My first family was abusive and extremely neglectful. The father was always at work. The mother neglected me, didn’t touch or feed me, and left me in precarious situations in hopes that I would die. She made my older brother hit and bite me. She passed me and my siblings over the fence to my neighbor regularly so we would be out of her hair. Child services took me and my three siblings out when I was five.

I lived in my second family until the day before my 8th birthday. My foster father there sexually abused me and my brother.

By the time I was in my third family, I was very disturbed. I also am autistic with mild cerebral palsy. My 60-year-old adoptive mother there emotionally and physically abused me and my sister, didn’t believe in mental health or cerebral palsy, and showed us zero affection.

Eventually she abandoned me at a reform school when I was 15. That school didn’t want to deal with immature, disturbed autistic kids, so they made up an excuse to kick me out when I was 16. I was immediately sent to a much worse reform school— an abusive one in Missouri which they’re trying to get shut down.

I was there so long that they said I couldn’t be there any longer. My adoptive mom didn’t take me back— she mailed me tickets to my birth dad saying “see if he wants you”. We had no contact with him— we only knew about him because my sister found his number and ran away when I was gone.

My birth dad still did not want his kids, so he abandoned me at a homeless shelter when I was 19.

I spent time in a lot of inappropriate homes until adult foster care.

Now I’m living in a market-rate apartment with housemates, but am about to be homeless (and with no money or family), because I complained a lot about their severe neglect and the upstairs neighbors terrorizing us for 9 months.

Life, man.

And now I’m writing a literary action science fantasy novel about childhood attachment disorder, healing from trauma, societal ethics, and becoming kinder, happier, greater people. It’s a blockbuster of a literary novel, and it’s quite far along. I have a Google Doc of its WIP progress up. But I’m still about to be homeless.