I’m just another human attempting to navigate this world.

Now that I’m done sounding like an alien or something… I grew up in an interesting household. As the youngest of five born to my mother, I was naturally spoiled in the eyes of my siblings. And in comparison, I would say yes. However, I also had to spend half of my 18 years in a far worse town. Desert? Wasteland? Doesn’t matter, it’s in the past.

My relationship with my siblings really didn’t feel like a bond until I left for the military (after turning 18, not even a month out of high school). I always felt like no matter my age I was treated like a little kid; I even recall crying out on the curb of my oldest sister’s house one Christmas because I felt mistreated–come to find out it was really all in my own adolescent hormonal mind. Sometime earlier in my life, I pulled a shopping cart from a dried creek bed, expecting to receive some kind of praise for whatever reason, and it was called trash after revealing it to my family. I wheeled it back to the creek and dumped it in the same spot I found it–what they didn’t know was that I had struggled with it for about an hour, unsnagging it from a grown out tree root, fallen and thought I had broken my ribs but still pulled it out to show them. I was probably around 10 or 11 (oh yeah, and overweight). I had felt so proud and I can only imagine now why they didn’t care about it.

The truth seems to me that, as humans, only that which occurs in front of us and bares meaning to us matters. I can’t blame them for not understanding what I had gone through to show them a literal piece of garbage (but also a workable shopping cart) because they weren’t there. For some reason, that shopping cart had meaning to me, and, as children do when they get determined, I focused only on getting it out and not how anybody might react to it.

The human perspective is funny to me, though I’m subject to it as well.

When I was 3 or 4 (maybe younger?) I have a vivid memory of my mother bleeding from her face. Her friend tried to keep me out of the kitchen where she sat with a bucket under the dripping blood. A few years later I discovered (or, comprehended better) my biological father was responsible–that alone could’ve really fucked (sorry, mom) me up. Luckily, I have a wonderful mother. Now, a question I pose to myself: does he deserve to be forgiven after so many years have passed? The only answer I’ve come to is no, BUT he does deserve to know his son. He’s human, too, after all.

A shorter explanation of all that?

I’m a 22-year-old (+1 year for every June after 2017), primarily white, veteran that spawned from a broken home.

Even shorter?

I’m human.

Just like everybody else.