“Raw Memoir”

Raw Memoir 

I was not always this person. That is what people do not understand. If you met me when I first moved into that apartment in 2023, you probably would have thought I was nice. Maybe too nice. Shy. Nervous. Naive. Someone who wanted to be accepted so badly that I let people get closer to me than I normally would have. I was walking into a tight little world in Salinas, and I learned fast that if you are not from here, you are never really from here. 

I thought if I worked hard enough at being cool with people, they would eventually let me in. They did not. And the thing that still gets me is that I felt guilty for getting that apartment. I remember telling one of my first case managers that I felt like I had survivor’s guilt. Like I had been placed there before I deserved it. Like somebody else should have gotten it instead of me. Looking back now, that is almost funny, because plenty of people made it clear they did not think I deserved it either. 

But what people did not know was what it took for me to even get there. They did not know what I had already survived, or what I was still surviving. They did not know that placement was not some special blessing handed to me because I was lucky. It was funding. It was algorithms. It was demographics. It was trauma scores and diagnosis codes and childhood history turned into eligibility. It was never personal until they made it personal. 

That is the part people miss when they look at me like I am ungrateful. They see the apartment key and not the price of getting it. They see a roof and think that means safety. They see a program and think that means care. But a place can have walls and still not feel like shelter. A system can have rules and still feel lawless when nobody explains them, when nobody follows them the same way twice, when everything depends on who likes you and who does not. 

I was honest when I got there. That was my mistake. I told them everything. I gave people a blueprint to my fears, my weaknesses, my grief, my history, my addiction, my family, my diagnosis, my shame. I thought honesty was how you got help. I thought trauma-informed care meant somebody would take what you gave them and protect it. Instead, it felt like every real thing I told them became something they could use later. 

I did not know then that honesty without protection can turn into exposure. I thought if I told the truth first, nobody could use it against me. I thought being transparent made me safer. But some people do not hear truth as truth. They hear it as material. They hear it as something to file, something to repeat out of context, something to hold until the day they need to make you look unreliable. 

There is one story I still think about because it shows how easy it was for them to twist me into something else. When my mom got sick, I thought I might want to overdose after she died. I was scared of myself. I was trying to understand what I might do before I did it. One night I tried to find heroin because my mind had gone to that dark place, and I could not find it. I am grateful now that I could not. But later, that story—the one time I was trying to find it because I was afraid of surviving my mother’s death—got turned into me having a heroin problem. It became a note, a label, a weapon. 

That is what hurt the most. Not just being misunderstood, but being documented wrong by people who were supposed to know better. When I was truly falling apart—when I got fired, when I was going through a breakup, when I could barely shower or feed myself, when I was disappearing into my apartment—there was barely anything real written about that. Just copy-and-paste notes. But when I started asking questions, suddenly I was symptomatic. Suddenly I was dangerous, manipulative, paranoid, drug-seeking, whatever word fit the story they needed to tell. 

It makes you start questioning your own memory, and that is dangerous. Because once enough people write something down wrong, it starts to become official. It starts to look more real than the person standing right there saying, no, that is not what happened. I learned that paperwork can be louder than a human being. I learned that a sentence typed by someone who barely knows you can follow you longer than the truth ever will. 

Eli 

Eli came into my life during a time when my apartment still did not feel like mine. Before him, I was mostly staying at my ex’s house. I did not really live in my own place until Eli started being there with me. Then the apartment became something different. It became warm for a minute. It became ours in my head, even if it was never really ours. 

With Eli, I let myself believe in small things again. A body next to mine on the couch. Food on the counter. A ride somewhere. A joke in the middle of a bad day. Someone knowing where my charger was. It sounds stupid until you have gone long enough without that kind of ordinary. Ordinary can feel like love when your life has mostly been emergencies. 

Our first date was innocent in a way that almost hurts to remember. We went to a meeting. We got food. We hung out for hours. We were both trying, or at least I think we were. We were sober that day. We were soft. We were kids in some way, even though I was not a kid anymore. I look back at that version of us and I barely recognize either one of us. 

I cared about him. I still do, even with everything that happened. I remember the way he used to look at me in the beginning, like he respected me because I had been sober before, because I had survived things, because maybe he thought I knew something. Sometimes I wonder if using with him changed how he saw me. Like maybe it confirmed some ugly thing people already believed. I know I am not responsible for another person’s addiction. I know that. But knowing something and not carrying it are two different things. 

There were moments when I could see the problem and still walk straight toward it. That is another thing people do not like to admit about survival. Sometimes you know something is bad for you and you still pick it because it feels less lonely than the alternative. Sometimes you are not choosing destruction. You are choosing not to be alone with yourself for one more night. 

Mateo 

After Eli, or during the wreckage of whatever we were calling the end, I started spending time with Mateo. He was from the same kind of world I was from, the same streets almost, the same old Seaside gravity. His family knew pieces of mine. There was something familiar in that before I even understood it. 

Mateo felt like a mirror from a neighborhood I understood. Not safe exactly, but familiar. There is a difference. Familiar can trick you into thinking it is safe because your body recognizes the language, the humor, the danger, the rhythm of the room. With him, I did not have to translate every part of myself. That felt good. That felt like rest, even if it was not peace. 

He was beautiful. Funny. Charismatic. The kind of person who walks into a room and makes you aware of yourself. I was not feeling good in my body then. I had gained weight when my mom died. I had lost some of it, but I still did not feel like myself. I did not feel wanted. Then one day we were standing in the kitchen, naked and random and ordinary, and he looked at me and said, “You know you’re really smart, right?” 

I do not know why that landed the way it did. Maybe because it came from him. Maybe because I had been called talented, funny, good at hair, all kinds of things, but smart was not a word I had learned to claim. In that moment, I believed it. And once I believed it, I started standing differently inside myself. 

That one sentence did something to me because it arrived in a moment when I did not feel valuable. I had spent so much of my life being looked at for what I could do for people, how I could make them feel, what I could provide, what kind of damage I could survive and still smile through. But smart meant something different. Smart meant there was something inside me nobody had managed to ruin. 

My Mother 

I learned early how to love people through things that were not okay. My mother was bipolar. She used on and off. My parents were not good together. When I was young, there were violent outbreaks and chaos and things I did not have language for yet. My grandma would come get me, and I would go to her house in Monterey, this beautiful house with a pool and a hot tub and a basketball court. Part of me wanted to be there anyway. Part of me knew I was being rescued. Part of me did not know what any of it meant. 

When your childhood is split between chaos and beautiful rooms, it does something strange to your memory. You can remember sunlight on a pool and still remember fear in your body. You can remember being safe at your grandma’s and still feel guilty for wanting to stay there. You can love your parents and still know they scared you. All of it can be true. That is the part that took me years to understand. 

I loved my mom more than anyone. She was my favorite person. She still is, in the way dead people stay alive in you. But I can say now that she was amazing and also that some things were not okay. She did the best she could, and sometimes her best was not what I needed as a child. Sometimes I needed a mother and not a friend. Sometimes I needed protection. I think that is why I am so protective of myself now. Nobody protected me enough then, so now I do it loudly. 

My mother’s death did not just break my heart. It rearranged the room inside me. After she was gone, everything had a different sound. Food tasted different. My body looked different. Time moved wrong. People expected grief to make me sad in a clean way, but it made me angry, desperate, numb, hungry, reckless, frozen, all of it at once. I did not know how to be a daughter with no mother left to call. 

Pattern Recognition 

People have called me paranoid. I call it pattern recognition. When you grow up watching people shift before they hurt you, you learn the signs. You learn tone, timing, silence, paperwork, body language, the little change in a room before somebody decides you are the problem. That is not always paranoia. Sometimes that is survival still doing its job. 

I wish people understood that being alert is not the same thing as being crazy. I am not inventing the room. I am reading it. I am reading the pause before someone lies. I am reading the email that suddenly changes tone. I am reading who gets protected and who gets blamed. Maybe I read too much sometimes. Maybe I do. But I would rather be accused of noticing too much than go back to being somebody who did not see it coming. 

The Meetings 

When I sit in those bureaucratic meetings now, I do not talk like them. I do not shrink myself so they can feel more comfortable failing me. I say the thing that makes the room get stiff. I ask what changed. Did you start believing me today? Did you start caring about my safety today? Did you start respecting me overnight? Old me would not have said that. Old me might not have gone to the meeting at all. 

Those meetings are not neutral to me. I walk into them carrying every unanswered call, every ignored message, every time I had to repeat the same facts to someone new, every time somebody acted like my pain was an attitude problem. By the time I sit down, I am not just responding to that moment. I am responding to the whole pattern. 

I know I come hard. I know I make people uncomfortable. But I am uncomfortable all the time. It is uncomfortable to go to bed hungry. It is uncomfortable to not know if you are safe. It is uncomfortable to have to explain your humanity to people who are paid to help you. So if someone has to sit through twenty minutes of me telling the truth about how they failed, then they can sit through it. 

And yes, I know there are people in those rooms who may think they are helping. Maybe some of them are trying. But trying does not erase harm. A soft voice does not undo a policy that leaves someone stranded. A polite email does not feed me. A meeting note does not protect me when I am the one outside after dark trying to figure out how to get home. 

What Happens When Support Disappears 

There are things I do not like talking about because people use them against you. But this is what happens when support gets removed from somebody who still needs it. You find yourself stranded at night, trying to get home with no money and no one safe to call. You ask for help and get told no. You call numbers that are supposed to exist for moments like that, and nothing happens. You start making choices that look reckless from the outside, but from the inside they feel like the only choices left. 

The worst part is how fast desperation starts to look like behavior. If I panic, they call it escalation. If I get loud, they call it aggression. If I document everything, they call it fixation. If I stop trusting people, they call it paranoia. Nobody asks what it does to a person to keep reaching for help and hit air every time. 

I have put myself in danger trying to survive systems that were already endangering me. That is the part people do not want to write down. They want the clean version where I am difficult, unstable, noncompliant, too much. They do not want the version where I begged for help, made packets, asked questions, showed up to meetings, learned contracts, read policies, tried to understand the rules they kept changing. 

I keep thinking about how many versions of me there are now. The girl who wanted to be liked. The daughter who wanted her mom back. The woman who loved men who could not always love her safely. The tenant who learned contracts because nobody would protect her. The person in the meeting with receipts and a shaking voice. The one who still wants tenderness even when she sounds furious. They are all me. None of them cancel the others out. 

I do not want this story cleaned up until it stops sounding like what it cost me. I do not want every sentence softened. I do not want to make myself smaller so strangers can decide I am credible. I have spent too much of my life trying to be believable to people who already decided what kind of person I was before I opened my mouth. 

I am not writing this because I think I am perfect. I am writing it because I am tired of being turned into paperwork that does not sound like me. I am tired of my worst moments being used as proof that I do not know what happened to me. I know what happened. I know what I survived. And if this is going to be my story, then it is going to be told in my voice. Raw. Real. Honest. Mine.