Origin, part I

This one will be dense and personal. Just a heads up.

In the spirit of authenticity, it’s important, I think, to go into my personal history. I’ve debated sharing this information over the internet for a long time. Depressing backstories tend to generate the negative type of sympathy where sycophants flock from the woodwork to pretend they give a shit or offer impotent words of consolation. Keep your sympathy and save it for people that waste time arguing over our irredeemable political system.

I hate the attention of sharing this story, but it’s an important one, for many reasons. Some of these reasons include disproving the myth of white privilege, proving I’m not writing from a place of vacuous naïveté and writing something that might help someone in an awful place. 

I process my thoughts externally, whether by the written word or spoken, so unlike most of my other posts, this one’s mostly for me. I need to externalize these thoughts and rid my crowded subconscious. You’re more than welcomed to read along, though. Excuse the heavy subject matter.

If you know me personally, you probably don’t know the Origin Story of Chris. Consider this the master class on why I am the way I am.

To get it out in the open, I don’t write the way I do to stoke my ego and pretend that I’m a highly intellectual prick. I write the way I do because it’s all I know. Ever since I started copying, word-for-word, pages of my favorite chapter-books into my journal at the age of 9, I knew I was supposed to write.

I knew I was given this gift of articulate expression so that I can share my story for the benefit of others. I suffered becuase I’m supposed to be a mouthpiece for the emotionally and mentally broken. I suffered so my future children don’t have to. I suffered so I can take what I learned and use it to transform this reality into a more positive place—a place worthy of raising kids in. I have felt a strong sense of Cosmic Duty toward my ability to express myself.

Before we proceed, it’s important to add this disclaimer: This multi-part story is built from my memories alone, many of which are buried deep in my subconscious. I don’t claim that is information is accurate. It simply represents my truth. Furthermore, names have been omitted to protect identities (you know who you are). This story isn’t supposed to be the final telling, either. This document is living. As I gain legit information to replace the inaccurate method of recollecting memories, I will update this story.

So, without further delay:

I was born in Denver, in the glorious year 1994. I am the fifth of five, a twin, and the only son to my biological parents. All my sisters except my twin have different fathers. (A little Chris Fun-Fact here, my biological last name is Vollendorff).

My earliest memory would probably be a painful earache I got when I was barely a toddler. I was living with my twin, one of my older biological sisters, and my mom. From what I recall, I lied on the floor, the pain in my ear so intense, it branded into my mind forever. I don’t remember that motel complex very well. Shit, it might not have even been a motel complex at all. But I do remember the group of other have-not kids shacked up in the motel for, presumably, the same reason I was….

What I remember most from this period were the other kids—forgotten kids that found fun in smashing discarded beer bottles on the cement. I remember one older boy, carrying me back to my mom’s room because I sliced my finger open pretty good. I don’t even remember what he looks like, but I remember being carried in his arms as he rushed me to my mother. I think. I also remember being asked to get naked with these kids because they were much older than me and apparently didn’t know how to express emotions beyond sexual.

We bounced around a lot when I was a toddler. My mom was homeless (from what I understand) and had a pretty gnarly drug dependency. There are even vague subconscious impressions of living out an abandoned train boxcar. My dad, presumably, was in jail at the time, or at least, he wasn’t around.

We spent a lot of time between boyfriends’ homes until verbal (and physical) altercations ended our various housing arrangements. I don’t blame these boyfriends; it’s hard to live a good life when your drug-addled girlfriend has twins with her.

I spent a lot of my earliest years as a toddler roaming Colorado. Occasionally, memories of my other sisters pop up, but much of my early childhood is obscured by an undeveloped brain and years of emotional repression. There are some memories of living in a home, once. I remember this house because I stepped on a nail and watched it penetrate the top of my foot. I was probably three or four. Mom wrapped it with a rag and sent me to bed. This was also the house where I learned how to climb onto the counter to get into the cabinets so I could feed myself. I’ve been proudly making my own breakfast ever since.

That house holds a lot of my earliest memories, such as watching Transformers with my Mom, zonked out on the couch. I remember a lot of daycares during this time as well, when my mom could hold a job down as a hotel cleaner. Sometimes she would take us to work with her, where we would run around the hotel like a giant playground. Sometimes we would help her work. Other times, she would send us to a friend’s house for the day. One such friend’s house included a group of shitty kids, just as unprivileged as us. I remember punching one of these kids in the face as hard as I could—enjoying the look of shock and blood staining his face—because he said something to my twin sister I didn’t like. I wasn’t even 5 yet.

I also remember one of these friend-daycares (I think the family of the kid whose nose I wrecked didn’t want us back), where the son and I were fighting and he took a metal pipe to my forehead, splitting it open. I remember spending hours crying, waiting for mommy to come back.

I even remember the black woman that lived across the street, with children of her own, that took us in some afternoons because she was wise and compassionate enough to realize we needed some normalcy. 

The clearest early memory I have, though, could also be considered my Inciting Incident. At this time, my twin and I were attending Honey Bear Preschool in Centennial, Colorado. I loved it there and loved being able to interact with kids my age. I loved the stability of school; it was an escape from my non-existent home life.

All that came crashing down, however, when my mom didn’t come to pick us up from school. She just never showed. We sat on the front steps long after everyone was gone. So long, in fact, that the principle of the school was leaving to go home for the day when she found us, still waiting. She tried to contact my mom. Eventually, she called the cops and we were taken to the local station. (My first ride in the back seat of a cop car came at the ripe age of four! Holla back!)

Later that same night, we were registered into the foster care system and shipped off to a home with about six or seven other kids with pasts equally, and more, dysfunctional than my own. For those of you unfamiliar with the foster care system, the best way to describe it is like trying to fix the Hoover Dam with a band-aid. A whole house of equally fucked up kids trying to pretend to be normal. My foster care experience was about as shitty as you’d expect, complete with sexual molestation and awkward conversations at my new school when people asked what my parents did and who they were.

I think this was when I decided to pretend. I didn’t want the attention of being different from other kids, so I adopted a “normal”, extroverted persona in order to make sure no one asked awkward questions. This persona, the cheerful, optimistic Chris, is a total farce. I’m just a fucking great pretender.

In fact, it wasn’t until I had an intense LSD experience (seven tabs that tested at about 150 micrograms, to be exact) that I realized this was the case. I was looking for the door to my subconscious and was obstructed by this mask. Having this mask forcefully dissolved was incredibly cathartic.

Anyway, to save you the horrid details of my experience in foster care, suffice it to say that my biological father’s dad—my grandpa—couldn’t take the blow to his family pride knowing that his grandkids were in the system (he himself was an orphan, if family legend is to be believed). My grandparents drove all the way from Southern California to rescue my twin sister and I. The next chapter of my life unfolds in sunny Southern Cali.

We’ll end part one there. I don’t want to drown you in shitty memories.

So, why do I tell this story?

It’s hard to talk about a dysfunctional past because many take it poorly. I don’t share these things to compare my shitty upbringing to anyone else’s. I don’t share these things for sympathy. In fact, I know that problems are relative, and everyone, everyone, has baggage. Many of you probably have a worse story than me.

I share these things because I am a success story. I have every right in the world (especially in today’s victim-culture) to be angry, bitter, sad, depressed, drug-addicted, fucked-up. I’m a success story because I CHOSE TO BE. Much of my life has been consumed with bitter hatred toward myself, those around me and toward my circumstances. Sure, I struggle with PTSD and depression and I probably will my entire life, but I choose not to let these things define me.

I made a conscious decision not to let these things bring me down. To be frank, this revelation came after a suicide attempt when I was about 17. I felt cheated despite having a family that adopted and cared about me. I felt that no one was sad enough for me. I wasted so much time feeling sorry for myself.

This was mostly because I kept this dark part of my life hidden so well and partly because no one my age could possibly relate. No platonic friendship, no girlfriend could possibly understand. I hated life for this. I wanted nothing more than to blend in, but because of my mask and not understanding how to reciprocate relationships, I was isolated in the most extreme. When most toddlers are learning the basics of relationships from their mom, I was busy surviving. 

To those that have suffered, I offer my advice: stop feeling sorry for yourself. It becomes an identity. I understand most of this self-pity comes from feeling irredeemable. If someone as cowardly and fake as me can choose otherwise, you can too.

I won’t try and make you feel better, either. “Life’s a bitch and then you die,” they say. But I will say that you can spend an entire lifetime waiting for people to relate and understand and shell out sympathy. This type of reactive existence is wholly dependent upon others. If you’ve gone through something horribly traumatic, it was for a reason. You have literally experienced the rawest form of life there is. Most people spend their whole lives pretending that life is just grand, but you know better. You know that life’s a bitch and then you die.

You are better off for your suffering. Those that have had life laid out for them, those that have never experienced the raw awfulness of existence have missed out on an important evolutionary curve. When shit inevitably hits the fan, they will break.

You will survive, though. You’ve made it this far, after all. You've learned how to adapt. Also, if you’re considering suicide—it’s not worth. All it does is prove that you are a coward, a spineless shit-sack. Which we both know you aren’t.

The real middle-finger comes from living a meaningful existence, even when God himself seems obsessed with making your life a living nightmare. Turn to God and say “Fuck you, guy, bring it on!”

What can He throw at you that you haven’t already experienced? You always have a choice, so choose Life.

With that, let’s save the rest of my story for another time.

photo cred: Francesco Unga at unplash.com