I found some old photos of myself this morning while I was sorting boxes I haven't touched in years, and it has me feeling a certain way. The MF in those pics thought she was the shit, but she didn't know a damn thing.

I also hate that they're all staged. Don't get me wrong, I loved my mom, and I guess I still do, but I was more of a doll to her than a daughter, the girl she wanted after having four boys. I was hand-picked - I didn't have a backstory, no baggage, no bio parents that I could realistically track down. That's how I feel about it anyway, or at least sometimes, when I'm in a mood. Like now.

Like this fucking pic.

I was three years old in this photo (I think). I have freckles. At that age I had a lot of freckles. Can you see them here? Can you count them? No, because I'm wearing makeup, sitting in a photographer's studio, at three years old, being told not to cry because it would mess up all their hard work.

The kids I nanny for have goofy pictures of them playing in the living room, and jumping on beds, and crying because they dumped their whole cereal bowl on the carpet and their mom is pissed. I don't have any of that. Was I even real?

I like this photo a lot more. My favorite, in fact. It's an objectively shitty picture, but it was taken by a friend's mom when we were watching her younger brother (my friend, not her mom) play football (soccer). I'm 8yo, sitting on a bench, giving zero shits. I want to say it's Deacy, but I doubt it - probably the pitch in Dangan. I don't really remember. My hair isn't brushed, my face probably isn't washed, I'm wearing a sweatshirt with holes in it, and with the right haircut I could pass for a boy.

Zero. Shits. Given.

I have to say again that I don't resent my childhood and I don't resent the parents that gave me so many opportunities, I just have some regrets about things I had no control over. I would NEVER have taken up an instrument on my own, but now I play a mean fiddle and I'm not half bad on a guitar. I wouldn't have asked for dance lessons, but because of them I have a go-to workout, and can be somewhat smug on the rare occasion I get invited to a club, or a wedding reception, or something with a dance floor. I might have asked for voice lessons because I loved to sing, and I did ask for - and received - a little speckled pony. I'nt she cute?

The little shithead is filthy, yes, because I was terrible at grooming her, but she's still cute. What's the name I gave her for this journal? Griffon? Something like that.

They didn't foster my writing, however, which I had a passion for even then. It was mostly poems and fairy stories, but I loved it. Waste of time, mom said. Success was a shot in a million, and her job was to prepare me for life in the real world. In that, I can tell you, she failed almost as completely as anyone could have, though in her defense, she wasn't psychic and couldn't have foreseen how things ultimately shook out.

Anyway, a lot of this is relative. That story about getting my picture taken at 3 years old... maybe it didn't happen that way. It's how I remember it, and I have the pictures, but I might not have been as bullied into it as I claim. I didn't leave my family on good terms and I haven't spoken to mom, dad, or my bros in 8 years. That makes it easy to cast blame, because there's nobody left to call me out, just the folks who put up with me when I was a disaster, and they have WAY too many nice things to say about me now because the truth is I was an unrepentant jerk to every one of them at one time or another. If mom bears any blame I certainly did nothing to make up for it. At least not until recently.

But real or not those regrets still remain, along with the feeling that everything is artificial, all the way back to the beginning, abandoned on a church pew when I was just a few days old. Who the fuck does that? Did it even happen that way or was there more to it? I have no way to find out... the most anyone can tell me about my bio parents is that mom was probably an addict and couldn't care for me. I've never seen a photo of me as a baby; I don't know if they even exist, which seems unlikely if not impossible.

That haze is one of the reasons this journal exists, why I'm publicly deconstructing myself in the medium that best resonates with me, and in a place where few people, if any, will read this far. I think I've mostly figured out who I am, but there are loose ends and missing pieces, and it'll take a long time, maybe the rest of my life, to sort them out.