Sometimes I feel like I should be about 20 years older. My mom would be my sister/my grandma would be my mom, and I'd have gone to a shitload of concerts in the 1980s and dropped acid and been a much more functional human being.

Or, hell, my mom could've kept me. I'd probably be better off. Especially with all the case managers, social workers, etc who would have been checking up on us. Instead of all this abuse from everyone else. I would have been far enough away to not be the target of my molesters. Two of them, anyway...

I identify so much with Spencer Reid from Criminal Minds. That's who my last entry was about. I was born to a mother with schizophrenia. A very intelligent woman, who probably could have been a professor of 15th century literature if she hadn't had such a raw deal in the childhood department. Because of the abuse she suffered, and the abuse I suffered after her, she didn't reach her potential and neither did I reach mine. I was a genius as a kid. In informal tests my IQ registered in the 190s. I skipped enough grades in math that I had to take classes at the local high school when I was in middle school. I could have studied physics, engineering, all of it. I had the aptitude. I kept up the momentum through all the years of abuse. All the way until I was about fifteen. Slowly, over the course of middle school and high school, everything slipped away.

I always struggled with grades. Mostly because so much was based on homework, and because home was not a safe place to do school work (or anything at all, really, except be quiet and watch the tv and do anything requested of me, and just let the fear settle on my shoulders and become a familiar weight).

My teachers saw that I had the aptitude but I guess they assumed that I didn't have the right attitude or something. My first teacher in the highly-capable program wrote me up on numerous complete bullshit "offenses." I really have absolutely no idea how in the fuck she was so wrong about everything all the time (or how someone with such a propensity can become a teacher -- although the last time I visited my old elementary school, she was working in the library...).

So many things could have been the one tiny thing that went differently and changed my whole life.

I watched child prodigies on shows like Oprah and specials on PBS. I knew I could be them. If only I had been given an instrument to play, a book to read, an equation to solve... and a safe place to do it in.

If only I had been seen and known for who and what I was. Instead of as the product of abuse and neglect that is so misunderstood by the world. Instead of a discipline case. Instead of someone failing to live up to their potential. Instead of a nuisance. Instead of a space-case. Instead of lazy.

If I could have been seen and known as a child being mistreated. As a person being given no nourishment outside of the physical. As someone whose constant abuse was beginning to degrade and destroy my mind, my ability to learn. As someone who wanted nothing more than to learn everything possible, and spread that knowledge along with love and kindness to all corners of the earth...

I lost my ability to learn when I was 14 and didn't get it back until I was 24.

I learned when I was 5 years old that I could be blamed for being a victim of sexual assault.

I didn't slip through the cracks, I was pushed.