tourist season

October 21, 2022. My last cafe latte at college.

I expressed for the first time this week that my experience in the fall was some of the most isolating and loneliest times of my life. It was beyond difficult somedays; but for two months I pushed myself to attend my daily classes. There was one time that I was having a good moment and I had Little Mix playing in my headphones on my route to class one more. I was like "yah, I live here now" and I was proud of myself. It was short lived, it was a brief moment. I was in a class of 70+ students and I feel I did not make any meaningful connections. I never shared a lunch or a coffee with a classmate. I did appreciate the one teacher who called me by my chosen name. The classmate who laughed with me in math class. My lab partner.  And the counsellor who worked with me until the very last day of the semester to make sure I had support leading into the holidays.

My emotions were becoming more difficult to control when I was in public settings. I started crying in class the first week of October. Being in my thoughts and alone in my mind for days on end, I started unraveling when I started to put together that I was a victim of domestic abuse in my LM household. First it was remembering that I was unprotected, I experienced several incidence of sexual trauma/sexual abuse  (1989, 1989-1994, and 1996) while in their care, and I was ignored and/or shamed. I was made to feel it was my fault. Then I started to remember being verbally abuse, being yelled at when I was fifteen years old, I don't know what I did wrong to be yelled at like this and he told me that I was a slut. Then in autumn when I was eighteen years old, he lost his mind on me and he yelled, he screamed, he threw things at me or near me, he punched the wall, and threatened to kill someone because he saw I had a hickey. I was always made to be the bad person when I was being taken advantaged of continuously.  I tried to stand up for myself that week, I told my LM parent that I was staying at my OM household from then on (without saying it was because I needed to be safe), half an hour later he was at my front door, demanding my house key and telling me that I was no longer welcome. He disowned me.  That day was October 16, 1998.

When it was reading week was when I went into my slump, I did not return to school in November. My impulses to jumpstart my recovery resulted in me pushing myself too far, too hard, and I couldn't keep up anymore. I began talking with a counsellor at the college; she was very helpful over those two months of support and she was very good about providing resources/places I could reach out to for continued support after my semester was up.