After I begged my parents to change schools, I quickly learnt the cruelty didn't stop, and neither did the indifference. I learnt another saying that year "kids can be cruel. It was a harsh truth that really resonated with me. Growing up, you always hear the phrase, but it doesn't hit you until you're on the receiving end. There's something about the bluntness and sometimes the thoughtlessness of kids that can make their words feel so much heavier. I guess what made it worse was the people who were supposed to 'protect me' did nothing.
My fourth-grade teachers told me to "get over it," as if pain was merely a surface wound you could stitch up or slice clean with a scalpel. They didn't see how it spread—how it crept through my veins, metastasizing like something terminal, like grief that didn't just sit in the chest but lived in the marrow. As a kid living in a warzone of words, with adults doing nothing to dismantle it, I began to wonder if I was just background noise—a loop of sorrow on repeat. I learned to wallow in silence because it was easier. Easier than being mocked for trying to speak. Easier than asking for help and being met with a shrug.
When my adopted mother died—the only person who saw a soul before a scar—I became one part grief, ninety-nine parts numb. She used to say beauty started with the word "Elliot," because she saw my heart before my skin, my story before my silence. She said my name like it meant something. Like I meant something. Like maybe not all words had to bruise. Maybe they could hurt in a redeeming way, like poetry, like truth. In the end, though, her love of cigarettes ran deeper—and they were what finally took her. And when they did, they didn't just steal her breath. They stole the only place I'd ever felt safe.
After her death, my father began drinking like he was trying to drown everything she ever touched. When he managed to hold down a job, he'd come home reeking of sweat and stale disappointment. Most nights, he'd stumble through the door, his breath thick with alcohol and resentment, and his hands quick to strike, or his words sharper than any blow. Other nights, he wouldn't say a word—just walked past me like I was nothing more than a shadow on the wall, too insignificant to waste a breath on. Sometimes, in the suffocating silence, I almost wished for the abuse, because at least then, I existed to him. At least then I was something real—something solid enough to hit, to yell at, to break like a bone. Hurt people hurt people, and although pain was awful, it was proof that I existed, especially when the quiet made me feel like I was already gone. Or at least, that he would be better off if I really was.
By eighth grade, therapy was just a part of my routine, and my personality had dulled into a blur of numbness and pills the psychiatrists would prescribe for me—each little tablet promising peace but delivering fog. The good days felt like uphill battles in the dark; the bad days, landslides. I spent my adolescence with the nickname "Popper"- partly because of the pills, but mostly because "kids can be cruel." It was meant to be funny, I guess. A joke that echoed in hallways and laughter that felt like slaps. The noise in my head was deafening, relentless thoughts blurring everything together like a radio stuck between stations.