I Wasn't Taught to Stay — Part One

July 17, 2025 · 4 min read

A few months ago, I rebranded myself. Again. That’s not a new habit for me. I get tired quickly… of names, of colors, of logos. I lose the light of whatever identity I’ve ever tried on. So far.

But my mission has always stayed the same: to tell my truth so others feel a little less alone in theirs.

I’ve been doing this for a long time. Even though I still feel like I’m in my mid-20s — I’ve been around the sun 45 times. I repeat this fact frequently because it’s a number I never thought I’d reach. At least… I never thought I wanted to.

Now, I share that number with pride. Now, I have a solid understanding of the pain that I needed to go through to reach this milestone of existence.

It was all… necessary.

To understand why I move like I do, why my gypsy-like mindset doesn’t stay in one place long, you have to know where I’ve been. I’m going to take you on an adventure through time.

Home 1: Aspen, Colorado — 1980

My first home on Earth was a trailer on the outskirts of town. I was born to two socialites — not the elite kind, but the party-animal, back-of-the-house kind.

Homes 2–3: Various places in Aspen — 1981–1984

My father vanished before I could remember him. My mother adjusted the only way women do when left behind: she worked. She moved. She survived. There was even a 17-day marriage somewhere in there, a last-ditch hope for rescue that didn’t pan out.

Home 4: Warwick, Rhode Island — Late 1984

We went back east. To my mother’s roots. To the Victorian house where she was raised. To my grandmother. To safety.

I still dream of that street: North Street. My grandma and I would take walks every night after dinner to the end of the street and back. Brandy, her dog, would sit at every crosswalk, and I would jump in all of the puddles, dreaming of adventures in a far-off place where love swallowed me whole.

When my heart began to harden, it was not because of the pain. It was because I still remembered a time when it didn’t hurt.

Home 5: North Kingstown, RI — 1986

This is the first place I remember living. Not just existing, not just passing through, but living.

We lived in a dated two-bedroom apartment on the third floor — no elevator, just creaking stairs and carpeted halls with that old-building smell. My mom made it feel like home. Somehow. Even with nothing, she gave me everything she could.

There was the tiny kitchen, the smell of our near-nightly dinner of quesadillas with green peppers and Pace salsa. Meat was a luxury that we could not afford. But I didn’t know that then. I didn’t feel poor. I didn’t feel hungry. Looking back, though, a single cucumber sandwich in my lunchbox says a lot more than I realized.

She gave what she had. And still, she bought me a wrought iron daybed with a brand new comforter with soft baby blue frills. I thanked God for it every night. It felt extravagant. Magical.

I remember the day she left me alone for the first time, just to run an errand. Ten minutes later, I panicked. Bolted out the door to chase her, and locked myself out. I sat there for hours, a six-year-old girl, alone on a stairwell in the silence of an old apartment building.

Eventually, someone let me back in. Eventually, she came home. I confessed to her that night, as I lay my head down on the pillow, what I had done. I told her I ran for her. I don’t remember what she said. But I know I never forgot the way fear can live in your throat.

Home 6: La Mesa, CA — 1989

After years of my mother clawing her way through workdays just to keep us afloat, a voice began to speak to her on the car radio. He accompanied her home each night, spinning well-meaning sermons. “Little girls need their father’s presence most of all,” he said. It felt like truth. So she did what women do when they’re exhausted and hopeful: she believed him.

She packed up her entire life — her daughter, her belongings, her pain — into a car and pointed us west. Out to Southern San Diego, where my father’s family had landed in the late 1960s.

We took 31 days to cross the country. Later that day, we hit stopped traffic on a narrow two-lane road. Hours passed. This is when I saw my first dead body. There were bikers, men who looked like warriors, weeping. Screaming to the heavens. Their cries pierced something in me.

My heart shattered for them that day. And I’ve carried that moment ever since. Maybe it’s time to let it go — to honor it, to fold it into the layers of who I am, but this time not as trauma, as evidence. That I feel deeply. That I care deeply. To my core.

Homes 7–8: La Mesa and Del Mar, CA — 1990–1992

By the start of 1990, I was ten. Double digits, still a child, but already carrying the eyes of someone who had seen too much.

The summer of ‘92 began with a haircut. Not just any cut — the cut. The kind of haircut that makes you question your entire existence when you look in the mirror and realize you no longer recognize yourself.

We didn’t go back to our place. My mom had moved us into his house. Del Mar. A man. A boyfriend. A new school. And a version of myself I didn’t know how to become.

It wasn’t our home. It wasn’t my room. It wasn’t safe. I was thrown into unfamiliar halls with unfamiliar faces, and the only thing I could control was the volume of my own silence. I didn’t know how to make friends anymore. I was just the girl with the boy haircut and a thousand stories I didn’t know how to tell. So I went inward. Back into that liminal space where imagination could protect me.

· · ·

I’ve reached a point. Not because the story’s over, but because I can feel it settling in your chest too. This was a lot to take in. A lot to carry. And we both deserve a breath.

There are still more moves, more memories, more soul-markings left to share. I’ll meet you back here when we’re both ready to keep going.