This Kid Don’t Stand A Chance
I can’t imagine living past my 20′s. I don’t know why. Maybe its the eating disorder, the depression, the increased chance of being the victim of violent crime due to being black and queer.
I’m trying to make plans for my future. I just want to stay a child, though. But it’s far too late for that. It used to be my mom would say, you’ll be able to go to any college you want. Now she’s asking me if I plan to graduate high school. Will I? Will I go to college? Will I keep my friends? Will I starve to death, or will I get diabetes from all my binging? Will I ever have another romantic relationship? Will I ever get married? Will I live to 30? Will I ever again be happy I was born? Will this life have been ‘worth it’?
Will I ever really write another poem?
The effect mental illness has had on my potential was totally unexpected by my family and teachers. I am privileged in being middle class, living in a ‘progressive’ country/city, and having gone to excellent schools. I am also lucky to be extremely smart. They thought that was all the important things. But what happens when you take a lucky, brilliant kid and you teach them how to read and research and debate and write, you teach them how to love and forgive and never to hurt anyone else… but you don’t teach them how to defend themselves from bullies? And you don’t defend them because you’re too dense to see? What happens when you push them into unhealthy friendships and refuse to believe them when they try to get away – just so you can continue being friends with their parents and sharing carpools? What happens when, due to your lack of experience and with no one else to help you, you instill beliefs and habits about food that silently lurk in your child, waiting to be triggered into an eating disorder? What happens when, living in a dangerous neighborhood and being busy working at home, you can’t take your child outside and they become unfit and disconnected from nature? What about when your child goes through puberty early and has to deal with a whole other load of problems, but they can’t talk to you anymore because as time passes you’re becoming yet another problem? What happens, mother? I’ll tell you what happens. This kid will slowly fall apart under the load of increasing challenges. This kid will learn and will look back and write poetry and study psychology just to understand what’s going on in their brain.
Because it was as unexpected to me as it was to my family. The only difference is… my family can just set rules and insist I follow them and feed me and be done. But I have to find a way to heal. Alone. Because if i don’t, all my chances will have gone by, and it will just get harder and harder.
About Author
Starfish
about me.. well. i'm a queer teenage kid who is struggling with mental illness (depression, general anxiety, eating disorder), among other things. i want to have people to talk about this stuff with, which is why i was excited to apply for this writing position when i saw the requirements and thought maybe i'd be good at this. if i make a mistake, please tell me and i'll try to fix it.
Hey Starfish, welcome aboard. For starters, let me offer you a hug, you sound like you need it. Believe me, I do understand some of what you’re going through. I identify as a trans woman, and though I didn’t come to this conclusion until I was around 26, it’s always “been there.”
My dad sent me to the same all boys Catholic high school he went to. Certainly, he didn’t know what it was that he was doing by sending me there – that a few of the public schools in the area were both likely better and safer. He also had no idea the internal struggle I was waging – I barely understood it then.
When I finished my junior year, I told him that if he sent me back there for senior year, one way or another, I would not be graduating high school. I had been utterly tormented for three years there, and I was still a “straight male” at that time. I was the lonely kid that would get left alone for two months every time there was a school shooting somewhere, the one whose friends even mocked.
Even through all this, it got better – my dad let me transfer to a new public high school in the area with the best and brightest students from my city. Did I “flourish?” Not exactly – my grades weren’t great, but suddenly I had a bunch of friends, and I wasn’t getting beaten up every other day. The dean didn’t need to get to know me on a first name basis, nor assume that every time I was running somewhere, it was FROM someone. I didn’t even know it, but that year, I was actively a queer kid, closeted only to myself. Still attracted to women, but a white hot queer.
Anyway, it was a growing experience, and I knew then I’d had the best year of my life in school that year. I just never made that connection until now.
To quote Against Me!, “I would be lying to you if I did not say something. That would make me feel like a politician.”
The point is, though it sounds patronizing now, it occurred to me that though my 20′s (and most of the years before that, to be honest) really sucked, sometimes you find the good stuff randomly intermixed, and you’ll find that when you hit 30 (and you will), those experiences made it all worth it. So keep going. You can only see what I mean when you get there.