What I Needed Was Love

I was born into the kind of poverty that doesn’t just mean a lack of money. It means the heat’s off again in January in a small ocean town, frigid and grey. It means dinners made of toast and maybe a canned soup for the 7th time this week. It means growing up with a jaw tight from hunger and a heart tight from watching everyone else pretend it’s normal. Winter’s were brutal, and so was the silence in the house. Cold in the air. Cold in the bones. Cold in the way no one ever really looked at me and said, you’re not okay, are you? Cold as in - I am in a snowsuit to sleep-. 
 
By the time I was 14, I was already hurting more than most adults I knew. I had scoliosis bad enough that my spine curved like a question mark. My body didn’t know how to stand straight in the world. At 14, I had spinal fusion surgery, my back pinned and sewn into place with steel. I remember waking up in the hospital, hooked up to a morphine drip, every breath laced with a strange, floaty silence. Pain would visit me in waves, and the drugs would lull it back out to sea. I lived on that drip for what felt like forever. I learned to float outside my body away from the physical pain, the mental anguish, and my life. 
 
When I left the hospital, the pain came home with me. No nurse. No rehab. Just a bottle of Percocets. I started chasing relief like a ghost. It was never about feeling good. It was about not feeling this. Percs weren’t enough after a while. So I found alcohol. Then something stronger. Anything that could quiet the ache, not just in my back but in my chest. My mind. My history. I didn’t call it poly-substance use back then. I called it survival. 
 
I became a mother at 20. A baby having a baby. I thought maybe this would be the beginning of something soft, something sacred. And in some ways, it was. But the pain never left. It shifted, grew new heads like a hydra. My brain split itself into pieces I didn’t understand. Anxiety sat in my lungs like a wet rag. OCD whispered lies to me in lists and loops, kill myself, jump, jump. Depression swallowed time. I drank to turn the volume down. I danced through nights so I could forget the days. The gay party scene welcomed me not with open arms but with open bottles, rails of cocaine, clouds of poppers and foggy hookups. It felt like community but it was mostly collapse. 
 
People saw me and saw a functioning mother. A tough girl. A survivor. No one asked what I needed. Not even when I started showing up in hospitals with trembling hands and cracked smiles, begging without words to be seen. I was met with charts. With cold stares. With questions that never led to answers. I was hurting out loud and they kept diagnosing my silence. 
 
And then there was the camp. The “program.” The place they sent “bad kids.” I was abducted from my own life. One day I was fighting to stay afloat, and the next I was locked in a place that saw me as a problem to fix, not a person to hold. They stripped my autonomy with every seclusion room, every locked door, every hour spent alone with nothing but my own frantic thoughts. I wasn’t safe in my mind, and they didn’t know what to do with that except restrain me. Force healing on me like it was something you could beat into a person. 
 
What I needed wasn’t isolation. It wasn’t threats or forced silence or being treated like a ticking bomb. I needed someone to lift me. To sit beside me and say, “Hey, you’re hurting. I see that.” I needed someone to look through the layers of survival and rage and fear and see me not the addict, not the troubled, not the “mom holding it together.” Just me. A girl in pain. A person with a crooked spine and a crooked history, trying to stand up anyway. 
 
They were scared of me when I wasn’t sane. And I was scared too. But being loved away from the edge not pushed, not punished, could have saved me. Could’ve saved so many like me. 
 
Instead, I learned to hate. Not just the people around me, but myself. The years taught me how to carry a blade in my smile. How to wear my trauma like a jacket that’s too heavy to take off but too familiar to toss aside. 
 
What I needed was harm reduction. A friend. A hand. A mirror that showed me my worth instead of my wounds. 
 
Now, looking back, I see that my survival wasn’t the absence of death. It was a rebellion. Every day I stayed alive was a quiet war cry. Every substance, every self-harming choice, was me trying to say, “I don’t know how else to live through this.” And maybe that’s the truth I carry forward now not to romanticize it, not to regret it, but to name it honestly. 
 
I needed love. I still do. 
 
And now I try to be the person I needed back then. For myself. For others. For the kid in the hospital bed. For the mother no one asked about. For the queer youth in the club dancing through pain. For the “bad kids” locked away when they needed to be heard. 
 
We were never bad. 
 
We were just bleeding. 

- K. B.