The Version of Me I’ll Never Meet

I’m 18, a senior in high school, about to go to college. My parents are both recovered alcoholics and drug addicts now “California sober.” They’re normal people today. But they weren’t when I was growing up. When I needed a safe home, I didn’t have one.

Tonight I was just sitting downstairs scrolling on my phone while my dad was talking to a friend about his past drug use. He started talking about this day nine years ago, Valentine’s Day, a day that’s burned into my memory. There are a lot of days like that for me.

He described how he went out to buy Valentine’s gifts for the family, came home, threw them at my mom, and left. I don’t even remember that part. But hearing him talk about that day made my chest start burning.

That burning feeling is the same one I get when something dangerous happens. When a man tried to grope me on the subway. When I’m about to throw up. When my brain suddenly flips into that I’m not safe mode. My chest burns like I’m in danger even when I’m just sitting in my own house.

I had to get up and leave.

It’s been almost a decade. My family seems like they’ve moved on. But those moments are carved into me. They’re not stories to me. They’re part of my nervous system.

And it makes me so angry that they couldn’t do the bare minimum and keep our house safe when I was a kid. Now they’re stable. Now they’re normal. Now they’re healed.

But I’m already 18.

Why couldn’t they have figured it out when I was 8?

Why did I have to grow up inside the chaos while they were figuring themselves out?

Sometimes I’m scared that when I look back on my life someday, all I’ll see is what happened to me as a kid. Because right now that’s what comes up first. Every school I went to, every friend, every memory it all sits under the shadow of not feeling safe.

I want to be a nurse. I want to help vulnerable people. Not in the same situation I was in, I honestly don’t think I could survive being a police officer and dealing with abusers directly. But helping people who are sick, scared, or powerless feels meaningful to me.

Knowing I might be able to help people when no one helped me gives me some kind of comfort.

But it doesn’t undo anything.

You can’t make up for a childhood where you didn’t feel safe.

And sometimes that realization makes me feel small. Like maybe I wasn’t important enough to protect. If the people who were supposed to keep me safe couldn’t do it, what does that say about me?

I know that thought isn’t logical. I know it’s not actually true. But it still feels true.

It feels like I have to earn love. Like I have to earn care. Like I have to prove I’m worth protecting. And sometimes I push myself to the point of destroying myself trying to get that.

My childhood lives in every part of me.

And sometimes I wonder who I would have been if I had grown up in a normal house. If I had grown up somewhere safe.

Because I’ll never get to meet that version of myself.