Genesis.

TW: mention of abuse

How very Catholic of me to name the chapter of my origin story after the book of Genesis.

How very Catholic of me to be raised Catholic, and no longer be a practicing Catholic.

To begin, in the lord’s year of 1994, I was born.

Now, babies are born every day, but what about ADOPTED babies? That’s right. I was born in November, a Scorpio, much to everyone’s delight. A Valentine’s Day bastard.

My mother was eighteen, and generally unwell—which I would find out twenty-one years later, but we aren’t there yet. So let’s just say I was born to a loving mother; to two parents who apparently wanted me but couldn’t afford me. (Also a lie, but baby Beef didn’t know this.)

I was with her for three days before the stork took me to a private adoption agency’s dwelling and offered me up to foster parents who kept me drugged (because a good baby is a quiet baby) until the glorious day of December 17th, when my parents adopted me and took me home.

I was a bait and switch, and much to my mother’s dismay, not a good baby. Or so I’ve heard.

Now, what all is significant about my birth?

Well, the trauma.

It’s traumatic to be born, but it’s also traumatic to be taken away from your first familial bond three days after being on this planet. Humans are not a precocial species.

My earliest memory—other than pooping under my dad’s bed while playing hide and seek—is a jaunty tale I always told with conviction despite my lack of evidence. Nonetheless, it’s a very real memory.

A memory I didn’t tell a professional about until I was unfucking myself in therapy, out of fear that I’d be “put away” for even mentioning it.

I was maybe three or four years old.

My bedroom used to be downstairs in the house my parents lived in for forty years. It was an old house, built in 1917. This is the house my mom also grew up in.

Now, what’s significant about these facts is that the house was evil.

Growing up, I always talked about how it was haunted, and how the next-door neighbors had been killed and all the others who had lived there since had had bad luck.

But why would that affect our house?

Collateral damage.

I was four years old, and I had been put to bed, but I very clearly remember waking up. My room was dark. My closet door, to the right of my bed, was slightly ajar, and I heard voices coming from it.

I was the biggest scaredy-cat growing up. I couldn’t even watch House or Law & Order without fear of illness or being abducted and murdered.

These were all very real fears to my younger self. Perhaps even more real than anything paranormal—which, thinking about it now, those are much more real fears to have.

So way to go, baby Beef, for having rational fears of cancer or becoming a sex trafficking victim.

Back to the voices.

They said they were going to kill me.

Terrifying.

I remember being covered in sweat and sleeping with a blanket over my head probably until I was at least fourteen. Didn’t matter how hot it was. If I slept with a blanket over my head, the demons couldn’t see me.

Obviously.

So the voices from the closet were getting louder, and I needed to get out of that room.

I went to my bedroom door, but it was duct-taped shut.

Literally the entire perimeter of the door, including the handle, was duct-taped, and I couldn’t open it.

So next I went to my window.

I remembered to go to the window from fire safety.

You guys, guess what?

Also duct-taped shut.

As the voices grew louder, I was crying out for my mom to come save me. Sobbing in the dark, I stood on my bed, accepting death.

I’m not sure if this was my first of many panic attacks, but my heart hurt the way it has many times since then. The feeling of dread washed over me as I swaddled myself and waited to be consumed by the voices.

And then I fell asleep.

That’s what was so scary about this memory: I remember very clearly being conscious and then not.

When I woke up, my face still felt like I had been crying.

I ran to my door, relieved that I had survived, and found my mom asleep on the couch with the TV on, as it always was in the living room.

I told her what happened, and she said I made it up.

She said I probably heard the TV as the voices.

At four years old, I was broken again.

I wasn’t protected or comforted the way I needed to be.

At that tender age, I accepted a concept—death—that my therapist later explained to me that a child’s understanding of death is very different from an adult’s.

I have been consciously broken for twenty-two years, and my earliest memory, a horror story, is actually just that.

A story I used to tell for the lulz and shock value that my generation grew up idolizing became a really sad realization and bittersweet confession about what it means to be abandoned.

My therapist told me that regardless of what actually happened in that memory, it was all very real to me.

The voices could have been some of the paranoia I talked about earlier. It could have been anything.

The only concrete thing is that I didn’t receive what I needed in that moment, and something in me broke.

At four years old, I accepted death and realized that I was all alone.

I would continue to go the rest of my life—so far—with that very deep, innate realization that in everything I did, I was alone.

No savior.

No champion.

I didn’t even know it was like that until the empty feeling I would get, but couldn’t describe, became so sharp I felt like I was dying.

Sleep was always bad for me pretty much from that point onward.

I had insomnia all throughout school. Sometimes when I was trying to sleep, I’d get hot flashes and a feeling of dread. I could see dark figures move out of the corner of my eye.

When my bedroom was moved upstairs, sometimes the door to the adjoining room would click open on its own.

It was an old house.

I was told it was just settling.

I’d lie there, repeating Our Fathers and Hail Marys like they could actually protect me. I remember learning that you couldn’t say the Our Father properly if you were possessed because the demon just, like, wouldn’t let you.

So I’d repeat it over and over in my head obsessively.

I’d be so paralyzed with fear that I couldn’t even get up and move a couple of feet to turn on the light.

I remember my first conscious panic attack.

I got it in the seventh grade.

I spent all summer, undiagnosed, being unable to breathe at night.

I remember waking up at midnight and my parents taking me to the ER because I was convinced I couldn’t breathe.

Nothing helped.

My parents then got on the mental health freight train to the best of their understanding, but I still didn’t get what I needed.

I could never be honest with my high school therapist out of fear because she was technically a family therapist. She’d talk to my mom.

I didn’t want anything unfavorable getting back to her.

I still remember the betrayal of my mom looking right at me and telling my therapist that she could never truly love me because I wasn’t hers.

I remember her telling my therapist that she had broken the cycle of abuse because she didn’t physically abuse me.

I remember her finally admitting years later that she loved to play MIND GAMES with me.

This is the part of the story that hurts the most.

Mom.