We learn through fantastic stories with happy endings that warm the soul. The stories designed to teach lessons and instill principles shape our imagination and before long metastasizes into our dreams. Before long, life becomes a fairy tale. We see ourselves skipping through fields of flowers. Our days are filled singing catchy songs with friendly inanimate objects harmonizing in the background. Eventually, we run into our prince (or princess) charming, get married, have a utopic family and grow old and work jobs that make us happy, so happy we whistle while we work. Good always wins. Evil always pays. Joy always reigns.

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I think about the idealized life I had imagined for myself, the fairy tales I’d concocted for myself, as I worked two jobs to buy my own first car, while going to school, and plotting how the hell I’m going to get out of my parents house. The fairy tale girl in me still wishes they were true. Then I wouldn’t think about killing myself.

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Fuck whoever came up with fairy tales.

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Fuck whoever thought it was just fine to leave out the part about life mocking and tormenting people who believe in that shit.

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Life is hard and unrelenting. Some people, sadly, end theirs. Between 1998 and 2018, the suicide rate in the U.S. increased 35%. The COVID-19 pandemic had 40% of Americans, per a Washington Post article in November 2020, grappling with at least one mental health or drug-related problem. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study in August 2020 showed 25.5% of young adults ages 18 to 24 were contemplating suicide — a figure that does not include those who didn’t admit such ideation. That is up from 10.4% in 2018.

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The precarious edge on which many are living should make us all rethink how we interact with others. The era of social media has created a climate where criticism is unfiltered, ridiculing is sport and piling on is normal behavior. One must look no further than the political discourse surrounding the 2020 Presidential Election to see just how much kindness and neighborly concern has evaporated.

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Which is why we need to do better. All of us. Because you never know what people are going through. Words have impact, whether verbalized or typed in a comment, and the stakes are life and death more times than many understand. We simply don’t get to see what people are going through.

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Have you ever just watched someone and wondered to yourself about them? Who are they? How did their life start? What obstacles have they faced? What are they struggling with right now?

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If you had the chance to ask them, you might get answers that change how you think about them, how you talk about them, what you’re willing to put up with from them. The answers might be foster care, mommy issues, abandonment scares, sexual assault, a mental health illness such as bipolar depression.

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Those would be my answers.

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What are yours?

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You know what you’ve been through. You know what your deepest struggles are and the map of holes in your heart. How would you respond to someone laughing at you in the throes of an episode? These are real concerns in a world rife with people on the brink.

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I’ll start.

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Abandoned. Raped. Beaten. Anxious. Depressed.

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My mother was supposed to be a one-night stand.

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She worked at a grocery store. My dad, he was a felon. But he was hot. Anyway, after intercourse, my mother refused to leave. She hung out at his house without him even there. It got to a point where my dad would stay at friends’ houses to avoid her. Finally she got the hint.

Over a year later, his mother ran into her at the store and she had a baby with her. That’s how I first met my grandmother. Nanny says she knew by looking at me that I was my dad’s baby.

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My father was in jail at the time so he had to wait to see me. When he was finally out, it was amazing. He stopped all his bad habits. He became a great father. It was perfect living with my dad. It was a fairy tale.

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Remember Disney’s version of Sleeping Beauty? How there was a king and queen who had a beautiful daughter and were exceedingly happy? Then evil Maleficent put a curse on the girl, thus taking the child away from her beloved family and forcing her to grow up with strangers? That’s what happened to me.

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I was 7 years old when Maleficent, my mother in this reality, decided to snatch me away from my entire family in California and move to Washington state. As it turned out, my father was not on my birth certificate. Apparently, that means he technically had no say in my life.

I know what you’re thinking? Why didn’t he fight it? A paternity test would prove he’s the father and get him rights? Like I said, mom was just supposed to be a one-night stand and she was clearly crazy. Plus, I was 7. I didn’t know to ask.

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Starting over with a new school and new friends was hard. I wasn’t alone. I had my brother and sister. Jack is three years younger than me. My sister was only two at the time.

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Things at home started to go downhill faster than Lindsay Vonn. My mother and stepfather were addicts. Their drug of choice were video games, which they thought was OK because it wasn’t drugs or alcohol. The effects were the same to me.

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They would spend all their time on their computers and wouldn’t take care of us. I was the oldest so that left me in charge. Every day, I got my siblings up and made them food. At 7, my culinary repertoire was pretty much just mac and cheese. That’s the only thing I knew how to make. Things started to get worse when they stopped working and never left the house. The food ran out, and we were starving. We stole our neighbor’s electricity and water. All three kids had such bad cases of lice our scalps would bleed. But nothing compared to the terror of our bathroom. You think a boogie man in the closet is scary? You didn’t see our disgusting bathroom.

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The bathtub was full of maggots and cockroaches. My 2-year-old sister’s dirty diapers were everywhere. It wasn’t strange to see a rat in the bathroom. I had to stand on the sides of the tub to shower. I cried as bugs crawled over my feet.

Fairy tale my ass.

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One day, I had enough. I couldn’t keep living that way. I was only a second grader but I already knew no one should live that way. I told the school what was going on at home. The next day cops and Child Protective Services showed up at our house. I guess my prince charming wore blue.

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I remember sitting in the back of a police car and listening to my siblings cry. Usually when CPS takes children from a home, it’s standard to first go to their offices. Processing or whatever. In our case, we went straight to the hospital. We were so hungry you could see our bones. And the lice was eating us alive.

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My father was made aware of our situation and dropped everything. He sought custody for me and got the court to order a DNA test. Sure enough, I was his. Just like Nanny said.

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He took parenting classes. He got an apartment for us. It took awhile, so I was in foster care for about a year while he got everything situated. I changed homes twice in that span. The first foster parents abused the kids. I don’t even remember the second. The third was nice, a teacher and a cop.

Finally, my dad was able to get custody of me when I was 8-years-old. I was so happy to go home and see my family.

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When trying to share with people how rough I had it, without giving the details, I tend to put it this way: my situation was so bad the courts opted to give me to an ex-felon than keep me with my mother.

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There was one problem. A major problem in my adolescent eyes: My father was not the dad of my siblings. He had no way to help them. He barely got it together to get me. So they got left in foster care. I haven’t seen or heard from them since.

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For four years, life was great. I started believing in fairy tales again. My struggle put Cinderella’s to shame, but at least I was getting a happy ending. I had my family. My dad was dating a woman named Angie, who was my Nanny’s boss. Angie looked out for me all the time when I lived with my dad the first time, including picking me up from school. She was a close family friend and was the only woman outside of my family I looked up to.

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