal grandparents.
My father was too poor to afford our own home until I was 9 years old, so for awhile, I lived with my mom’s parents. My whole family resided in this awful town, but my grandparent’s house was almost an escape from the harsh realities of our location. I wish I lived there permanently. My mother lived there, but I never saw her or really interacted with her. She had nothing to do with me. My only fond memories from childhood are working in my grandparents’ garden, learning how to hoe the fields, plant the beans, and dig little ditches in the rocky soil so that the fertilizer could be spread. My favorite time of year was going to the farmer’s market and seeing the culmination of everyone’s hard work in the fields.
I raised baby chickens in my bathroom, and went on runs with my grandparents to trade eggs. I learned how to cook the vegetables that we had grown, and how to sew my own clothes. Yet, my fun at home could not overshadow how hard of a time that I had at school.
My elementary school had around 200 kids in total. Same people from birth to graduation. I was always different from other children. I was one of maybe 6 children who did not play sports. I loved to read and I loved to learn about computers. Our school required you to read around 5 books every semester, but I always won awards for reading over 75 books every consecutive year. I questioned the biblical teachings that were being shoehorned into our public schools, even as a child, I did not have much faith, and it made me an outsider among my peers. I had sensory issues with clothing and sensations, and I did not know how to interact with other children. They would not play with me, and I had no friends. I was not diagnosed with autism until 17 years of age, mainly because not a single soul in my town knew what autism was. However, I remember sobbing in my fourth grade classroom because the other children had made fun of me for having a crush on a character in one of my favorite books. I spoke about my interests almost obsessively, until it was bullied out of me.
Then halfway through elementary school, my father took me back and brought me into a house with his disabled sister, and his parents. Ever since I was small, my father’s parents- who I’ll refer to as gran and granp for clarity and distinction from my other grandparents- judged me and wanted me to conform to their standards. My gran was shichzophrenic, and would constantly throw screaming and crying fits, often directed towards me. She yelled at my father, berated him, and made his drinking habits get worse. My father became violent, and would smash the glass cabinets in our house, smash our dishware, and just throw around whatever he saw fit.
I recall being 9 years old, and my father taking a crying and screaming spell after drinking a bottle of liquor. He put a gun to his head in front of me. My granps stopped him, but I’ll never forget the sound of my father crying and my granps cleaning up shards of glass.
Over the next year, my father threw a series of wild parties. One time, a woman burnt off a strand of my hair with her cigarette. Another time, a man broke into our home, stole all our belongings, and slashed open all my stuffed animals in search for drugs. When I was 10 years old, my father was killed by a drunk driver. From that point on, my gran and granps had me in their care, although my custody had never been changed over from my mother. My house burned down that same year, and so my aunt, my gran, my gramps and I all moved into the old family home. I became my aunt’s caretaker.
She had a stint where she had to be placed in a nursing home, and my 11 year old self practically lived there. I did my homework there, had my own bed, and socialized with the other residents. No one stopped to think that it was messed up to stick a kid into a nursing home to act as a secondary caretaker. Whenever she moved back home, I was responsible for making a lot of her meals, doing the dishes, cleaning the house, taking care of her animals, and fetching whatever she needed. Around my 7th grade year, the bullying I faced at school increased substantially. To the point where I was getting beaten up.
I got my lip busted in for saying that I thought a boy in my grade was cute and I liked him. Apparently I was obsessive and annoying, and he was another girl’s boyfriend. So trying to act normal had backfired on me. I was “weird” and I deserved to get a beating. I got tripped in the hallways. People laughed and made fun of me on a daily basis. I was that person that people asked out as a joke when they made bets with their friends.
At the same time, I was beginning to realize I liked girls, as well as boys. My gran tore into me, saying I was going to hell, and that I was not my father’s child- “He always made fun of those QUEERS!” One of the girls at my school started sending me death threats over that boy she liked, and said my gran was going to hell because she’d been admitted to a psych hospital for a suicide attempt. She made fun of my father dying. At that point, I had to start going to another school 45 minutes away. Still in another dilapidated podunk town, but at least I had new classmates. For awhile, I was very happy there. Still made fun of for being weird, and for being gay, but I made two friends in my class for the very first time. I was placed in accelerated/gifted learning. I was excited when it came time to attend high school, the so called best time of one’s life.