A lot of the people who say they don’t care about new policies and such because it ‘doesn’t affect them or anyone who they know,’ Hi, now you do.
I’m Solus! SolusCharge, a young adult; think gen-Z, who’s trying their best to get through life in general, not just with laws or regulations. Someone who can’t run away from the pain it causes us. A genderfluid/nonbinary Pansexual that is learning everything at face value now.
I have a lifelong, incurable condition that forces me to take birth control to regulate hormones. This doesn’t mean i don’t want kids, nor does it mean i want an abortion, but it means that without this medicine my own life could be threatened. And when care- when this medicine becomes harder to get, more expensive. I won’t be able to afford it. I’m going to have to face the choice of my own health and life, versus getting to live. Stuck as a lost statistic, an outlier in the system.
I’ve struggled with this condition my whole life, it led me down a road of pain and suffering all the way until I finally was able to get it stabilized. My own body is attacking itself because of a chemical imbalance. And now that I’m finally getting on my feet, it might be all taken from me.
I come from a family where mental health isn’t a thing, where feelings are hidden between the lines of passive aggressive comments. Where everything you say has to be scrutinized under a microscope to figure out what it meant. Where my parents who tried to raise me weren’t there almost ever. Where I can’t remember their faces when I don’t see them. Like voids in my memories.
So I was raised by the internet, lost in the threads of tumbler and google hangouts before discord ever existed. Lost in the thoughts of being someone else. Throwing myself into fantasy so I never had to truly exist. Left on auto pilot so much that I couldn’t tell you the bricks that make up my foundation. Years of memories I should have just don’t exist until they pop up in conversation. Until someone else mentions it. It’s like not having your own map in your library.
I’ve been drawing since I could hold a pen. I remember doodling over my door with a sharpie and getting yelled at when it was found. Yet, to this day, it still resides there.
Which is odd, because I didn’t have a door at all for years. I had gotten in a fight with my older brother; a spitfire with ADHD who was the definition of ‘boys will be boys’. And Him and my dad are carbon copies, down to their voice itself. So to a little seven year old me who was sobbing hysterically because I had gotten into a physical fight with my 12 year old brother, I didn’t unlock my door for my dad. So the handle was taken off; I didn’t get that handle back until I was 18. A few years later I was ten, and my room was a mess- a depression room that blocked my door because I wanted to wallow in the dark and never leave. So they took off my door all together. It was replaced with a curtain of bead shells that made horrible noises whenever someone passed though. I only got my door back when I was 18 and was given a cat; my princess, as a birthday present.
A cat who was ‘rescued’ off craigslist for $30. A cat who was pregnant with six kittens in my closet of a room.
That’s right, my room wasn’t ever meant to be an actual bedroom. If I remember my uncle’s words it was meant to only ever be an office. An office with a tiny closet full of my dad’s old rotten scuba equipment I wasn’t allowed to open. An office that was half taken up by a twin sized bed my entire life until I moved out.
Our house was a mess. A hoarder’s situation of mess that will ‘someday be super useful’! We have a mountain of such things in the living room that was dubbed ‘mount crapmore’ by my parents.
I’ve struggled my entire life in that house, fought up my own misery until I was drowning and had to claw myself out. So when given an extension to leave- I did.
I thought I’d have to convince my parents, I had a whole speech learned and written down, a script, and all the reasons and points. But to my surprise they just let me. It was the best thing I could have done for myself.
I remember my Nana always saying she wished she had a quiet kid like me. But she didn’t. If she had one it would have meant her kid hated her vividly. And while I don’t hate my parents now, it’s taken a lot of therapy to find that. To fix what they broke unknowingly. To learn what they never bothered to teach me because I was so mature. Because I didn’t need help. When I really, REALLY did.
But I’ll have to further that in some other post some other day.
I’m not super educated on all of this, but I am happy to be her, happy to learn and listen. In my own way I’m livid, though I’m not very good at showing it. I do my best after all, and sometimes that’s me in the background with dark humor or drawing, or going ‘wohoo’ but I’ll be here. Because we need to be, because my whole life is at stake, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why with all the youtubers and tiktok ban or whatever, that more people aren’t shouting. But I also know about social unrest, my whole AP seminar final was about social unrest and peaceful vs violent protests.
Nothing is going to happen if we simply keep coasting.
And that’s the rough part about change, it’s uncomfortable and hard. No one is going to be able to speak up if we just keep doing the easy stuff. So now if you’ve read this you know someone who’s affected. I’m gonna have to deal with this for the rest of my life, everything happening- it all affects me. And I’m gonna have to figure out how to deal with each blow, each hit, one at a time. But we’re gonna survive, and hell we’re all gonna thrive.