UTYPS

I imagine my life five years from now having a non-profit organization for foster youth to normalize their experience with CPS, to help their transition so they could be more self-sufficient. Not a lot of people are able to survive and I believe that they’re not given the tools to do so while they’re in the system. I believe that they have all these books in place, thinking that that’s going to teach people what to do. But you can’t [learn from a book]. Like in a family, you learn stuff every day. You learn stuff when you’re 30, you learn stuff when you’re 50, you still have to call your parents."

And [my high school teacher who adopted me when I was 17] just made me feel special. Like most – throughout my life, people would look at me and they immediately judge like what I say is, everybody else looked at me and saw a broken down car. She looked at me and she saw a super star. She told me that I told her a story about Julius Caesar because I’ve always been a big history dude. She was like, wow. – this fricking kid. Every time I would come in there she gave me the confidence to be me. And I found out a lot about myself that I didn’t know just by being in her classroom and her giving me the avenue to express myself."

Here I am in chaos and I have no one listening to my voice. I have no one to turn to who I can trust. I don’t know anyone. Everyone is against me. That’s what it felt like. You have your caseworkers. You have your therapist talking to you and helping you and everything you say, they don’t listen to you. I feel like a lot of the times, they didn’t take our voice into consideration. They just did whatever they were gonna do. ... When you have people just picking your life for you and it’s not for the better – because I know. I had to take care of myself, so I know what’s better for me. Even though I was making bad decisions, for the most part, if I knew that I didn’t need something in my life, I wanted people to listen to that. Like here’s all this abuse happening around me, here’s all this chaos, all these negative things are happening and I never – I was in a foster home once. The whole other time, I spent it in treatment centers."