Trauma, to me, is like a tornado. It’s chaotic but calm… but also spiraling. You usually don’t know what’s wrong and usually lose control of your emotions. You have these feelings that come and go and don’t quite stay. It can be confusing.
Have you ever just smelled something, or had someone touch you, and you start to get really warm and dizzy and just don’t know what’s wrong? That’s what trauma is.
Growing up in a home without love and care makes you cold and quiet. Being abused in different forms caused my trauma at a very young age. Then, revealing my truth and going into the system was my second trauma. Navigating my life with trauma and being in the system was really hard. People saw me as angry or unstable, but most people didn’t know what happened to me or what I had gone through before coming into care. A simple “Are you okay?” or “What’s wrong?” would have gone a long way.
I feel that trauma is not taken seriously. Yes, people know what it is, but people are so quick to judge a youth and have these biases that they completely forget what trauma is and what it does to youth at a young age.
As I went through foster care, I had several incidents I would describe as trauma: moving from home to home, not being able to keep relationships and friendships because of moving around so much, trying to graduate school with everything going on, and becoming homeless after exiting the system. All of these things caused me trauma and forced me to go into survival mode at a young age.
Trauma can cause you to think differently and react to things differently — and a lot of people misunderstand this. Trauma is so misunderstood and taken out of context. I really wish people would sit down and educate themselves about trauma before even working with youth. Once you understand trauma, you understand youth and why they might react the way they do. It’s all about taking the time to really listen to our stories and see why we operate the way we do.
All it takes is open-mindedness and the ability to learn new things — and to be open to them.
After aging out, my mission was to teach people about trauma, what it does to a person, and why people’s judgment might hurt youth depending on their situation. I wanted to bring light to the topic because I so often hear stories that hurt my head to know that foster youth are being judged based on how they act or respond, when it could be as simple as asking if we are okay or what we need.
It’s not that hard. But people want to be in control so much that they forget foster youth are humans as well. All I ever wanted was for people to understand who I am, not judge me based on my anger or reactions. I wanted people to know who Aleesha is — what I like to do and what my hobbies are.
I don’t want to be a case file to people. I want to be known as Aleesha, and I don’t even want to include the case file. The case file is a bunch of biases and opinions about who I am as a youth. It’s not who I truly am.
And that causes trauma for foster youth. We feel unseen, unheard, and not appreciated or welcomed the way we should. Off the bat, we are judged based on our case file before anyone even talks to us. Why aren’t foster youth seen as humans? Why are we seen as these poor kids who have no home? We should be known by our names, not by some case file.
I feel the system continuously adds to our trauma every day. As foster youth, we aren’t able to deal with our trauma until we age out — and that’s when the real work starts. We were dumped with so much trauma from the system that we then have to navigate it in our adult lives and try to put the past behind us.
It’s a lot harder when you have no support, and you age out and now have to navigate life. How can you navigate life after having so much trauma dumped on you?
As a former foster youth, I want to change the system and be a leader for other fosters. I want to educate anyone who works in the welfare system to know what trauma is and take it seriously. We are human too, and we deserve the same respect other children get. Just because we are part of the system doesn’t make us any different.
I’m not in my case file. I’m human.
