26March2025: I've attempted to do this before and have since learned that my memory has been quite volatile. It shouldn't be a surprise to me because it is in the nature of memories to twist themselves and dissolve, and because it is practically the only prominent aspect of the concept of memory in literature. It's also a reason why I'm doing this now before I forget everything that happened to me.

Suffice to say, this will not be the most objective recollection of what has occurred in my past twenty-one years of living. It is also notable to mention that, yes, I am young so I may devolve into senseless pretentious droning. I also wouldn't consider myself adept in writing, incredibly knowledgeable, nor anybody of import. I am not a particularly active participant in politics, philosophy, or any communities of the sort other than the broader interest of art.

If you're not interested in my cultural background, skip to the 'Pre-teened' titled section of this recollection.

All of that aside... this is my story.

I was the only one of four kids in my immediate family to be born in the United States, where we live now. My mother was an immigrant from the Philippines, following her sisters in pursuit of a brighter future in America. With her, she brought her eldest son, a daughter, and a younger son who were all instructed not to tell anyone that they would be leaving. They had heard stories of people telling trusted friends only for those friends to turn on them, kidnap them to ransom the travel money from their families and leave them broke with no way out of the city, let alone the country. Her and her three kids then left everyone they knew behind without a word.

My mother did not know she was pregnant when she arrived in the country. To the country, my mother's degree in nursing was not enough. She worked, went back to school, and took care of three kids. My aunt, 6 hours away in an entirely different state, took care of me as an infant. Later in my life I ended up calling two of my aunts 'mom' as one of many results of this arrangement and their respective husbands 'dad', though I adamantly rejected this habit when I became a pre-teen.

Eventually I came back to live with my mother and siblings. For a while, we lived in a three-bedroom house with my grandfather and uncle. We all slept sardine-style in the same queen-sized bed while the two men took their rooms. This house was in an area that was notorious for its crime and poverty as a result of segregation during years that had long since ended and the subsequent underlying biases in both the descendants of the oppressors and the oppressed. That is aside the point. One time I had gotten up in the middle of the night to pee in that house, crawled my way out of the sleeping arrangement, and trudged the two steps to the bathroom. I remember cautiously leaning my upper body into the room to switch on the lights, which only makes sense when I tell you that atop the counter was both a rat and a roach! I've always joked about this moment, saying things like how the two species were having a very professional meeting that I had interrupted, but the truth is that we were poor. There was a hole in the roof above my spot at the dining table that we had to shove plastic bags into so the raccoons and squirrels that lived in the ceiling would not drop down onto my meal.

This all changed when my step-dad came into the picture. I don't know the timeframe on this but he lived with us in that sardine house for a while, the two youngest (me and my brother) slept in bed with them for a bit, my older siblings sleeping in two twin-beds in the other room. Then, me and my brother (whom, for ease of reading, I will now refer to as my 'younger brother' despite him being born almost two years before me) slept in those small twin beds with our older siblings. That didn't last long either. We moved into a large, two-story, six-bedroom home with my mother settling into her career as a physical therapist and the addition of my step-father's income.

This is the home where I had my first panic attack. I'd been left behind, grounded and alone at home while the rest of my family went shopping. I cried in bed, scared of being alone and maybe of the reprocussions of my actions. I don't remember what I was being punished for. Everything in the room felt like it was so big that it was right next to my face, taking up my vision from across the room. I had a large CRT TV and that was the most prominent thing. It felt alive. It felt like it was in my head. It was strange because that TV was one of the things I got the most joy out of when we first moved into that home. There was nothing except that TV and an arcade joystick that plugged into those little red, white, and yellow input components. My introduction to video games. I watched Scooby-Doo on that same TV immediately after my panic attack. I remember being so hungry that I wandered into the kitchen, which felt like tresspassing when grounded, and eating handfuls of sprinkles because I knew nothing about cooking or what foods were safe to eat raw. I didn't even open the fridge.

Another memory I have is around the same year, third grade. It's a misty one because of its subject matter. I remember pleading, crying on the ground for my mother to allow me to clean my room by myself. I'd sat around on the floor of the dirty room and tidied up for hours but I couldn't seem to get it clean. I remember wanting to learn how to do it by myself and finally being fed up with the fact that my mother wasn't letting me build that skill. It wasn't that complex in my young mind. It was mostly a mantra of "let me do it!" over and over. Looking back now, I can finally break down what I really wanted. That was the beginning of my battle with hygiene and depression. I was a radical nihilist at the time. I loved the concept of nihilism after learning the term as it bounced around the web.

Distinctly, I remember coming to terms with my being bisexual also being around that time, not that I was struggling with it beforehand. It felt natural. I was in third or fourth grade. I'd already been exposed to the internet and mature TV, having owned an iPod and been given free access to the computers in the house. Previously, we had one of those tan home PC's that I would play newgrounds games on and such. For the next two years I hid crushes I had on my same-sex peers, though without pain or anything of the sort. It was around the time when same-sex marriage was just becoming normalized and I had come to terms with the fact that I would get the opportunity to date around when I was older, another complex feeling I can break down only now. This is one of the few moments where I look back on my past self and feel pride about being smart, because the rest of the time I made normal juvenile mistakes.

My step-dad was a good man. To this day I consider him my one and only dad. He was a heavy-set white man with an injury on his thumb that seemed to hurt more often than not. I preferred that hand for holding. He indulged in my love for American food, contrary to my mother's love for traditional Filipino food. He would put sugar and barbeque sauce in his mac and cheese, and would make me a separate batch without it because he knew I didn't like it. He played video games and used to play football in highschool. I assume he stopped because of the injury on his throwing hand. He was a radiologist for Mayo Clinic.

I remember a day at the mall around the time when I'd come to terms about my sexuality. Me and my step-dad were waiting outside Victoria's Secret, the women's undergarments store, as my family shopped inside. Probably bored as a fourth or fifth grader, I boldly asking, "what do you think about the LGBTQ community?," which was sort of an advanced term to me at the time. It wasn't too surprising that I knew of it. It was, like, 2013. People were queer. This was only supported by the fact that my dad went on to tell me that his roommates in college were lesbians and he saw them as normal people. That pretty much solidified it for me, if the typical white male college student years prior to my birth had seen lesbians as normal then it was normal now. He would later tell me he was excited for those friends when same-sex marriage became legal in 2015.

So, I was in middle school now. I had gotten over my love for boy bands and was veering into listening to emo music. It started when I was about 11, with Skillet and Three Days Grace. Now I was going to what is called a 'magnet school'. A school with a specific advanced curriculum. There were ones for sciences, for pre-med, etc. Mine was for arts. Out of the majors such as theatre, orchestra, and creative writing I chose visual arts. My specific specialty was fine arts, painting and drawing, but there was also design, printmaking, and sculpture which I could have chosen. I was placed in advanced classes because I had studied arts before as a passion of mine. I'd already done still life drawings, drew from naked posed art reference photos, and loved to do fanart for comics and things (unfortunately a lot of undertale fanart).

It was a grueling curriculum with exceedingly difficult standards to meet. It wasn't uncommon for people to cry when getting their painting critiqued after spending three months on it, having stood for hours upon hours working on it. Our arms would get sore from holding the brushes and things up for these long hours, our minds would start to meld the minutes together and the image before us would distort the proportions. We were thirteen. It was only natural to get so very bored.

My step-father died here, me in 7th grade. It was cancer and I remember him deterriorating in front of me. It was something I bottled up, probably because my mind saw it as too much to handle with my depression having been developing since maybe third or fourth grade. I was convinced that I was a sociopath because of this, which probably is incorrect. I would only process the loss and grieve years later, crying in the shower when my mind finally got a moment alone by itself. For a long time, it felt as if his ghost was with me. That sounds nice in theory, but in practice I felt like every single one of my actions was being closely monitored and I developed a pretty extreme paranoia and anxiety along with levels of self-loathing about what I considered my depravity, failure, personality, and impropriety.

My depression would hit some of its peaks. Long nights wishing for a painless, coincidental death and days spent avoiding people. I would avoid people so hard that I wouldn't go to the kitchen to get myself meals and barely ate. My stomach got used to only drinking water and I would sleep for hours at a time, now I know it was because of my lack of fuel and depressive state. I just thought I was defective and bound to be a failure. I'd barely began my life and I'd already been traumatized by the asian mindset that not getting A's meant I wouldn't get into college.

I remember having my first experiences with drugs at this time. I'd smoked weed a couple times. My friend had done acid on my 8th grade graduation trip to a nearby large city during a time when we were all left alone in an arcade. I had my first beer when left alone at home, while eating wings and watching the original Star Wars trilogy. It was just small stuff like that.

To this day, I can't remember much about this time. I vaguely remember the unfortunately universal experience of getting groomed on Kik. I joined discord in 2015 or early 2016, I dont really remember. What I do remember is acting like I was in my later teens when I was only in my early teens. This led to the development of an online persona that doesn't exist anymore. I would use fake names, wouldn't speak in voice chat for fear of my high-pitched child voice being exposed, share art that was relatively good because of my being in art school, and passed as a 16-19 year old. I wouldn't suggest this to anyone. I feel bad for everyone that did this as a kid, but I know that adults at the time didn't understand the scope of the internet and there's bound to be many people who did this because of a lack of internet surveillance.

So, I gained friends and struggled with teen issues too early. I joined them on their journey to graduating high-school, my side being a ruse. But the social skills I gained were real (though the too-early part left a mark on me, I'm sure). I'd learned to navigate friendships and moods that were far removed from my physical community, which only led me to isolate myself in person and turn online more. I kept friendships at an arms length if they were my age because it felt... weirdly wrong, like I was taking advantage of their younger mental state. I'm not saying I was actually, really wise beyond my years or anything like that, in fact I hated terms like 'old soul'. There were just social issues they were learning about that I felt adept in, and I knew that there were probably other issues that I wasn't as knowledgable on. Of course, being young, I still felt pretentious about it. Luckily I kept that part to myself because I knew the feeling was stupid and I had a lot to learn. I hate that person now and the bad decisions made that still affect me to this day, though I don't favor the lack of intelligence that children have in the first place and it's only natural to just be stupid and not know things when you're in that early learning stage.

I distinctly remember dating a girl because I thought she was cute. The relationship lasted a couple months but eventually ended with me asking her directly, "do you want to be with me or do you want to be me?," to which she admitted she wanted to be me. I'd noticed that she was idolizing me and confronted her without malice, which I think was at least a little bit advanced for a middle schooler. She later changed her name to the name I was going by at the time. (Side note: Strangely not the first or last person to do this.) This is when I stopped dating people from my school because I'd tried a couple times before and found out that I just straight up didn't enjoy it because none of them knew how to navigate a relationship, or couldn't even self-reflect enough to understand their own feelings.

I really tried. It was like this for all of them. Though, my best friend at the time was a girl who knew how she felt and was direct about it. She was my only tie to what I felt (at the time and now, because of the nature of middle school as a whole) was logic in that place. I didn't learn much else but hatred for the human race and existentialism during that time. I was angry.

The anger from my pre-teen years dissolved when I got to highschool. I was a nihilist, but not the mad 'nothing matters...' kind. More of the happy-go-lucky, numb 'nothing matters!' kind. I did what I wanted, but only after realizing what I wanted was for other people to be happy because that creates the ideal environment for me. I wanted the entire world to be happy but I knew I didn't have that reach so I started with those around me.

People were smarter, I'd gotten into another Magnet school for highschool and the people there were the artsy-fartsy type, though I was mostly friends with upperclassmen as a lowerclassman. I did feel like I belonged for once in my life after a childhood of isolation. I didn't go online as often anymore, but I also still felt like my life was going nowhere. That I was a failure and would never achieve a career. I started smoking, worst decision of my life, and painted like my life depended on it. My skills were finally those akin to a professional, I think. I could paint and draw accurately, I could come up with original ideas (most of which were self-reflections) because I was trying to find out what got me so depressed.

Still depressed though. I still didn't eat very much but now I drank a lot of energy drinks and let food rot on the floor of my bedroom. I got used to flies and the self-loathing that comes with seeing them every moment I'm home. I hated home. I hated being there, but I hated being asleep more. I spent many hours on my computer. I gamed a lot, my sleep schedule devolved so much that I had entire friend groups that were from Europe and Asia because I would be awake late and they were the only people online due to the time difference. The friends I gained online were mostly annoying and had no self-awareness. Having knowledge-seeking friends is very important to me now in adulthood, but back then I didn't care because I'd already given up on finding a good social circle and developing a community that suited me.

The school was more strict than my other school because it was seen as a privilege to pursue your dreams. Instead of electives, you took college-level arts classes related to your major. You woke up at 5-AM to make the bus downtown to the school because it wasn't your neighborhood school, got home at 5pm or even later if you had a job. If your grades were lower than a C, you would be kicked out. Sometimes they'd even threaten it if you had too many C's.

Later on the strict nature of the school would change because students were collectively getting depressed, especially because Covid-19 was causing performance issues. Councelling wasn't helping. We had a free hour for lunch to go anywhere on campus to do work or take tests we missed, that didn't help either. It got to the point where teachers/professors would straight-up lie about grades and put in good ones just so the students could graduate during the pandemic. Among highschoolers at the time was a mass amount of resentment building for the unforgiving academic system. People turned to drugs. There were a couple students in my years who were known to do meth (though they had dropped out or got kicked out among the many who did). The alternative subcultures within the arts communities and worldwide pandemic-related depression did not help. I knew students who did cocaine, who drank until they passed out on the side of the roads, etc. Edibles were regularly bought and sold on campus. Once there was an entire group of people that got drugged by a student who brought what members of the graduating year called the "Acid Cake" for someone's birthday.

To some, this may sound like stereotypical juvenile highschool shenanigans, but to most people I asked in adulthood this wasn't the case. For a lot of people, the pandemic resulted in a lack of parties instead and the loss of a traditional high school experience. Parents lost their jobs because of the pandemic, people died, high school felt pointless but also the only path because of a blind hope that college would land them a career because of the rising requirements for entry-level jobs. For my high school, many people I knew didn't expect to go to college because art wasn't a sustainable job. We used to actively, actually call the place the 'cesspool', maybe as an inside joke but pretty much everyone I knew did call it that.

Despite this, everyone I asked during my last year there told me that they didn't regret going there. Some told me that (despite planning to pursue something other than the arts in college or otherwise) they would rather feel like they fit in than have suffered the monotony and isolation they would have felt in a public school.

In the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I had a house fire. I lost all of my possesssions, other than a large teeshirt I was wearing to sleep and my phone that I grabbed on my way out. It was late. The sirens were so loud that hearing a fire truck still makes me nauseous now. My aunts had moved down a couple states to join my family in the city and were in the house when it happened. It started in my room, my bed catching fire where it was pressed up against the outlet where I charged my phone. It wasn't plugged in at the time. I'd fallen asleep with it in my hand, probably after a long night. My mattress topper, exposed because my depression kept me from making my bed or washing my sheets, caught fire. I woke up because it was bright. I thought it was morning, and the fire singed the hairs of my leg. I got out without a scratch somehow. Not even a burn. I tried to pour water on it, I remember, but it was an electrical fire. Luckily the water just.. evaporated instead of spreading the buzzing sparks. I think so, at least. I can't quite remember. It was so bright. I ran through the house knocking wildly on the doors and by that point the smoke was already making my eyes water. The firefighters fought it for what felt like hours. The sun had come up by the time they were done.

I don't remember where I went after that, but it was probably one of my aunt's houses because that is where lived for the next two or three years. I lived there, with her and the new marriage she had with her husband, plus her two-year old. I swapped rooms a couple times. We all were trying to find something that worked. Three to a room, two to a room, eventually I just started sleeping on a futon in the corner of the living room. I'd graduated high school and did nothing all day. I don't really remember the year and a half that I knew I spent in that living room. I remember coding my Spacehey and my Neocities. I remember writing a lot of music when I was the only one left alone during the day, because I wasn't in college or anything. The fire made me start college late.

What I do know is that I dated people from dating apps that I don't even remember. I was having my worst manic and depressive episodes to date, strangely only dipping into suicidal once or twice and not enough to even actually consider doing it (luckily). I drank a lot, smoked a lot (nicotine), loved to party but can't remember any of the parties. It can't have been too many of them though. I remember feeling a strange relief because the room I'd longed to leave and spent the majority of my life depressed in had vanished into smoke and dust.

The friendships I had made online years prior completely dissolved because I never had the privacy to video/voice chat with any of them, and didn't have a good enough computer to play video games (a newfound friend online had sent me a free shitty laptop because he was given it at his computer repair shop job; it is also notable to mention that people from those online frienships were settling into careers or college no). I don't really remember the people I knew while I was at that house. Those all dissolved too, when I finally moved out and into the home where I live now.

I've lived here for two years I think. It's hard to tell these days. I haven't been keeping track, especially without the designated years of progress you are given in highschool. I now own posessions again. In the future they will remind me of my college years. I have a PC, only having had laptops in the past. It's really nice. I'd gotten really into reading when I lived in my aunt's house. I now have a small collection of books alongside the ones I got off Libgen.

I'd say, the defining books I'd read while at my aunt's house were Paradise lost by John Milton, The Magicians by Lev Grossman, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Hariri, The Neil Gaiman Reader (although many things have come out about him as a person), Classical Philosophy by Peter Adamson, Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), Saint Augustine's Confessions, Seneca's Letters on Ethics, and In Praise of Folly (Desiderius) among many romance novels that are negligable on their own.

If you can't tell, I was getting into philosophy at the time, especially ethics. Mostly because I was grappling with the guilt I felt about how I'd spent my lifetime after my close encounter with losing it all, and also with... actually nearly losing it all (also the illogical guilt I felt for the fire starting in my home, which I got some resentment for from family members that didn't last long because it was just a knee-jerk scapegoat reaction). I'd lost everything except for a select few friends I love dearly and my family members (though I felt like I'd lost them too for a long time because of the resentment).

I'd lost my mind and I'd lost who I thought I was. People pitied me, and I may or may not have basked in it because it was the only attention I got at the time. I drew a lot, especially with an iPad I was gifted that overheated from use within a year. I journaled a lot but never consistently and mostly just logging things in my commonplace book. I traveled a lot. It was my family's way of coping with the experience and, though it postponed our move by a very long time, it helped them heal. They tell me now that they're deathly afraid of house fires and can't put on a candle without feeling extreme anxiety. I can put on candles though, but I have to put them far from anything flammable like cloth or paper or I get that same feeling. And I can't go on trips without feeling that lost feeling and instinctively ignoring my responsibilities. I don't go on long trips anymore. I struggle with even being a week away from home.

I am slowly putting myself back together.