I've never been braver than I am at this moment. I don't like looking backward, and putting my past in front of people always makes me anxious. There's not a lot back there that appeals to me now, but I'm working on it, learning to love that kid and everyone she became on her journey to get to where I am today. It's one of the reasons I star

I'm 9 years old in this picture, standing in the backyard of a professional photographer's studio in Galway. Mom was a domestic diva and we didn't do quick and dirty DSLR shots on our own property or in our own home. I have almost nothing from those days that isn't professionally shot and retouched, lending to a kind of unreality when I look back at them, as though I'm just a fictional character in someone else's mind. I'm very open about my pursuit of AI and my attempts to digitize myself, but this damn thing is so doctored it looks more AI than AI.

Anonymity remains important to me for both professional and private reasons, but I think maybe 10 people in the world or fewer have photos of me at this age and I obviously don't look the same so I'm going to call it safe enough. It's important for the context of this entry.

I wasn't a cute kid, and I think that was kind of disappointing to my mom. I was more of a tomboy. My brothers were all big and much older, so I had to be tough at home. They called me a Hufflepuff, which is stupid because I'm CLEARLY a Gryffindor, or maybe a Ravenclaw.

Mom still insisted I be girly, and I ate that up for a long while, learning dance and music, competing in the local dressage circuit, wearing cute dresses and getting $50 haircuts. I had a fucking POISE instructor for a month because I was short and mom wanted me to stand straighter.

I stupidly thought we were rural and took pride in that but it was true only in the sense that we didn't live smack in the city and had like five goats and some geese and chickens. I was adopted into money - not like billionaire money, but we were more than well off, at least compared to me now. I never thought of us as rich, but anytime I wanted something I got it, as long as it was a reasonable request. Reasonable meant no flamethrowers, but it also meant no guitars because they distracted from the violin. First-world problems.

Then I turned fourteen. That year of my life started as complete shit and it went downhill from there. I had an aunt who got me out of a rapidly deteriorating situation, helped me move to America, and put me in touch with an American family who went to bat for me. I couldn't stay in the states legally as a 15-year-old without a guardian, so between them and my aunt (who has dual citizenship in the US), they arranged for me to live with them while I went through an 8-month legal nightmare. In the end, I was granted a work visa and adult status at the age of 16.

I worked all that summer doing menial stuff - anything anyone would pay me for. You can imagine that went well, a four-and-a-half-foot tall underage princess getting her hands dirty for a living. My American sponsors got me into school and I cut my work back to a few hours each week. I managed to pass my GED at the end of that year and dropped out.

Enter my punk era. I wanted to leave everything I was in Ireland and I abandoned every last expectation my mother had placed on me in favor of everything I had been denied... and a lot of other things solely because they would not have been approved. I tried smoking and hated it. I tried pot and kind of liked it, but I couldn't get past the idea of sucking burning weeds into my lungs so I quit. Fortunately, I didn't go for anything harder than alcohol, but it turns out I don't like that either except for the occasional whiskey or beer. You can't be Irish and not drink whiskey and beer.

You don't need the ugly details but it got kinda bad for a minute and I'm not proud of it. I came close to throwing my life away after people I hardly knew worked so hard to give me a new one. That realization is why it never got worse. Why I came back from it.

I was luckier than I had any reason to be. The mother of the US family that took me in is an attorney and she helped me jump the line, so to speak. Having a family member with citizenship helped enormously and my "special circumstances" opened a few of the right doors. In the summer of my 17th year, I received my permanent resident card.

I won't get into the rest right now, and maybe not ever... except to recap how I was homeless for two years living out of a van, how I managed to bullshit my way into college and finished my Journalism degree remotely with a GPA I'm actually proud of, how I ended up managing production budgets for a media company in the midwest, how I FINALLY received my US citizenship, how I got into writing and why I'm still passionate about it...

People have gone through way worse, and I neither expect nor want sympathy. Not that you'd offer it, but people do and that gets old so I don't receive it very graciously. It sounds like an adventure when you cram all the details into a dozen paragraphs and only hint at the catalysts for change, but it wasn't. The day-to-day was often stressful or boring with happy moments sprinkled in. What it DOES do is explain, in part, why my head and heart are a little fucked up.

I don't categorize anything I went through as trauma. Most of the emotional scarring came from my own choices, not something imposed on me. My mom was an overbearing perfectionist but she loved her family and did her best for us in the best way she knew how. My dad was a dick in a lot of ways but he'd have cut off his own pecker for any one of us, even me, even after all the shit went down. My brothers are assholes and they'd be the first to admit it. They treated me like hell at home, but that only forced me to stand my ground... and if anyone even looked at me sideways all four would come down on them like the wrath of God. I left that behind, but My aunt is a legitimate guardian angel, and now that I've settled down I get to have dinner with my American family almost every day. It's the people, not the situations that have had the strongest influence on me. Every one of them has hurt me at some point and I've hurt them too, but loving or hating them for it? That's a choice. It's not always easy, but as much as it's up to me, I choose to love.

In the end, all you can do is own your mistakes, forgive other people for theirs, and be fucking GRATEFUL for all the blessings that are so easy to ignore when life isn't exactly going your way. It makes all of us a little fucked up, but that's ok too. The chips and cracks and scars make us who we are more than our perfections, and that can be a good thing if we can stay positive and maintain a healthy, honest perspective.