
I don’t remember the day I was taken.
I was three. Whatever happened before that lives in paperwork and fragments and the way my body still reacts to certain tones of voice. My life inside the system starts not with a clean break but with a long blur of doors closing behind me—front doors, bedroom doors, car doors—until “moving” became my normal and “home” became a temporary word.
Over fifteen years I lived in roughly thirty-two foster homes and two residential homes. You don’t move that many times because you’re “unlucky.” You move because trauma turns kids into puzzles most adults were never trained to solve. You move because carers get overwhelmed. You move because you start testing people before they can leave you—pushing, melting down, stealing food, saying the ugly truth out loud—anything to see if they’ll fight for you. And when they don’t, you move again. That pattern wires itself into your bones.








