I Don’t Know Where to Start

Life came at me from so many directions…

Perhaps a linear, inclusive version of my life would be too much… too much for me to write in one continuous piece and too much for you to digest. Because of this, I am starting to tell my story by summarizing the truly “telling times”.

There were the early life melancholy times. Unrecognized depression. I recall times when I was placed in a rocking chair near where my mother worked because I had lost the desire to do anything else. I recall my first suicidal ideation very clearly. It was before I started school.

There was the teenage desire to clap back at my mother but knowing I dare not. Knowing it would get bad if I did. I was afraid of my mother — not that she would beat me but for how she would berate me. Turns out it was even worse than I had imagined.

There was the time my mother found out I was doing something she had specifically preached against. And she wrote this down in a letter.

I’d rather see you dead than in bed with a ******.

There was the time that my mother wrote that in a letter. And it broke me for a long time. I left college. I hooked up with the very type person she had imagined me with.

There was the time the one I hooked up with did everything in his power to prove my mother…