The Foster System’s Lost Child

I don’t remember what home is supposed to feel like.

By the time I was twelve, I had been in six foster homes. By sixteen, I had lost count. Some were just places to sleep, some were filled with people who barely acknowledged me, and some were worse than the homes I had been taken from. I learned early that attachment was dangerous, that love was temporary, and that nothing was ever truly mine.

I carried my belongings in trash bags. I stopped unpacking. What was the point? I would be gone soon anyway.

At eighteen, the system let me go. No family, no support, no place to land. I thought I was ready—I had survived worse. But the world wasn’t built for kids like me. I worked two jobs, crashed on couches, let people use me because it felt better than being alone. I told myself I was fine.

But I wasn’t fine.

I was angry. At the system that failed me. At the families who didn’t want me. At the world for moving on like I had never existed. I numbed myself with anything I could—drinking, reckless choices, people who saw me as nothing more than a passing moment. If I wasn’t worth keeping, why should I care?

I didn’t trust anyone. People left. That’s what they did. Every time someone tried to get close, I pushed them away before they had the chance. It was easier that way. No risk, no disappointment, no proof that I was as unlovable as I had always feared.

Then, one night, I found an old letter from my younger self—something I had written in a group home when I was ten. “I hope I have a family one day. I hope I have a place that is mine. I hope I am happy.”

I stared at those words for hours. That little girl had hope. And I had let her down.

The next day, I reached out to a former caseworker—the only adult who had ever seemed to care. She helped me find a therapist who specialized in childhood trauma. He didn’t judge me for the life I had been living. He didn’t pity me. He just listened.

Therapy was brutal at first. Saying the words out loud—I never felt wanted, I never felt safe—made me feel exposed, raw. My therapist told me something that I hated at first: “You have to trust yourself before you can trust anyone else.”

Trust. The word felt impossible.

But he was right. I had spent my entire life waiting for someone to prove that I was worth loving. But what if no one ever did? What if the only person who could give me that was me?

So I started small. I wrote in a journal, even when I hated what I saw on the page. I started meditating, even when my mind told me it was pointless. I forced myself to sit with my emotions instead of drowning them out. And little by little, I started believing that maybe I was worth something.

But healing doesn’t happen in isolation.

I had to learn how to let people in. I had to accept kindness without suspicion, friendship without the expectation of abandonment. It wasn’t easy. The first time someone told me they cared about me, I laughed. Not because I thought it was funny, but because I didn’t know what else to do.

But then they showed up again. And again.

Slowly, I started building something that felt like family. It wasn’t traditional. It wasn’t tied by blood. But it was real. Friends who became siblings, mentors who became parental figures, people who saw me for who I was—not just a kid who had been tossed around by the system, but a person with value, with dreams, with something to offer the world.

Now, I work with kids aging out of the foster system, helping them navigate the world that once swallowed me whole. I remind them that their past does not define them. That they are not disposable. That they deserve more than just survival.

I never got the family I dreamed of as a child. But I built one. And for the first time, I know what home feels like. Not just a place, not just walls, but people. Love. Belonging.

And for the first time, I trust that I deserve it.

If you are reading this I want you to know this truth… YOU deserve it too.