an introduction

I didn’t start with an agenda. I just started writing one afternoon after getting off the phone with a friend. To paraphrase, he told me I should start writing literally anything, just to see what comes out. Which, coincidentally, is also what they tell you in rehab. Process your trauma out by writing it in your own words. 

I never thought of any of my experiences as especially profound. I’d known boys who really did get the shit beat out of them by their dads, girls who really were molested by their uncles and cousins, and lots of kids who actually were taken from their parents to be raised by grandparents, or become wards of the State of California in some way. That never happened to me. Not exactly. In my family, in a lot of families, the idea of getting the government, the State, involved in family matters is the absolute last thing you do. It’s actually not even an option- not even on the list. You don’t do it. Everything gets solved in house. I’m from a family that doesn’t involve the government, and I was raised in a house where we do not call the cops. We don’t call the cops, and if they show up we don’t talk to them unless we have to. We solve all our own problems- or you know, we don’t. (It’s the second one).

I think the late teenage years and early twenties are a lot harder than our society gives any of us credit for. This goes especially for the kids who are forced to grow up quickly, never knowing the difference. Essentially, we’re kids until we’re not. Whether it’s your family or the government, one morning you wake up and you are a young adult. No transition– just dropped into a cruel world. Yesterday you would have gone to baby jail, but today if you fuck up you will go to grown up jail. Yesterday you were a child, and today you are a grown up so you need to get a job. You don’t have any experience yet, though, so we are going to pay you in baby dollars, Because you are a baby grown up. 

Something they teach you in drug and alcohol rehab is that as kids we (addicts) didn’t learn proper boundaries- with anything. We didn’t learn emotional or physical boundaries, we are codependent, we minimize our emotional needs for other people, and we have fucked up dopamine-seratonin responses that have our brains programmed to consistantly make exactly the wrong choices. We lie, we cheat, we steal, and we don’t give a fuck. If you are able to turn it around and enter what addicts call Recovery, you realize that you didn’t grow up and mature quickly at all, you actually just skipped over most developmental steps that other people experience in more secure homes. Then comes the huge task of reparenting yourself and reteaching yourself all these really basic skills and tools that other people got as fucking kids. You find yourself crying at night holding yourself because you are just trying to send a loving thought to your former child self that things end up kind of ok. It fucking sucks.

If you were a child of the mid nineties like I was, especially in a single parent home, you more than likely babysat yourself after school with the help of a TV, and were allowed to “go ride bikes” until sundown. No phones, no internet– the dark ages, lawless. The way your mom found you would be to call your friends’ mom’s until she got the right house. Or if your mom was like my mom, she would roll up in her truck to you and your friends, yell at you in front of them, make fun of the boys to their faces so as to communicate do not touch my daughter, tell your friend ok say hi to your mom sweetie, and then drive away to the bar. I think a lot of the other kids were both entertained by, and scared of, my mom. You would never want to be the target, but everyone was always ready to hear the usually funny, but always bat shit crazy things that came out of her mouth.

***

The names are all real here. I went back and forth on that a lot. I thought about ethics and privacy. I thought about forgiveness. 

And then I said Fuck that.

The places are all real too. When you grow up walking around in ghetto or, at best, working class neighborhoods, the street names are important. Certain intersections are ok to cross, some are not. Some blocks are no-goes entirely, and the street names draw the territories. The hoods, the projects, the barrios, whatever you want to call them. Before Google maps existed we kept the maps in our heads and had to memorize the danger zones. If you have ever questioned if housing segregation is real, stop and take an honest look around. If you don’t think so, it's because you live in a homogenous white middle class neighborhood. If there is one brown family on your cul-de-sac, that doesn’t make the neighborhood desegregated. It proves the fucking point.

***

This work has taken decades of pain, addiction, grief, and generational trauma to produce. I certainly didn’t do it on my own- if you know what I mean. I simply couldn’t have. We are all an amalgamation of our experiences and our relationships. These are some of mine. The big brains out there will try to examine what I am saying about the intersections of feminism with class and the ever dubious State. The bleeding hearts will see a story about domestic and child abuse, the criminalization of addiction, and the carceral system. The mixed race multicultural people will understand all the code switching, and will know- and feel- exactly what I mean each time I talk about my hair. The addicts will see a story about how the Devil tempted me and I signed the fucking Book. It’s not a one size fits all type of situation- of course it isn’t. This is going to be a mirror of sorts- what you read into this is what is reflected  by your own experience.

So what is this all really about? What am I trying to say here? I don’t know if I’m trying to say anything at all, really.

I’m just saying it.