That's Dope - Chapter 1 - My Name Read Count : 104

Category : Books-Non-Fiction

Sub Category : Biography

My name doesnt matter. I dont have just one. You can call me whatever you want to call me and I will still be without a valid identity to myself or to you. Because in time, your feelings towards me will change. And time never stops. Feelings will always be changing. And with new feelings comes new attitudes, and new gestures when you talk. There will be new things you will decide to talk to me about or decide not to talk to me about. You will have new tones within how you speak to me, new insinuations, and always new names based off of your new beliefs about me. 

    When my biological mother gave birth to me she told the doctors a name, Stephanie Rayshell Ziegler. The very moment when i took my first breath i was gifted with an identity. When the state took me from her they left that identity behind. They were tearing me from the one person most likely to really understand me for me. They took me from the one person in the entire world who would always love me just the way I am, because a mothers love for her own flesh and blood is an unbreakable bond. By taking me from her, the state was motivating me to believe that I could no longer be my mothers daughter, and I was not to be like her. Like me. She was no longer a part of what i was to become. Now they were the ones who had my identity in their grip. They were in control, they were playing the all powerful over a judged upon society. They were acting as if they knew what they were doing- deciding my fate against what god, if he does exist, had intended it to be. 

  Child whelfare, also known as social services, were doing their part to rearrange humanity. It was their job to play tetris with familys. They used children instead of blocks. They were supposed to put me in a place where they believed i would fit best. It was their job and so thats exactly what they did. It wasnt long after removing me from my mother befor they had chose a spot to place me into. I was only in a foster home for about a year and a half. I was about four years old when they found a family which they believed to be fit to raise me. I was then adopted into this new family, with a new assigned mom and dad. This home, in their eyes, was a new place within a special grid. The grid was made up of dreams by the higher class of people. This was a land where things were just as they believed they should be. A place without drugs and alcohol to burden my developement. As if drugs and alcohol were the only struggles we face on this planet. This here was a different world with a different way of functioning. With different ways of traumatizing you and hurting your heart. In this world, the damage done to your spirit was done in a way which was acceptable in society. It was overlooked on purpose.

   They thought that by moving me somewhere different that they had planted a brand new me.  I was now supposed to be somebody different. My assigned parents even changed my name to Tiffany Marie Hill. However, I never really felt like this person they told me i was. I guess you can take the child away from their blood but cant take the blood out of the child. The name Tiffany meant nothing to me. I didnt know how i really even felt about anything. I was already hurt. I was damaged by the seperation. I was abused in my foster home. The downward spiral kept spinning further and further downward from there. My assigned home was only a continuence of an abusive cycle that would persist for the duration of my entire life.

   My assigned parents decided in lue of  my history that there was something wrong with me mentally. They wanted to make me act differently and think differently. They wanted to change me from who i was already becoming. Who i apperently already was, whoever that may have been. So the next stop was the head doctor.

  The head doctor told me I wasnt supposed to be who I was being too. He told me i should be thinking and feeling differently than i was everytime I went to see him. I saw him alot . At least once a week my newly assigned mother would drag me down to see him, sometimes even twice a week. My assigned mom had this idea of what kind of person I was supposed to be and I wasnt it. Instead I was just broken to her. Damaged. So since she couldnt return me for a refund she figured she better go get me fixed so I can be exactly what she ordered. Both my assigned mom and the head doctor assessed me constantly and came up with several lables in lue of my mental health, as well as drafted up an identity that was to be me someday after some seriouse dedication and heavy medicating. They said dont worry, we will help you become someone completely different than who you are now, we will make you our own identity that we can be proud of. They prescribed me many different medications during the time I lived at my assigned familys house. Nuerontin, ritalin, zoloft, tegrotol, prozac, adderol, stratera, and many more. They told me with each one that they had found a new and better solution. That they figured out why i was this disturbed emotional wreck. Within these pills were the answer to my assigned mothers prayers. These pills were going to mold the old me into the shape of my new mothers daughter. Certain things that happenned to me surrounding my being medicated, however, made it all feel more like i was some huge experiment to them rather than a client who was suffering and needed medical relief. Sometimes my assigned mom would switch around my siblings medications and mine to see if theirs worked better on me. Sometimes she would give me a higher dosage of my own than what was perscribed- never less tho. And whenever i had a bad day she would say it must be because i didnt take my pills. I got into a routine of taking something to alter my mind three times a day, which later on in my life strongly contributed to my prolonged drug use as I realized that I used drugs because I thought they made me feel better and I used them like I took pills. About three times a day unless it was a rough day, then it was more. At my assigned home it was typical to have a pill for every bleeding moment. It was normal protocall that if my assigned mom thought i was feeling anything at all aside from numb or that i was snapping out my medically induced coma-her solution was to give me more meds or make a phone call to the head doctor. Coincidentally, i learned that there really is a pill for everything. It was difficult to not be able to do something about it. To have to sit there day after day and be forced to let people analize me and make all these decitions on my behalf. It was exhausting to be told every day that I wasnt supposed to be me.

   I still dont quite understand how they were so sure of who I was anyways. I cant say I know how they came to the conclusion that I needed this much changing. They didnt base their ideas off of my opinions or thoughts. In fact, as I remember it, my assigned mother spent more time chatting with the head doctor than I was ever allowed to. I wasnt able to talk at any visit for very long at all befor my assigned mom would cut me off to say whatever she believed was relevent. She would tell him i was lying or that things werent the way i was saying they were. Looking back now i can see that she did this mostly to cover for my assigned dads behavior. He was abusive in many ways and back then i did not have the knowledge i do now about what abuse looks like. I couldnt figure out how to explain exactly what was wrong in his actions, only that something was wrong. As i would sit there fumbling at my words trying to find the right ones to capture how he was hurting me my assigned mom was already coming up with ways to turn it around onto me and excuse his behavior. If I got anywhere close to pinpointing the reality of the problems I was faced with at home my assigned mother would say i was not being truthful. At the beginning of every visit the head doctor would ask me how my week went and each time I would do my very best to tell him. However, as soon as I said anything about our assigned dads or her behavior it was over. She'd butt in with this horrible disqusted look on her face like she absolutely couldnt believe I could say something so ridiculouse. At that point in our visits i would get sent to the waiting room while she sat in the office conversing alone with the head doctor. I eventually stopped trying to fight it and explain. I just let her take over. I was, and still am at times, confused with how to honor my thoughts and feelings as they were so contriversal to hers. I have my moments where the existence of actual reality still plagues me. Riddled with uncertainty, I often catch myself wondering if my own perception of myself is so different from others perception that it's too greatly effecting my judgement. 

I pondered upon if it were possible that my actions were based from a fictatous view of things on my end. Like I was so sure things were okay but then they werent. Like maybe it's my own fault because I shouldve seen it as everyone else did and I didnt. Maybe i can blame a few of the mistakes ive made on this sort of concept. Then again, maybe its them who say things and do things with skewed sense of reality and I really was right. Maybe they were mistaken. Or was it possible that all of us were working from a fake facaud of actuality? Im pretty sure I cant actually relate to any of the names they blessed me with. So, whose right? 

   All these people around me with different perceptions of how things were going, who i was, and how things were supposed to go.  Everyone had their own arguments and they all tried different tactics to convince the crowd. My assigned dad had some of the most "influential" ways of making sure i saw it his way. Even tho his ideas were never anything good, he repeated them to me like clockwork over and over again. I dont know who i spent more time with the head doctor or my assigned dad. I wonder who really knew me better. My assigned dad was only home in the evenings and even then there wasnt much luck in making memories with him as far as hanging out or spending time together. Except when we would go on vacation with them which turned out to be a bad experience everytime. I think because they didnt really want to have us kids on the trip. That was apperent when they started paying people from the church to watch us for a couple weeks at a time while they went alone. The head doctor saw me once or twice a week. And for at least a small part of the session he was speaking to me. Over time i may have started to relate more to some of the names my assigned dad bestowed upon me than the things the head doctor gave me meds for. To my new father I was mostly stubborn, stupid, a drama queen, selfish, ignorant, out of control, crazy, a fat pig, a liar, and lazy. Overtime those names became easy for me to accept. Looking back at it now, i believe I was more okay being called these things by him because I couldnt seem to come up with any respect for the guy. He treated me in a way that resulted in a complete lack of concern on my part for whatever it was he thought of me. He showed me that there were far worse things he could do to hurt me then tell me who or what he thought I was. I cared less about what came out of his mouth than what might come from someones elses mouth like a complete strangers or a kid from school- a teacher, a store cashier clerk, someone standing at the busstop. I didnt care what this guy thought. Even if i did start believing he was right.

   The names i couldnt stand to be called were the ones i didnt believe in.They were the most painful ones because I couldnt explain them away quick enough. I wished and i prayed to a god who was failing me. I asked politely and screamed at this god to make them go away. If they went away then maybe I could have friends and be normal. I might even have felt some sort of happiness in some moments of my growing up. But rather than being happy, I spent alot of time being frustrated. I spent too much time struggling with my words, trying to explain myself to others. They had names for me that i knew they wouldnt have if only they understood what i understood to be true. Which i didnt actually understand anything to be true so maybe thats why it was so difficult to sway people differently.

    I was given many names by my peers at school, kids that lived in my neighborhood, and boys my age from church. Names like wierdo, ugly, disgusting, wackjob, loser, psycho, lame, and freak. These names haunted me while i was growing up, when all I could do was strive for and beg for acceptence. I struggled with how I should act around those people because they were the quickest to judge. I believed that they would either have to like me or they would hurt me. And i believed that those who did like me would end up hating me soon enough and then they would just hurt me too. But even if they ended up hurting me then at least i would have experienced the freedom within a friendship for a wrinkle in time.

   It seems to be a little less of an issue in my lifeas of now. I have too much going on to stress out about others excepting me, however, it was a big deal growing up. I just wanted to be a normal person, with normal friends, who rode a normal long bus to school, went to normal classes, and who didnt sit alone at recess singing made up songs to herself. But there was nothing normal about me. Normal wasnt in the cards at all.

   All these names I was given and i still felt so lost when it came to who I saw myself as.  So in search of myself i impulsively ventured off into the world on my own at age 14. It sucked that i ended up living under a bridge for the better part of the following 15 years of this event. I learned alot of things that you would need to know if you were out on the streets. Street smarts they call it. 

  In retrospect, what bothers me the most about leaving so young, was dropping out of highschool only 3 months into my freshman year. School was a great place to find myself healthy happy names from the ones in charge. Names like smart, talented, capable, and artistic to name only a few. All i had to do was follow my IEP and i would be granted a good name from a teacher. On the streets there were some good names as well, but nothing in comparisson to a teacher naming you something that sais you stick out from the rest in a good way. The bad names were among the lot of good ones. Someone might call me a good and a bad name all in one day. Mostly the names given to me on the streets haad to do with the person giving them to me. And loyalty is only top layer deep on the streets. One minute someones telling you they have your back, that youre family now. But if you by chance need them the very next moment to have your back like they said then they are nowhere to be found.

   When i was prostituting in portland at age 16, the tricks i pulled off burnside called me baby, sweetheart, bitch, and whore. The people i panhandled change from called me a begger, a junky, a fuckin loser, and poor girl. The alternative type men i dated, mostly homeless as well, called me sexy, honey, babe, bitch, cunt, honky, fat, useless, selfish, needy, crazy, no good, useless, stupid, etcettera etcettera. My street friends gave me street names like sister, daughter, homie, giggles, and baby shadow.

   Over the years, all but the good names started to play more and more in my head consistantly. Names like stupid, dumbass, loser, idiot, fatass, disgusting, bitch were all within the never ending cycle of names. It was like a double sided tape that automatically flips, continuing to play until it breaks. Getting that tape to stop is a hard thing to do. Its as if the tape player is wrapped with a chunk of metal and I cant find a way to penetrate it. They say to stop it from repeating these things, you have to replace each negative thought with three positive ones. 

   Ive tried this technique a few times. However, in all honesty, my attempts havent ever been completely seriouse. Its always been hard for me to do it with a straight face. Especially in front of others. It ends up being a pretty embarrassing task having to correct my negative self talk in front of a group of people. Maybe its a confidence issue. Maybe it has to do with being put on the spot. Or maybe it has to do with having to come up with good things to say about myself. Over the years ive been in and out of rehab and that is one of the things the treatment centers all have in common. Affrimations is what they are called. Affrimations are possative, affirming statements. They are supposed to rerecord the tape. They are supposed to help you think differently.  They are supposed to help you feel better about yourself, even love yourself.

   Im not sure if i love myself or hate myself at this point. I think i at least hold some serious resentments against the things ive done and mistakes ive made. However, like i said, im still not sure how much or how little i think of me. What names have i given myself over the years? What self destructive behaviors have i participated in as a form of revenge against the pain ive suffered? What names do i have for myself today?

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