Author: admin

Starting school was the best thing that ever happened to me. I loved school. School was a wonderful place. I loved my teachers. They were all kind, and seemed to care about me. My favorite thing was that they fed you every day without fail. And I do not care how much the other kids complained about school lunches, to me they were good! Any food was wonderful to me, but anyone who has ever eaten my mother’s cooking would understand why school lunches were delicious. But I also loved learning, and playing. School for me was a safe place. So, it is not very surprising that I remember my life in school years. Every year was a new adventure, a new teacher, new things to learn and experience. I tell people that you could boil down my nature to the word “why.” I feel like a continual preschooler constantly curious about how the world works. An explorer who constantly wants to see what is over the next hill, just for the sake of knowing. I can’t believe that I am saying this, but I actually went to school in an old, three-room school house straight from the past. It…

Only half of me knows that this was very bad. I need to start this one with a trigger warning. It is probably the most graphic and horrific of all my memories…to other people. To me, it is only one of many horrific stories. I have had to gain empathy for the people who hear it. If horror stories or movies bother you, this story may be hard to hear. I woke in the night to the sound of a woman screaming. I got out of bed and walked over to the door. I opened the door and looked down. I remember seeing my bare feet, the ruffle on the bottom of my night gown, and a set of bloody footprints on the floor. I think I should have felt fear, but I was filled with curiosity. I remember following those footprints up the hallway and into the bathroom. I opened the door. The room was full of fresh, bright red blood. My mother was sitting on the toilet, her hair and clothing covered in blood. She was hunched over with her face in her hands. When I opened the door, she looked up at me, her face and hands…

I have memories of quite a few different “planning meetings,” but basically, they were all similar to the example I am going to describe. As children we knew when shit was going to go down. You could feel it, and it followed a predictable pattern. Dad would start to get irritated about little things. He would start to be easily annoyed. Eventually, something would be the last straw, and off to the bar he would go. Now, one of the older children would take charge. These were basically strategy meeting for the upcoming battle. We were soldiers in a war. Assignments would be given, and eventually escape plans would be drawn up for our inevitable retreat. One of the older kids would take on dad, one of them would have to be back up, for when the first one went down. The twins were in charge of getting the guns. My job was to get the bullets. I was little and I could sneak around the fighting and separate the bullets from the guns if the twins failed. He could not kill us if he did not have bullets. The rest of us would scatter. The idea is, he cannot…

I think I was being “safe housed.” The problem is, I was safe, sure, but it was probably the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced in my life. Waking up in a strange land. From my point of view, a beating was nothing compared to my mother’s attempts to keep me safe. I would like to invite you to image what it would feel like if one day you woke up and you had no idea where you were. You were surrounded by people you had never met, and had no idea how you got there, or how long you would be staying there. Take some time to really imagine how you would feel if that happened to you tomorrow morning. My eyes open slightly. Just enough to see that there is a soft glow of light coming through the window. At first, I feel the peace of just waking up. There are a few minutes of disorientation when I wake up in which I feel, what I think is, a peaceful mind. It is just awareness, no thoughts, no feelings, just becoming aware that I am alive. This peace is short-lived, as soon the information starts to register…

Our brains are not recording our lives, our brains are interpreting our lives, and then producing a memory. If five people witness a bank robbery, and then retell it, the details that the brain misses will be filled in by the brain of the person. Details tend to change from person to person. You will get five different stories, told from 5 different points of view. One person will talk about how scary the guy was, and could tell you the color of his eyes, while another will not even notice the man and focus on the gun, they can tell you the kind of gun, but not the color of the eyes. It is very unusual for anyone to have any memories earlier then about 3 years old. It is called Infantile Amnesia. It is unsure if the brain is not developed enough yet, but it is generally thought that we do have the memories, but there is not a good way to access them. Whatever the reason, I can only tell you the first years of my life are only composed of other people's stories. And, that is problematic, because trauma messes with people's memories. For some reason,…