They took me “for my own good.”
They said it was protection.
Said the bruises meant action.
Said the state would do better than my family had.
And maybe it did.
Maybe the cupboard was worse.
Maybe the burn on my arm was enough reason.
But let me tell you this:
I wasn’t saved.
I was processed.
Moved.
Monitored.
Managed.
But never truly seen.
The care system doesn’t raise children.
It stores them.
I was given beds, not homes.
Paper files, not conversations.
Punishments, not guidance.
Every time I started to settle, they’d move me again.
Another stranger’s house.
Another set of rules.
Another cold kitchen where I learned to smile too early and speak too little.
They call it “looked after.”
But I don’t remember anyone looking at me, really.
No one asked how the silence was settling in my bones.
How I stopped expecting permanence.
How I started performing safety instead of feeling it.
And the older I got,
the louder my behaviors became—
not because I was bad,
but because I was breaking.
I wasn’t acting out.
I was sending signals from inside the system
that said:
“This isn’t working. I’m not okay.”
But bureaucracy doesn’t speak that language.
So I got labeled instead.
What they got wrong is thinking I was ungrateful.
I wasn’t.
I was scared.
Grateful children don’t flinch when someone touches their arm.
Grateful children don’t stay up all night wondering if this bedroom will still be theirs next week.
Grateful children don’t write songs about ghosts they never got to bury.
I’m not here to tear it all down.
Some carers were kind.
Some tried.
But kindness isn’t structure.
Empathy doesn’t replace continuity.
What I needed was not just safety.
I needed belonging.
And I spent years trying to recreate it through art, through love, through mistakes.
Some of those attempts hurt others.
Some of them hurt me more.
But every single one came from a place that never learned how to be held.
The system couldn’t hold me.
So I became my own container.
My own myth.
My own unstable house.
And now, I’m learning how to rebuild that—
not as a file,
not as a problem,
but as a person still trying to return to something that feels like home.