I'm writing this by looking at my diary entries from around that time; this is a lot harder than I thought it'd be. There's no way you can capture an individual completely in a story. My readers, though they can get to learn things about me, will probably never know me. You can only understand so much about a human being. Even so, I want to try. I want something to leave behind in the event of my death or disability. There's no promise that something won't happen to me and leave me unable to tell this story, and that is why I'm doing this at twenty while I'm so young.

But no matter what I do, there's still so, so, so much you will never know about me.

Life continued from then on. During the weekends we cleaned the unit endlessly under the supervision of two female staff members I nicknamed Hannigan (from Little Orphan Annie) and Trunchbull (from Matilda). There was more fighting, more drama, more violence and though Tish did apologize for the earlier incident, her actions didn't match her words. She'd even try to scare me with promises to "do it again", to which I replied "go right on ahead". Please. I couldn't believe that I told everyone not to press charges on this girl.

Somewhere along the line, I entered some sort of essay contest held by Martin O'Malley. I don't remember what it was about, but I got some Governor's Citation and went to the ceremony, driven by my CASA (court appointed social advocate) worker Marti Haub.

"I am gonna go punch the governor in the face!" I joked to everyone on my way out. While there, I made sure to hoarde all the food and I brought a big bucket of fried chicken back for the girls in the unit.

By then, the number of altercations I got into decreased, I calmed down, and the workers there got ready to discharge me. I went to an interview at an independent living program called Family Advocacy; they had two phases; phase one where you'd have to stay with a foster parent, and phase two where you had your own apartment. They liked me, but there was a problem with my immigration status. I still didn't have a green card or social security number (and to this day I am still not a citizen). That unnerved me because the state had been "working on it" for around five years, but I had my hopes up.

During that time, I had nothing I could possibly cut myself with because they took away everything I possibly could've used. I kept the previous incident with Shantel in my mind and sometimes heated up water so I could burn small parts of my skin with it. It was a short-lived phase, and no one ever found out about it.

I dreamed of having someone there that I could count on always; someone to ride with, but people like that didn't exist. Even the strongest of relationships eventually fell apart as the people drifted away from each other.

They kept pushing back my discharge date and I felt like it'd never come, just like when I first started talking to Family Advocacy, the interviews kept getting postponed due to snow. I felt trapped; it was such a relief just to be able to leave and go to McDonald's or something every two weeks or so. But the time did come, and I left to go to phase one of Family Advocacy/Mentor Maryland's Independent Living program.

Now that I'm talking about it, I recall a staff member who told me I'd never get out of there. He told me I wouldn't last long in the next foster home I went to-if I ever went to one-and I'd never get to Independent Living.

I'm pleased to inform you that I did everything he told me I'd never do. There's no better feeling in the world than proving the haters wrong.

When a kid got discharged, they usually threw some sort of party. I didn't want one. I felt strangely indifferent and prepared about the whole thing. I didn't want anybody to know about me leaving until I was already gone; I'd let them think I went on a really long sign-out or something. The last thing I wanted was a bunch of fake "I'll miss you's" from people who didn't give a fuck if I was dead or alive and damn sure didn't know who I was as a person.

I moved in with Ms. Vanessa Wilson. I lived in the basement since she was waiting for Korea Miller, a foster daughter of hers that had been with her for two years, to go to phase two and get her own apartment. Then I'd have my own room next to Keisha Smith. During the day, I attended Forbush Day School. To go to phase two, you had to be at least eighteen and had to have at least five hundred dollars in your account, a high school diploma or GED, meet all the behavior requirements, and of course you had to be employed.

From the moment I walked in, I was dead set on going to phase two. Most kids in phase two had roommates, but I didn't care. If it wasn't required for me to be in phase one first, I never would've gone.

The people in Forbush were much less disruptive than the people in RTC; strangely, as soon as I walked in there, I started missing the girls I used to live with, if only for their ruckus and drama. It was weird, to say the least-far too quiet. So even though I'd gotten out, I called the unit to check in with them and laughed when I heard they'd gotten in trouble for sniffing coke. I don't know why I thought that was so hilarious.

It unnerved me when kids tried to talk shit in there because I knew how I would've handled it just a little while ago. But I'd come this far and made it out, and I controlled myself.

I'm laughing because I remember all the smoke. Me and Korea were the only non-smokers. I coughed so much. There was no privacy there in the basement; people would come downstairs to play video games while I was trying to sleep but I didn't say anything for fear it would start something and once again, I'd be thrown out.

Although I was out of Sheppard Pratt, the mentality was the same. Korea Miller. Where do I begin? That girl thought she was the fucking boss, and that she owned everyone around her because she'd been there the longest. She came downstairs and just randomly turned the TV off while I was watching it and that's when I first noticed her attitude. She talked about the other girls behind their backs nonstop but if they were present, she'd pretend to be nice. She considered the front seat of Ms. Wilson's car her "throne" and hogged it like there was no tomorrow-her attitude was that because she'd been there the longest, she was the ruler. On a couple of occasions, I heard her make some racist remarks on my ethnicity. And of course she was favored. No one in the house cared about her superiority complex; only the other foster kids with the program did.

After two months in the Independent Living program, she got thrown out and moved back in with us. It was drama there like there's drama everywhere, but sometimes I really hated Korea. But nothing noteworthy really happened. It was just typical shit. Even the other adults in the house who were supposed to watch us acted the same way. She formed little "cliques" with them, gossiping, drawing even our foster mother's grandkids into her little he said-she said bullshit. Lord knows how much time I spent while she and her little "clique" talked shit about Keisha behind her back, hurling all sorts of insults at her for no reason.

That was why I couldn't trust anyone. They talked shit about everyone while they weren't there-it made me wonder how they talked about me when I wasn't around.

It was times like those when it was really hard for me to keep my temper in check. Sometimes I felt like losing it and blowing my top all over again like I used to do, but then I reminded myself how hard I'd worked to get out of lockdown. I had to move forward and keep living life; I couldn't just react the same way I used to.

Around then I completed the mail-based Art program I'd been attending-it took me three years instead of two to complete it because I'd moved around so much and it was hard for me to continuously keep in touch with them. I got my social security number, work visa and green card through the state and got a job at Quizno's.

I was so, so happy when I got my first job. It was my first step towards getting out of there. I hated the gossip there, I hated how I couldn't trust anyone, and I lived day to day dreaming of when I'd be out and didn't have to deal with the bullshit that foster homes came with anymore.

Through my job there, I saved up enough money to get myself a laptop and go to driving school, though I still don't have my license. Here, you have to have a provisional license for two years before you can get a driver's license, and I had no one to sit with me and help me complete the behind-the-wheel hours I needed (none of the authority figures working with me were comfortable with the idea of a kid driving their car.)

After I graduated high school, I worked various sales jobs and was once a beginner model maker for an architechtural firm. Needless to say, I had a hard time catching up to everyone else. I saved up, worked hard, kept myself out of trouble the best I could and finally moved into my own apartment in phase two. I didn't even have to have a roommate!

I didn't have any incentive to go to college. I'd had co-workers who had degrees, but they were holding the same positions that I was holding. Plus there was no degree that I found interesting.

People had always told me that I should model, so I enrolled in John Casablancas to take classes in acting and modeling. Let me tell you, the public always thinks success in modeling is all about "looking pretty"-it is not. It's more like freeze-frame acting than anything else, and depending on the assignment, sometimes your job is to look downright scary. I'd even had one girl tell me that the job was basically "standing around having people tell you how pretty you are". Are you kidding me?! Models don't hear about how "pretty" they are. Models hear all day that they're too tall, too short, too thin, too fat, not good enough-the list goes on and on. It's a skill like any other, and it really sickens me how many people think otherwise. Especially runway. Good Lord, I basically failed runway.

Afterwards, I did some trade-for-print modeling with some photographers and had shoots with a dude name Kelly for Asian Glamour, who specifically wanted to work with Asian models. Kelly, though I tolerated him enough, disgusted me. He slammed the models for not wanting to do nudes and made fun of their appearances. I don't know what happened to him afterwards. His business, if it's still up, is probably not doing well.

And of course, I got slammed because some of the shoots I did were suggestive. Were they not aware that I was modeling, not taking cutesy fun little family pictures? I can only elaborate by giving you passages from my blog.

"Answer me this: Why is it that if you're female, no one cares about anything besides what you wear? I mean, I've had people come to me, saying "Hey, I think you're different/cool/make good points/smart whatever etc etc. but I can't talk to you because you're wearing a bikini in one of your pics."

.................................Idiots.

The thing is, only women get criticized for this. Quote Xtina-"The guy gets all the glory the more he can score and the girl can do the same and yet you call her a whore". If a female is sexually active, everybody goes "OMG SLUUUUUUUT!!!1111!1!1" but if a male is sexually active, everyone's all "LOL THAT'S MY MAN YOU'RE A PLAYER!11111!!!!!111" A girl can be a complete virgin, but if she DARES to wear shorts or something people go "OMG YOU WHOOOOOOOOOOORE!" And a dude can go around with nothing on but shorts and no one gives a fuck. A man never gets called a slut or gets ridiculed for his sexual activity no matter how promiscuous he is, and a woman cannot do ANYTHING.

You know what that is? Objectification. That attitude stems from prejudice-like back in the day, when men could have as many wives as they wanted and do whatever they wanted but women had to be the faithful little robots and personal sex toys of their husbands or whoever owned them.

Your attitude when you call a girl a "whore" "slut" or anything is the same thing. You are implying that ONLY female sexuality is bad and it's only bad if a girl does it, but it's A-OK when a man does.

Sad thing is, I hear women going around with the same attitude, objectifying themselves. Degrading themselves.

Disgusting."

And art is self-expression. You are supposed to be creative, experiment, and express yourself. And yes, sometimes that includes sexuality. So why is it that people think there should be limits as to what you can or can't express? Why is every other emotion/aspect of humanity okay, but if someone wants to use sexuality, they immediately get slammed for it? Is there any good reason besides that humans have been brainwashed to censor themselves?

And why is it that the male models, who did everything the female models did, never got slammed for anything they did?

During that time, I also saved every penny I had and went in the studio by myself. I recorded around six songs and put the raw files online on iTunes and other places as an EP. They were unmastered, not even mixed down, and very poor quality but that was all I could afford. I had a song about self-injury there, and of course, people wanted to censor me.

Personally, I hate censorship. I am gonna bother you with my recent blog entry.

"How do you guys feel about wannabe-moral guardians always going "liek OMG that's not appropriate for the kids!!!!!!!!!!1111111!!!"?

First of all, no one is gonna go change their lives because of something they heard on a song or saw in a movie. That means that everyone who ever saw a horror movie would become an axe murderer. In the extremely rare cases where someone does try to blame entertaintment for their actions, you can do some research into their backgrounds and find out that these people have been having problems LONG before anything happened and they were gonna do it with or without whatever song/movie they're trying to blame. It's called making up excuses.

Seriously, every song I listen to is about drugs and guess what? Those songs have NEVER affected the way I think. I'm one of the cleanest people you could ever find-hell, I don't even drink. The slightest bit of liquor disgusts me.

This is only done by idiots who're too dumb to take responsibilites for their own actions trying to find scapegoats for their own stupidity/bad parenting. Every time anything happens it's all "LOL HEY GUISE LET'S BLAME THE RAP MUSIC FOR EVERYTHING LIKE ALWAYS INSTEAD OF FACING THE TRUTH AND TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR OUR OWN ACTIONS ONEONEONE!!11111"

Second of all, every form of media that's not for kids comes with a clear label/warning/rating that tells you "HEY YOU IDIOT THIS IS NOT FOR CHILDREN". If you see that (which you did because it's there and you can't possibly miss it unless you're a dumbass and you don't even screen your kids' media intake) and STILL choose to show it to your children, whose fault is that? Oh yeah, YOURS.

Seriously, what kind of excuse is "it's inappropriate for kids" when it's NOT INTENDED FOR KIDS? It's clearly for ADULTS, so what the fuck kind of excuse is that?

People always want to blame somebody else, when they're the ones causing their own problems. Disgusting."

The story is not over.

We're getting closer and closer to where I am currently, but there's a lot of stuff that happened afterwards that I am not yet ready to talk about.

Stick with me. I plan to update this continuously throughout the years. I don't know when the next update will come, but it will be here.