I grew up in what sounds like a very lucky time and place where I had access to an education, food in the refrigerator, the fact that I had a refrigerator at all is amazing to a hefty percentage of the total population I’m sure, I had a mom, a dad, peers and nothing to worry about in terms of basic needs. Or did I?

This is where things get interesting.

While I had to work little for the necessities of life, there was something happening on an emotional level that would make one wonder what constitutes our basic needs as human beings.

Let’s begin with my mother. She was born into a navy family, constantly moving around from place to place, never getting a real chance to put down roots. She’s lived in Japan, Guam, Canada, Spain, all over the United States. She finally got a chance to settle down in Portland when she got to high school and finished out her school years shy and living in the shadows of her star athlete older brother. My mom was sexually molested/raped two different times that she recalls in her adolescent years and never talked about it until she was in her mid-thirties. She had a very emotionally distant navy seal father who was quick to get angry at her whenever she didn’t understand something or whenever she did something wrong. Her mother favored her oldest child, and my mom was left out frequently. When she turned seventeen she met a man twenty years her senior and married him. She abandoned her old life to be with this man and was quickly pregnant and ready to give birth to my older brother. The man my mother married turned out to be a child molester. It was said that he had another son with another woman before meeting my mother who he had pushed in front of a car and killed on his eighteenth birthday for an inheritance. My mother spent a few years married to this man before finally leaving for the safety of her child.

My mother fell in love with man number two whom she met at her job. This man was my father, and she quickly married him and, like with the last guy, she got pregnant. This time with me. My dad at the time was a functional alcoholic and she stayed with him until she had me in the oven for about seven months. My father molested my older brother, and my mother found out and once again, fled the marriage for the safety of her children. I’ll go into more about my father later.

At this point, my mother was single, had two marriages under her belt and a child from each. My older brother was starting to display behavioral issues that were severe and hard to keep in check. Attention-deficit hyperactive disorder, to be specific. He was so hard to deal with that my mom started laying the hand on him to keep him in check. Eventually she sought help for both her and him (the right thing to do) and she walked away with tools to handle his behavior when it became unbearable and a prescription for Ritalin for my brother to keep him calm and focused.

My mother entered into another relationship that never quite made it to a voluntary marriage, but the two stayed together so long that they were deemed married by the IRS and government. This guy had an issue with alcohol, but he wasn’t a child molester (yippee!) However, he was emotionally abusive and have horrible anger issues that came out later in the relationship. In the beginning this new guy held my hand and called me his ‘little honey.’ I apparently loved him and he treated me like his true daughter, I’ve even seen home video of this, and it still makes me cringe to know that it was true. My mother got pregnant unintentionally with my younger brother and the moment he was born, this guy I had come to see as a father figure immediately lost interest in his relationship with me in exchange for a better relationship with his new blood son. From that moment on, I was at fault for all problems that the baby caused, I was annoying, I was put to bed by 5pm in the summer time while all the neighbor kids got to play in the street on our dead end and I would stand on my bed on my tip toes to look out the window and vicariously live the perfect childhood through them.

My mom worked all of the time and the father figure just played first person shooter games on the computer all of the time. Couldn’t be bothered by anything, the sound of cartoons drove him up the wall, hamburger helper every night or whatever you can find in a can or the freezer help yourself, I was the caretaker for my little brother whenever he wanted to crawl around or play in the yard. My mom was always gone and when she’d come home father figure would start to scream at her about all the havoc I’d caused him while she was away and they would fight. By fight, I mean scream so the entire street could enjoy their dinner and listen to the latest. My mother would yell at him saying, “if you lay a hand on my kids, any of them, I will come after you with a two-by-four!”

My older brother was always away as he and the father figure did not get along at all, and my older brother was out causing trouble of his own. He was flunking school, doing drugs and quite promiscuous. By sixteen he was officially kicked out of the house and unwelcome in the home. I didn’t see much of him since. To this day I don’t know where he lives or who he’s become. There is a warrant out for his arrest on rape and abuse charges.

This is the emotional landscape being set for your young author. This goes on like this with the latest father figure until the age of about nine or ten, and then things start to unfold and my mom has an affair with a new guy at her job. My true father also remains in the peripheral of my child life, which I will address in a later post. Going back to my last post where I mention what I call the American Paradox, where life seems free, abundant and void of pain and struggle, I have to say that my childhood was anything but those things. When someone is poor, hungry and without shelter or clothes, one can only hope that they have the strength of their minds, the perseverance and the awareness of what they have to do to survive. When someone is emotionally abused, neglected and at unrelenting conflict, one can only hope they are at least sheltered and fed.

It’s strange, I always have so much to say when out in some coffee shop, sitting at a window looking out into the streets, watching all the people passing by. I think, “Ya’ know, I should start a blog, I have so much I want to say about my personal struggle, about health, how to find that inner motivation, this experience of life…” And  then here I am, and it’s just strange. Maybe it’s performance anxiety I’m experiencing. I’ll be honest, this must be my double digit attempt at starting some sort of blog platform. And every other time I’ve made a single post, usually something melancholy and reaching for wisdom in the mundane adolescence we have all experienced, then after its published I get nervous and uncertain and my words feel empty. Post. Read. Re-read. Edit. Edit again. Edit some more. Eh, delete post. Re-post something similar but better said. Edit. Edit again. Edit some more. Delete post. Obsess. Obsess some more. Delete blog. I guess this is exactly where I should start, this very thing I have struggled with my entire life: self-confidence. Uncertainty. Aimlessness. The feelings of desire, passion, curiosity and enthusiasm have always been there, but what’s missing? Why do I always feel like I’m just spinning my wheels in the mud? These questions are the ones worth answering, worth hashing out on a blog where others can stumble upon it and feel a sense of connectivity and maybe even motivation to answer these questions for themselves. There is some comfort in knowing that I am not–we are not, the only ones to feel this way. This blog is a space where I will try and answer these questions for myself and offer perspective from a very small corner in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. This is the beginning of my official and permanent blog journey…

Portland, Oregon, the most beautiful city in the world. I couldn’t be more grateful and lucky to be born and raised in such a culturally rich, economically abundant and environmentally lush region on this planet. The odds are outstanding, and I acknowledge this every day when I open my eyes. I can’t sleep in anymore, as the awareness of how privileged I am works as a set clock within. There are so many people, places and opportunities to be seized, and yet this soul of mine has only this lifetime to figure out which people warrant my time and affection, which places to let become a part of me, and which opportunities are worth the leaps of faith.

I grew up right in the southeastern suburbs of the city, where you’ll see lots of apartments and houses of different classes lined up on the same block. I went to public schools in the same district from elementary all the way through high school, was lucky enough to live in one home, have the same peers throughout my upbringing and apply for college when I graduated high school. I was an honor roll student who cared deeply about grades and doing well at everything I did. I played rugby throughout my high school years and was voted Best Smile my senior year. I applied to only one school, Portland State University. I got in, moved out of my mother’s house and into the dorms and had the all-American (and very Portlandia) college experience: drugs, alcohol, skipping class, concerts, drunken waits in line at three in the morning at Voodoo donuts, an over-drafted bank account, part-time job at a late-night sandwich shop, frequent change of majors and interests, constant fear and pressure over whether or not all the debt and time invested was worth the education when I was too clueless to know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Oh, my generation will never forget the times. But we are focusing on the good stuff, and even though that all sounded contradictory, it was good. It was still good. Even then, I had clean water to drink, unlimited choices for dinner with hardly any money, more time to think than is probably healthy and men constantly vying for my attention. I bet you’re wondering why my blog claims to be about overcoming depression, anxiety and the sense of aimlessness, aren’t you? This is the American paradox, a look from the outside in. Now that we’ve looked at the outside, let me invite you in…

Until next time…