Who Am I And Who Do I Want To Be?

𝐼 𝒿𝓊𝓈𝓉 𝓌𝒶𝓃𝓉 𝓉𝑜 𝒻𝒾𝓇𝓈𝓉𝓁𝓎 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓃𝓀 @manoldonchev 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝑔𝒾𝓋𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓂𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓈𝓊𝑔𝑔𝑒𝓈𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃 𝓉𝑜 𝒸𝑜𝓂𝓅𝓁𝑒𝓉𝑒𝓁𝓎 𝒾𝓃𝓉𝓇𝑜𝒹𝓊𝒸𝑒 𝓂𝓎𝓈𝑒𝓁𝒻..

𝕎𝕙𝕠 𝔸𝕞 𝕀?

My name is Braedy warren, a 22 year old who was born in Belleville Ontario, Canada. When I was born, I was brought into this world 11 weeks early (almost a full 3 months!) and I only weighed 3.9 ounces. My mother could literally hold me in the palm of her hand. I spent the next 6 months in the hospital in an incubator for my lungs have not fully developed then, which also put me in a high risk situation as well being that I had a heart murmur too (a hole in the heart). I also want to say that the hospital gave my mother a hard time for my premature birth as they thought she had abused her pregnancy and only being 19 at that time. However once everything was settled between my mom and the hospital and me having grown a bit more we were able to go home. Home as far as I can remember was a red brick 2- storey house with a matching red brick covered balcony. I also remember that the house had a plastic great horned owl perched on the peak; and I always thought it was real until we moved out- weird how I never clued in eh?

(Photo by: SnowPrints https://www.snowprints.ca)

𝕄𝕠𝕧𝕚𝕟𝕘....

As a child up to even 3 years ago, I have moved house A LOT. So naturally this meant moving schools a lot. I want to believe that my first school that I attended was Queen Elizabeth and I don't have any memories from there- no good ones anyways. My mother has always told me that school's principal told us that I wouldn't be able to do anything or achieve anything and that principal knelt down to me and said softly to me that "that's okay". I learned slowly and I have a spectrum of Autism which is called Aspbergers, and later to find out that I also have C.A.P. (central Auditory Processing) which would make it harder for me to learn as you could be talking to me about giraffes for example. I would be listening to you and seemingly understanding you until I would think that we were talking about Ice cream and I would ask a question regarding what I had understood to be the subject in the conversation. Now again, I don't remember this but deep down I can truthfully believe this happened. At that very moment mom decided to home-school me until grade 2.
I want to briefly touch base on this... being home-schooled is not necessarily a bad thing. Hell, if it weren't for that year of one on one, I probably wouldn't have had much luck in public school on. The only downfall for me personally was that i was pushed waay too hard on homework and school related curriculum. I had to read a book a week and write a full essay on it due by the end of said week. I would get in trouble or even punished if I didn't get an equation right or didn't get work done in general. I was going insane.

𝔸𝕓𝕦𝕤𝕖

Some time goes by and my mother marries and at this time we were living in Kitchener,Ontario. She marries a piece of work, this guy will always be the reason why whenever I get mad, I make myself LIVID. Any little thing I would do wrong he would hit me, and not a soft tap, hard enough to make my head ring. If I talked back in any way I would have a time out but not a normal one. He would force me stand in a corner and I would have to stand there holding my hands above my head completely straight. If he caught me with a slight bend in my arm or having them at my side due to being there for 4 hours straight, he'd angrily yank my arms straight and yell at me for not doing what he told me to. I was only 10, maybe 11. It didn't end at that, I had an issue where I would wet myself just randomly. This in turn made this guy mad at me, which is understandable but like he always would, he'd take it beyond far. He would grab a pure white plastic cooking spoon and use that to punish me by spanking me with it with all the might he had. If i tried to block it with my hands he would hold my arms behind me and continue. He would even number the hits as if he was trying to set a new high score, playing a game. My mother wouldn't step in and sometimes even threaten me that she would tell him what i did if and when I did something wrong, and she would too so later that night it would happen again. My wetting issue got to the point where they took my bed away and gave me a garbage bag to sleep on the floor with and that was it.
K (the guy) went to as far as splitting my head open with a different pure white plastic spoon because the first one broke while he was using it against me. I remember that night too, because I didn't yell or cry, my 4 year old brother was in the living room watching television and I was trying to not have him hear me in pain or to think it was a normal thing that people do; so, K got so mad he broke the spoon over my body. I WON THAT FIGHT.

𝕀𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕡𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖

I moved in with mother after her and K filed for divorce not long after that incident with my head. We moved into a complex and both my brother and I made a few friends. This was also the time when my mom gave me my first piece of photography equipment: a Nikon D80. An older model but one that is great to learn on. She had a few close friends who were great at the art and decided I should shadow them and take up the hobby. So I did and learned to love what I could do with a small device, I believe this was my first photo EVER with my Nikon:

I was about 15-16 now and although whom I now considered to be family (mother my brother and I) had good memories, the bad ones always came back around and mom did start to abuse me as well but not nearly as harshly as K. This was slightly different however. In my mind today I have a little bit more of an understanding as to why my mom thought was right by her doing, it still doesn't make it right however I can't hate her for it. You see she was on medication for both being Bi-Polar and slight Insomnia. She was on a very powerful drug called cymbolta (I think) for helping of her Bi-Polar and something else with her sleeping issues. This caused her not to be present all the time, maybe even only half the time, the other half made her so she couldn't control her anger or frustrations with me being a kid at the time who always looked to challenge my mom, being that's what I was used to. So I decided to stay with K for a bit. Whenever he would go to work he would kick me out of his apartment and wouldn't let me have a key so I would be outside no matter the weather and I'd walk around until I guessed when he'd be back. I found a lot of solitude in libraries then. Until, one day after being sick and tired of this being my life for a month, I found his key and hid it from him. He went to work one day and couldn't find his key so he set up a little camera facing his front door saying, "In case anyone comes in being it's unlocked", but I knew it was for that but more so to catch me if I wanted to come in while he was gone. He left and I took his key and with money I had saved up and found on the streets walking I got a copy of the key made of the same brass material, then later on said I had "found" his key. So I had a key of my own and everytime he left for work, I would go for an hour walk to then come back for 6.5 hours to his apartment then go back out with the door locked for another hour or so to meet with him at his apartment.

𝔹𝕣𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕠𝕟

I moved to Brighton, Ontario on my own after another 3 months of moving from mother's to K's house and moved in with my Aunt and Uncle for a few years while I finished up high school. After high school I moved out on my "own" with a roommate and got my first job. I fell into a dark place and began drinking every night with my roomie even if I had work the next day, and I would do that for weeks on end until I lost my job 5 months later due to this fact.

I jumped from living space to living space but never really found a solid place. Meanwhile during the five years I was living in Brighton, I had completely shut off communications with mother, my brother and K. So I came back down to woodstock, Ontario where mom and my brother lives with my little sister and mom's much deserved husband. I was supposed to go back to Brighton after the week visit but I had found work here in Woodstock and stayed and that's where I am living now.

𝕎𝕙𝕠 𝔻𝕠 𝕀 𝕎𝕒𝕟𝕥 𝕋𝕠 𝔹𝕖?

I want to take this love of photography that I have acquired and turn into a lifestyle. whether that be a side job or my main business, or even working as a known photographer for a company somewhere- I want to be a professional photographer. So please, follow me here and also follow my OTHER Instagram account (down below picture) and we can hopefully build up a positively focused community (I mentioned that in my other post: https://steemit.com/photography/@vision20twenty/vision20twenty-join-me )!

(My OTHER instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/jabrmacro )

(Picture taken by: Salemanderdigital https://www.instagram.com/salemanderdigital )

𝒯𝒽𝒶𝓃𝓀 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓇𝑒𝒶𝒹𝒾𝓃𝑔- 𝒞𝐻𝐸𝐸𝑅𝒮!
~ 𝒱20