I've been thinking of writing an autobiography or memoir, but it just never comes together for me, but I figured if I write one story at a time and post it on my blog maybe once a month, I can do that. Maybe one day I'll pull all the stories together and put them in a book but for now I'll just share some stories with you about my childhood and into adulthood. Some of the stories will be happy, some sad and some horrific because that was my childhood. But they will all be real, things that actually happened. If it seems like something that people enjoy reading maybe, I'll keep it going. These stories will not be in any kind of order; I'll just write them as they come to me.
Going To Our School's Open House as a Kid
I've shared this picture of me and my younger brother when we were teenagers. It was around this time when I was between 14-16 and he was between 12-14 years old that we would go to each other's Open House at our schools. Our parents were divorced by this time and we only saw our dad every other weekend when he would come to get us sometimes. Our mom was too busy with her boyfriends and drugs to go to our schools for anything. So we went to each other's open house and saw the art or whatever the teacher had set out for us to share during it. My brother came to my open house and looked at whatever my teacher had us make to put on the wall for our parents to see when they got there. Then we went to my brother's school.
My brother's school had a carnival during his open house and he got a bunch of tokens for doing good in school that he could use at different booths. They had games, food, and one booth had a bracelet engraving thing going on. My brother took some of his tokens and instead of using them on himself for games or food, he used them to have my name engraved on this bracelet.
The engraving is pretty faint now all these years later, but I still have it. It meant so much to me that he would spend his hard-earned tokens on me for something like this.
Not too long after this my brother and I both ended up in 2 different psychiatric hospitals for suicide attemps. I was 18 and he was 15. So I was in an adult hospital and he was in a youth hospital. One day I signed up for a day pass to take the bus down the street and go see my brother when he was able to have visitors.
He had made this leather bracelet for me during one of their arts and crafts classes they had for the teenagers at the psychiatric hospital he was in. I wore it for a long time until it got too tight on my wrist. But I kept it all these years. It meant a lot to me that he made this for me.
Links to past stories
2023
2024