10:01am August 20, 2014

➸ Shout-out to everyone whose childhood was hell.

chaos-under-construction:

youneedacat:

Shout out to everyone who can’t remember back to an idyllic childhood, because that time never existed for abused children.

Shout out to everyone for whom childhood was a never-ending hell with no refuge, anywhere, in sight.

Shout out to everyone who never experienced…

Thank you

Thank you for reminding us that we are better in spite of what we had as a childhood. We have no family and haven’t since we were five or six. We call ourselves street rats for a reason. Juvie and so-called foster care, orphan homes and dumpsters, backyard sheds we could sneak into and the occasional family that saw us, knew we had no place to go and let us stay hidden for short periods of time if we worked. Gaps where we honestly felt like we were transported and ended up in a different part of town with no memory of how we got there but no real change in how we lived.

Until the age of 15 when we found a real foster home for the first time and home school for real learning also for the first time. Does it make sense now to you why we don’t comment on families? Why we can’t comment on growing up and school?

This is why our goal is only to survive because this has been our goal for life since that age of 5 or 6.

-NV

As well as those of us who weren’t taken away when we should have been, in “families” in which nobody outside wanted to intervene because the parents were considered “respectable” ie white, older, educated, middle class. You know how in schools they tell kids “If someone is abusing you tell an adult, and keep telling successive adults until someone believes you!” and then proceed to ignore it when kids come forward in the way that they’re told, with the bruises to prove it.

Just in general everyone who didn’t and sometimes still doesn’t understand why anyone would want a family when the concept of family was something horrific you tried to escape from, who couldn’t stand when school let out for the summer because you’d be trapped, stuck at home with your mother’s rages and no break to force her to cool off occasionally.

Who still faces every new event or process in life with dread because they spend most of their lives to date having to steady themselves for whatever new cruelties their family could dream up next. Who is ostracised by their extended family because they don’t let their abuser(s) take central place in their lives anymore or participate in (ruin) their occasions and who finds that this doesn’t surprise them all that much because if they refused to protect an abused three year old they’re sure as shit not gonna be on your side now.

Basically, people who have to learn how to live when they are already adults because all they know is how to duck and cover and survive