My Life As I Know It

A note before you read: this piece touches on surviving abuse, though it spares the specifics. If that's heavy for you today, take care of yourself first. I’m going to add this to part of my “Live Like Elton” series because he is the one who got me through what I hope I can do for others today. There's a version of my story that's just a list of horrible and terrible things that people should never have to go through. A catalog of things that were done to me, by people who sh

This post is part of the Live Like Elton series. It contains descriptions of trauma, sexual abuse, and addiction. I'm not sharing this for shock value. I'm sharing it because someone out there needs to know they're not alone.

The year I made it… and started to lose it all. COVID-19 marked the beginning of when my life started to collapse. Well… the mark of the beginning of the end of my death, well, Palmer’s death, and the life I had created. The version of me that I loved. There was the version of me reserved for family. Quiet. Polite. Compliant. Loved, but only under certain conditions. And then there was my true identity. Palmer. Palmer had one goal defined by the very things that I loved about

Writing was the one thing that held me grounded while I battled the brainwashing, domestic violence, and gaslighting. This was written shortly after realizing that I wasn’t, in fact, crazy, I didn’t make up my life, and I had nobody else to look up to but the people who were doing good for a better tomorrow. I had been battling my reality for two years… while I did fight far more than I believe most would, after six months of being told that I wasn’t great, I never lived in A