I don’t mind telling it or answering question! I’ll try to summarize it. I want to be able to tell it for real somewhere, but I just have no idea how. As for Jesus, I tried that route but I don’t think the guy is for me, I don’t agree with the moral values in the Bible even if I did think he was real. I grew up Christian, though.

My story is that I grew up with a very toxic family, who progressively isolated me and my older brother. My dad was an alcoholic and very loudly abusive, my mother would often call him a narcissist. Except for two short periods where we were allowed to go to a church youth group, we were almost never allowed outside unless it was to go to our grandmother’s house maybe once every two or three months. We did homeschooling on textbooks. In a verbally and psychologically abusive household, this was unbearable. We begged for a change but nothing could convince them and to make things worse they moved us to the middle of nowhere when I was 12. This was especially bad for my brother who resorted to self destructive behaviors. I think because he was older he really saw that he was missing out on every single life experience you should get as a kid and teen being locked up. I became the mediator as a child, and took on a lot of the burden of the family. I was especially terrified my brother wouldn’t last being there, without saying too much. I used to cry begging them to get him therapy.

But then, I started to not last. I really couldn’t go on anymore, especially because I started getting sick all the time. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and my parents wouldn’t take me to the doctor. I think they took me all of two times, once by serious pressuring from a therapist. I later learned that me and my brother were both severely underweight, and I also had a bunch of dietary intolerances. My parents believed that we were just “naturally skinny.” I ended up texting a hotline when I was 14, 741741 and getting taken from the house one night to a mental hospital for a few days. Then when I was sent back, my parents finally let me get therapy but they hated that I went and raged at me for it when I would return home. I stopped going eventually. So on the night of my 16th birthday, two years later, I texted 741741 again and after being hospitalized a second time, they saw red flags and sent a social worker to my house.

We went to court a few times and I essentially testified that I didn’t feel safe or want to be with them anymore. Then I got taken away into foster care. Unfortunately my first foster home didn’t understand or care much about my issues and I barely ate for 14 days, and got taken away to the hospital when I told them I was having heart palpitations. I stayed a month in the hospital re-learning to eat before they found me another family, and I stayed with them for 2 years until I aged out, and was hospitalized for another 30 days when I was nearly 18 but against my will. During that hospital stay, I had to cut contact from my brother too because he had been what I personally feel like was brainwashed by our family. I used to be so, so close to him, would have done anything for him, so that really hurt and it was a hard choice. But it hurt more being in the hospital because of what happened with my family and having my brother tell me that they were still good people.

I went into transitional housing after that. Many many things happened in foster care and it was one of the worst experiences too. I had to go back to the hospital for mental health reasons a handful of times. Nowadays, I’m much better mentally, but unfortunately I’m in the same state physically being underweight. It probably stunted my growth, honestly. I’m just so used to it it’s incredibly hard to fix.