#they also invited me to dinner w their spouse and spouse's sibling and said me and sibling would get along rly well

[tkbrokkoli]

my fav coworker made me a compliment yesterday by saying i remind them of a kingfisher so if you ever wonder what i look like. i'm a bird, actually

[itfightsback]

3/17/2017

All of the things I really want to be able to open up and talk about right now I can't without risking prison. People can be irresponsibly cruel to each other for seemingly no reason at all. Such is the way of nature. I could linger on about the current drama of my life for hours, but I want to talk more about where I came from.

Everyone has seen different things, came from different places, and overcame different trials in their lives. That being said, I have to tell you that many wouldn't last a single day living in the hell that is my mind. I'm not trying to say that I have been through the worst in life, but I have definitely seen, and am all too familiar with it. On the morning of 9/11/2001, we were celebrating my friend's birthday on the bus on the way to school. At 11 years old, we couldn't really comprehend what was happening at the time. A touchy subject for very many so I won't linger. It was not long after that my father, who has been in the US Army since 17, was called for airport security duty which caused him to pretty much live out of a hotel 30 minutes away from us for several months. This left my mother to take care of me and my 3 younger siblings, ages 8, 6, and 3 at the time. My parents both worked and on different shifts so one of them could always be there with us. One would come and the other would go, and at times they hardly ever got to see each other. Things were never easy there, but I am truly blessed to have my parents who stayed together through all of the tumultuous shit we have been through together when I know so many people who have lost their parents, or been abandoned by them, at a young age.

I believe it was sometime that same year that I was woke up in the night when the meth lab in a trailer across the street from ours blew up. Nope, I didn't grow up on the inner city streets. I grew up in a shithole trailer park on the outskirts of Jefferson City, MO. I saw and had to deal with things as a child that I would not wish upon my worst enemy. I doubt you have ever fished multiple cockroaches out of the pitcher of Kool-Aid before pouring yourself a glass. Not to mention continuously flicking them off your plate while you are eating dinner. There just isn't anything like the feeling you feel when you are in 2nd grade and you see one escape from your backpack and take off across the room yielding widespread screaming and panic.

See, I grew up in a place where no one gave a fuck about any of us. We did the best we could to look out for each other while also looking out for ourselves first. I grew up in a place where no one said a word when someone beat their children or spouses. I've heard kids screaming and crying through the walls from down the street. I've seen a street fight over a fucking candy bar. The kids ran wild in the trailer park because their parents neglected them due to work, or because they would rather drink or do drugs. We were all poor and white so we didn't deal with race issues, and I never heard about or saw any issues with pills. Police violence wasn't a thing because we were in Highway Patrol jurisdiction, and if you called, you'd be lucky if they showed within 15 minutes. I don't blame them, I wouldn't want to fuck with that kind of crazy with a badge and a gun either. We were generally left to fend for ourselves, and we had much bigger problems than rampant petty thievery. Mainly abusive alcoholics, cocaine, heroin, and meth. It was a shit show in there, and I am so glad my younger siblings didn't have to see everything that I did.

All the way through school it was hard to make any real friends. I was one of the smartest kids in school despite all of the other kids that I knew from my neck of the woods being trouble makers and not really trying at all. I knew better than to talk about things because I knew I would find myself in more trouble than it was worth. I earned their respect by keeping my mouth shut when they did stupid shit, nor did I ever try to stop them. They were the only friends I really had, and I spent a lot of bus rides teaching them how to do their homework. So many other kids at school had nicer clothes, shoes, and school supplies. Our parents were always working, and I had to look after my siblings. So going to other kid's houses almost never happened, and I sure as hell wasn't about to invite them to mine. I was rarely ever bullied because I surrounded myself with the bad kids and we looked after each other like we were family when we were little. I learned how to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut. I learned how not to be seen or heard, and get away with things that others wouldn't. I was always pretty quiet, and I was fascinated with observing what the other kids were doing. Even from that young age my mind was often more full than my mouth would allow.

Growing up in the environment that I did stole something from me that I will never be able to get back. I won't say it robbed me of my childhood. I had friends there. We played video games, rode our bikes, built bike ramps, trespassed anywhere we could get away with it, and threw rocks off the cliff at cars driving on the highway. The typical dumb stuff kids do. What it stole from me is a normal perception of the world around me. I don't know what it is like to be black, latino, asian, indian, middle-eastern, or female living in a world that is largely dominated by white men. I know what it is like to be looked down upon by all those I just mentioned as they all fight for their own equality. I also know what it is like to be looked down upon by white people as an inferior human being based on circumstances completely out of my control. That disconnect in my own ability to be able to easily relate to others has plagued my entire existence on this planet. Like I said I wasn't really bullied. We saw the looks the richer kids would give us, and we stayed away from each other. We finally got out of there when I was 15 moving to a house just down the street as I was about to start my second year of high school.

I eventually graduated high school, and then college. Most of the friends I had in the trailer park didn't finish high school in order to get jobs, and/or help their families. Thus repeating the cycle of being trapped in that poverty ridden shithole. Some of them are junkies that only work so they can supply themselves with more drugs. I know multiple people rotting in prison for child porn. I know multiple people who have been killed in crashes while driving drunk, or with heroin in their system. I had a friend that was shot on the street making a drug deal. There isn't a single thing about where I came from that is pretty, and the saddest part is that most of them don't care enough to try and get out. Anyways. Enough of this talk for now.

I am now at a point in my life where my privacy has been violated in ways I can't begin to even comprehend, nor do I even want to anymore. I have two weeks left to figure out how I am going to pay my rent. It is really hard to be happy and love myself when so many people I love, and have looked up to, are trying to tell me I should hate myself for what I am trying to do. I don't understand what about arranging songs that relate to my life in a playlist to tell a story is so malicious. I am not trying to claim your songs as my own. However, I am trying to claim that I arranged them in the playlist. I am not trying to be you. I am trying to be me. Something about arranging songs in a playlist creating a memory is a lot more exciting and interesting to me than just hitting the favorite button and accumulating new songs I like in an ever-growing list of music. What I am trying to create, is some kind of cross between Big Fish, Happy Feet, and Fifty Shades Of Grey, and yes I absolutely want to be the greatest at it. I am sure I enjoy listening to music more than I would enjoy creating it. I lack visual/spatial creativity, and that is a fact. I have taken tests. It isn't my strong suit.

I have had to do everything in my life the hard way, and have tried to invest so much of myself into others only to be beat down by them. I honestly don't think there is a single person in the world I can trust anymore which is unbelievably disheartening. I wish more people could love me for me, and not for what they seek to gain from me. I won't be surprised when nothing changes, and I still have to fight for myself all by myself. This world has enjoyed seeing me struggle from the day I was born, and I have already surpassed every expectation anyone in my family ever had for me. I'm not about to stop there. I will keep praying for another day that I might be able to feel the warmth of the sun, or look up in the sky to see the stars and moon as I continue to try and understand what it means to be happy and achieve my dreams. I can tell you one thing for sure. I have never felt happier in my entire life, than when I would look into her eyes, see her every thought vanish from her mind, and her face light up like a blooming flower. I know I don't need her in order to be happy, but that doesn't stop the emptiness where my heart once was from yearning for her. It is something I have to keep taking one day at a time.

It is not easy to have a friend or a family member who dies. We mourn and remember the impact they had on our lives. It is harder to have a friend that lives, and somehow gets off by tormenting your very soul for their own selfish benefit. It is even worse when all of your friends are that way, and even your own family doesn't believe in you.

If you are reading this and can relate in any way, have lost someone, have been served absolute hell in your life, feel misunderstood by everyone, or feel no one sees you, you are not alone. If you feel like you can't overcome what you are facing, feel like you aren't worth anything to anyone, feel like you can't make it to tomorrow, feel like the world would be better off without you, or feel like giving up, I want you to know from the very bottom of my abused, broken, distraught, and ever-beating heart that YOU ARE THE ONLY REASON I AM STILL FUCKING HERE.