Resilience Through Chaos

Weekend Check-In: The Lives I’ve Lived

The life I’m living now? Ten years ago, I couldn’t have pictured it if you handed me a storyboard and a budget.

If you told 16-year-old me what I was about to survive over the next decade, I’d laugh not because it’s funny, but because anxiety has always loved a costume change. I’d probably ask one question: Do we make it out the other side? And the answer is yes but not in a tidy, inspirational-montage way. More like: clawing, crawling, rebuilding, learning, relapsing, and still showing up.

When I actually list it out, it’s almost insulting that I’m expected to act normal. In ten years: three serious relationships, multiple affairs (only one was mine), four different living situations, one fraud court case that I got dragged near, one pet adoption that felt like an emotional rescue mission for me, two lost scholarships, and a jump from zero medications to six. That’s not “character development.” That’s a whole Netflix series with too many seasons.

So where do you even begin?

Sixteen: the before-times

At 16, I was already in it.

I lost my best friend after a heated argument the kind where both people walk away acting tough, but you’re actually just bleeding privately. I stopped seeing my therapist because I outgrew what she could provide… and because she literally described my family situation “as a farm” and proceeded to make actual animal noises in session.

I wish I was exaggerating. I’m not.

I started experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Not because I was trying to be edgy because I was trying to feel anything else. Not numb. Not trapped. Not like a high schooler living in a world that felt societally unsafe.

Eventually I ended up in a drug counseling service in South Portland. It was the kind of “okay, so we’re doing this now” moment where you realize you’re not just having a hard week. You’re building patterns that could swallow you.

There was a lot going on mentally and emotionally for a kid who was expected to perform normal.

College decisions: desperation in a blazer

Then came the “what’s next?” pressure and I was panicking.

I got denied from my top three schools. I felt helpless and like I was running out of time. In a moment of pure survival brain, I called one of my good judys and basically asked what her school was like… because at that point I was hunting for any path that looked like a future. She told me it was like our small town doable, familiar, manageable.

What she failed to mention was that it was founded by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and was a Catholic institution.

So yeah. That was the vibe.

I did random roommate because I didn’t have the privilege of choice at that point. My soon-to-be roommate and I friended each other on Facebook and started planning who would bring what. Normal college stuff. He told me he’d sent my info to his best friend

— I’ll call him M —

who apparently became instantly obsessed with my image.

M got my Snapchat through my roommate, and that summer we talked every day. For the first time, I felt like I was getting the attention I’d always wanted back home attention that never worked out for me because the societal equation didn’t allow it. When the semester started, we started dating in person. He lived about 30 minutes from campus.

And honestly? Thank god because campus life was a nightmare.

Campus: gender rules and social warfare

My dorm was divided by gendered floors. Because of “rules and regulations,” I ended up on the boys’ floor. If you’ve never lived inside a system that’s obsessed with categorizing you, just imagine being forced to live in a constant mirror that reflects you wrong.

I had one friend on the girls’ floor I’ll call her G. We were from the same town but never really clicked (and in hindsight… for a reason). For a while she was all I had on campus, until we had a major falling out.

After that, she used her social power the kind that looks like charm but functions like a weapon to convince the boys on my floor (including my roommate) that I was mentally ill, “crazy,” and shouldn’t be trusted.

And they believed her.

From November through move-out, my entire floor stopped talking to me. Months of being treated like a threat. Months of being isolated inside a building full of people. It’s hard to explain how dehumanizing that is, but it does something permanent to your nervous system.

You start shrinking. You start monitoring your own existence.

During that time, my “home base” was technically my dorm room but I was mostly living with M in his apartment in Peabody, Massachusetts.

It wasn’t nice by any standard. There was mold everywhere.

And the landlord/roommate was a drunk, a druggie, a town nuisance a walking liability. But we made a little life. I was trying so hard to believe I was building safety.

M installed security cameras, sensors, all of it supposedly to “protect me and my things from the roommate.”

Come to find out: it wasn’t protection. It was surveillance.

It was to keep tabs on me — to know when he could sneak other people into our space.

That summer, a planned apartment fell through and I moved back home to Maine.

It was a sign. And when I say sign, I mean a screaming, neon, emergency exit sign. I just wasn’t ready to read it.

Crazyville: the story turns feral

This is where things take a turn into what-the-actual-fuck territory.

As I’m getting ready to move out and take my last final of the year, I get told we’re locked out of the apartment. Police are there to make sure we don’t step foot on the property.

And my two guinea pigs are inside.

I’m going to repeat this slowly: I had two guinea pigs in that apartment.

This is what my ex told me, word for word:

“Hey, I’m so sorry but you’re not going to be able to see/pick up your guinea pigs. [Roommate] got into a drunken rage and threw them down the stairs and against the walls and then into the dumpsters.”

Yeah.

That sentence does not leave your body after you hear it. There are certain kinds of cruelty that change the texture of your brain. That was one of them.

And as if that wasn’t enough: M also had a court date for credit card fraud, money laundering, and another fraud charge. His mom bailed him out and got him off with no punishment. Apparently this wasn’t her first time doing it.

When she met me, she asked how much I was charging per hour — because her son would “never actually be with someone like me.”

That’s the kind of comment that’s meant to shrink you into silence. The kind of comment that expects you to feel grateful for being tolerated. It didn’t just insult me — it tried to define the borders of what I deserved.

Allston: paying for someone else’s chaos

Despite all that, I moved him into my new apartment in Allston, Massachusetts. He promised he’d pay his half of the rent and then some because of his “entrepreneurial” something-or-other.

Guess what happened.

He never paid a penny.

To this day, he owes me and my family over $5,000 in rent charges. And his mom threatened me if I kept contacting him about it.

Don’t you just love family values?

After we finally broke up — after I’d been living on my own for a while — I got a cat as a reward for surviving. Not a trendy “self-care pet.” A real one. A living creature that made the apartment feel like mine again. A small anchor.

Then I got a message from an unknown number that just said: “I’m sorry.”

I asked who it was.

It was one of his boyfriends.

He confessed that M cheated on me for the entire relationship and that he’d been snuck into my bed multiple times.

And then, like a cherry on top of the most unhinged sundae imaginable, he added something along the lines of:

“You have lovely decor in your space, by the way. Sorry for intruding and sleeping with your man. But I thought you should know.”

I have never sprung out of bed and stripped sheets so fast in my life.

Because in that moment, it hit me: it wasn’t just betrayal. It was violation. It was the reality that my life had been treated like a stage set other people felt entitled to use.

And then

Then the pandemic hit.

more to come.

love jamie