so tonight i’m gonna write about childhood. i don’t remember a lot of mine to be honest. people will say “do you remember when this happened?” and the majority of the time my answer is “no”. i didn’t have a bad or traumatic childhood. i grew up in a small town in indiana. my parents were great. i was a weird kid, i know that. grappling with gender and trying to figure out who i was took up a lot of time in my brain. from what my mom tells me when i was little i would scream and cry when she put dresses on me. i was a pretty depressed teenager though. and that i know i’ve tried to block out. i would come home from school and just sleep. part of that i’m sure was mental illness. when i was 20 i was diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder, severe with psychotic features, full interepisode recovery. whew what a mouthfull! its pretty common for depression to hit before mania etc. and i’m sure that’s what was happening with me. when it comes to remembering things i don’t know why i can’t. i remember certain things like getting extremely sick on our band trip to florida and having to go to the hospital and be flown home. i remember being rear ended by a kid in my school (who i later found out was drunk) and having to go to the hospital. i remember having my birthday taken away because my friend and i rung up a thousand dollar phone bill to the new kids on the block hotline. (i think we may have sort of celebrated it but it was a pretty low key thing. definitely a punishment i deserved). thats all i can think of off the top of my head. i can tell you what music i was into when i was a teenager. r.e.m., pearl jam, nirvana, green day, tori amos. i remember i went to lollapalooza but i don’t remember the show. i sometimes wonder if i smacked my head too many times as a kid or something to have all this memory loss.