Where I grew up was awful. It was a shithole, a garbage dump set ablaze with toxic suffocating fire choking everyone who entered, a black hole of happiness with no escape, a place where stuffed full of depression and apathy, a culture completely built upon poverty and mental illness, a place where my family fell apart, a place where I was irreparably damaged, a place that would constantly exhaust me, a place where I fell headfirst into mental illness, and I miss it so much.
I’d be lying if I said I understand what it is I’m writing about. It’s a topic for me that leaves me completely confused and upset. My home and the community in it filled me with such mixed and chaotic emotions that it’s practically impossible for me to put it down. All my life I’ve tried to be as introspective as I can, I’ve always tried to understand what it is I’m feeling and why it is I feel that way. But as to why I miss this place; it’s just a question I’m ill equipped to handle.
For a start, the first thing I think of when I hear the word “home” is toxicity. It was an extremely toxic place, there’s no doubt about it. It just had this energy, like we were all stuck in quicksand and we knew it. I don’t think I ever interacted with a genuinely happy person while I was there. My friends were always damaged, the families I interacted with were always constantly struggling to either pay bills, or just to not fall apart completely. It was crammed full with this yearning to escape that was competing with complete apathy. I swear you could even feel it in the air.
It was like this thick fog, you didn’t breathe it in, rather, you almost felt it in your brain. It’s so hard to describe, like people always say that you know when you’re home, and I definitely did, to say the least. I don’t want to go as far as to call it constant misery, but with the way people acted it might as well have been.
For example, I was walking my dog, and this happened twice, where these really old couples came up to me and told me about their dog just like it! Was dead. Two different couples, two different long stories about dead dogs. Can’t forget the then proceeding story about how their kids had gone and taken their other dog and that they’re lonely and have no more reasons to live. Yeah ya know, casual sidewalk conversation.
Or how about the constant fucking drama. Oh good lord, there were always fights in the park, shitty abusive relationships. My friend and I were picked on quite a lot actually, we were basically the outcasts of our age group. Look at me, still managing to be the outcast in a place full of broken nutcases. That’s literally my linkedin bio, come on.
Really though, we had to avoid everyone if we didn’t want the snot beat out of us. Something about young boys being raised in broken, unstable environments, that make them just want to physically assault people.
He was a great friend though, and really the only one I had for years. Until he was forbidden from talking to us when we found out that his parents were stealing his disability money to pay off their debt, and not giving any to him. While he was homeschooled elementary level stuff, forcing him to be dependent on them. Just so they could claim he couldn’t live without them when he turned 18, so they could keep getting his money. Also, they wouldn’t take him to get his eyes checked, or to the doctors, or let him get a job, or do anything.
Guess you could consider that friendship over.
	Suffice to say that this wasn’t the most nurturing place to grow up. I could go on and on about more little stories and disasters that I was around daily, but is there really any point in talking about every single piece of garbage at a dump. I never had the best role models around me, It seemed everyone around was just in this inescapable pit, and I was more and more falling into the same thing. I started to find myself hopeless, all I was doing was making mistakes and I didn’t understand why. I didn’t understand what was and wasn’t healthy, I didn’t even understand that there was something wrong with me. I just thought that the world was out to get me, that this truly was all there was in the world.
	It can’t just be because it was such a toxic place that I miss it right? I refuse to believe that it can be that simple, you know what, I refuse to believe that I can be that dumb. There has to be some other reason that I miss it, there has to be.
	Well, what about school? I am a firm believer that high school is not actually a place where dreams go to die. I know, controversial opinion, but really, at my school it didn’t feel like we were just a bunch of raisins in the sun. Were our dreams and mental states rotting away into nicotine flavored flash drives and alcoholism? Yes. But did we have fun? No? Oh, okay.
	But, that aside, I hold my high school up in high reverence. I’m not sure how it is in other schools but it really felt like a community. We were a big school but everybody knew each other, people actually cared about each other. While it was isolating at first it had a lot going for it. If you were lucky there were a lot of good teachers, there were so many outlets if you were struggling, and, oh my god, are these people actually smiling?
	Sure, maybe I look so highly up to this place just because my home was such a toxic place to be, in fact I’m sure that’s the case. But the why doesn’t matter, what the school was for me was a community I could actually get involved in. Sure we were all struggling, we were all depressed, riddled with anxiety, lonely, but at least we were alone together.
	And now I’m just alone.
	I think the biggest jarring part of being here is just the sheer size of it. I see hundreds of people walking by me every time I go outside and not one of them gives a damn about me. The world doesn’t revolve around me, I know, but fuck man.
	I’ve been telling myself that all this time I’ve been spending alone has just been me trying to discover myself now that I’m finally happy. But come on, that's a lame excuse if I’ve ever heard one.
	Everyone always depicts depression as these muted greys and blacks. That somehow when you’re depressed the world dims itself, hiding its beauty behind the fog that you perceive. But to me depression is this, like, neon color. Harsh bright pinks, sharp greens and yellows, bold blues and oranges. That the world is so harsh in everything it gives to you, that all of its color is so frighteningly intimidating. That if I were to fall on the bright, buzzing, sticky, sharp green ground, it would take me in, it would envelop me in it’s aura, dragging me down until I collapse into my bed at night, shaking the world around me, like my exhaustion is some potent external force.
That I don’t actually see out of my own eyes, instead seeing the world from some other lens, from dutch angles and up-shots. Watching myself stare up at my bright, hazy, oppressively pink ceiling. Until the light goes back up and I’m washed back into the sea of closed off, dark blue people. They push me ashore into my classrooms, the temporary safe haven for my mind to relax, until the clock hits and I’m blinded again by the yellow sun beating down on me. I walk home, shoes sticking to the green molasses floor until I fall down again, for it to just repeat. Over, and over. And over, and over again.
The world no longer feels like an inviting place. I look around me and I don’t see soft, nice colors. I see colors that make my eyeballs burn, and I just fucking miss my home.