Lost Child in the Vapors and the Fumes
I was only 10 years old.
At that age, I didn't understand trauma. I didn't understand addiction. I didn't understand why adults did some of the things they did.
I just understood pain.
I had been relocated to another foster home. By then, I had learned how to be a quiet child. I didn't talk much about what was happening inside me. I kept my pain to myself.
There was an older foster child in the home. He was around 16. I noticed that he would go into the garage a lot, and being the curious kid I was, I wanted to know what he was doing in there.
One day, I waited until he closed the garage door. Then I ran around behind the garage and looked through a window.
I saw him with a five-gallon gas can.
He was inhaling the gasoline fumes.
He saw me watching him.
He came running around behind the shed and told me, "Don't tell anyone or I will beat you up."
So I didn't.
The next day, I saw him doing it again.
Curiosity got the best of me.
I went into that garage and tried what I had seen him doing.
The first time I inhaled the fumes, I became extremely lightheaded. I fell backward and hit my head on a push mower. My body started shaking.
I was scared.
He looked at me and said, "Just relax, you're okay."
That night I went to sleep.
The next morning, I woke up with a headache.
You might read this and wonder why a 10-year-old child would ever go back into that garage.
That's where you have to understand the child I was.
I wasn't looking for drugs.
I was looking for an escape.
There were things happening to me in foster care that I didn't know how to talk about. An adult connected to the system that was supposed to protect me was behaving toward me in ways that were inappropriate.
I carried shame that I didn't know what to do with.
Then that older foster child told me something I would remember.
"When you have pain, come out to the garage and inhale this. It will make you not think about anything."
Think about that for a moment.
I was 10.
I didn't understand what I was putting into my body. I didn't understand where choices like that could eventually lead.
All I understood was that for a little while, maybe I wouldn't have to think about what was hurting me.
So for a period of time, that's what I did.
Eventually, I moved away from that foster home. Later in my childhood, I would be introduced to other substances.
But that's another story.
Because this story isn't really about gasoline.
It's about escape.
During the day, people might have seen a quiet little boy.
They couldn't see what happened when I went into my room at night.
I would lie in bed trembling because I was scared.
Sometimes I would cry myself to sleep thinking,
"When is this going to be over?"
Nobody heard everything going on inside me because I didn't know how to tell them.
For a long time, I kept trying to stay strong through whatever came next.
And somewhere along the way, I began to realize something that would take me years to fully understand.
Nobody was coming to be my hero.
I had wounds inside me that other people couldn't see, and eventually I was going to have to learn how to heal those wounds myself.
But when I look back today, I don't want anyone reading my story and thinking,
"Jeffrey had the worst life."
That's not why I'm telling it.
I don't want your pity.
I want you to see something that I couldn't see when I was 10 years old.
That little boy was stronger than he thought he was.
Every morning he got back up.
Every time life moved him somewhere else, he kept going.
Every night he cried himself to sleep wondering when it would finally be over, somehow he still woke up the next morning and faced another day.
Back then, I didn't call that strength.
I was just trying to survive.
Today, I call it something different.
I call it not giving up.
If I could walk back into that foster home today, open that bedroom door and sit beside that frightened little boy, I know exactly what I would tell him.
I'm proud of you for not giving up.
You endured pain, and one day you're going to understand something you can't see right now.
You're stronger than you think you are.
Maybe that's one of the greatest things my childhood taught me.
Sometimes you don't recognize your own strength while you're living through the storm.
Sometimes you don't discover it until years later, when you finally look back at the child you used to be and realize—
He wasn't weak.
He was surviving.
And that little boy became his own hero.
