Trust is a goal of mine.

Accountability will get you out of places that blame never could.

The feeling is that nobody has my back because they never have. The fear is that nobody ever will. Here are the first two of three stories that make it hard for me to trust people.

If I could do it all over, I would have teenaged better. When my mom kicked me out of the house on my 18th birthday, I had some scary nights trying to find a roof over my head. It shouldn’t have happened this way. I don’t blame my mom for kicking me out. My mom was a single mom and simultaneously raised two teenagers and two toddlers. Ultimately, I should have complied with mom’s house rules at least until I graduated high school and made plans to actually be independent. I was gone with a girlfriend the whole weekend before my 18th birthday. Mom had joked that she was kicking me out when I turned 18, but all parents say that, right? I get home after a wonderful weekend away, and she shows me the cake she baked for me and tells me to get out of the house by 5 pm, or she’s calling the police. And she did. The police came, I asked can she really do this? They assured me that she can, and that’s what happened. I requested clothes. She gave me a random trash bag of my clothes, mostly things I didn’t even wear, and sent me into the frigid January North Dakota night. I was between jobs and halfway through my senior year of high school. For the first time I was completely on my own.

I wish I would have been nicer to my mom because when she kicked me out that night, our relationship changed forever. I had some friends who really helped me out, but I wore out my welcome everywhere I went due to problems with alcohol, marijuana, or pornography, and I spent some cold nights on the street. Those nights really made me appreciate all of the kind parents of my friends that opened up their homes to me, but sitting in the dark, being too cold to sleep, I’d be lying if I said that didn’t drive a wedge between my mom and I. I love my Mom, and my children love their grandmother, and I respect what she’s accomplished, but life’s pages are written in ink. You can never go back and undo the actual suffering that you caused someone. You can choose how to write the next page, but you can’t unwrite the last. If there is a lesson there, just don’t do any grand evil things to your children because they will most likely outlive you, then you are dead, and there is still someone out there angry at you. Be kind to your children, enable them as much as you can, and get out of their way.

One particular night, I had an agreement with someone from school I hardly knew; he had his own apartment and said I could crash on his couch that night. I showed up in the evening, and there was no answer. I had no money and no other options that night. I half-slept on the sidewalk, but it was too cold to really sleep. The next day, I asked him about it at school, and he dismissed it like he had forgotten he wouldn’t be there, and it was no big deal. Since that night, I’ve never taken a roof over my head for granted. I appreciate housing, and I don’t trust that anyone else will ever provide it for me. I told myself I would never be in that situation again, helpless and cold on the street. I ended up in a long-term living situation with a great friend of mine and burned that bridge over an incident involving smoking marijuana out of a gas mask. I lucked out and started dating a new girlfriend. She was younger than me, but emotionally she was a few years ahead of me, and she taught me as best she could how to love a woman and be her man. She lived with her mom, who was in the Air Force and gone most of the time, but she was actually a really cool lady, and I they allowed me to live with them for 3-4 months as I finished my senior year of high school. We broke up over trivial reasons but stayed friends for a few years. We could have had a better relationship if I had gotten my crap together.

I used a lot of people when I was a teenager. I’ve paid a lot forward, but I’ve never paid anything back. I made all the wrong decisions and was saved by the grace of others. I put myself into dangerous situations and expected my friends to bail me out. I was wreckless no matter how many times I crashed

Teenagers are programmed to seek out a tribe and to deeply love the tribe they are connected to. As teenagers, we trust early, deeply, and too often. We feel safe in incredibly dangerous situations. Teenagers will go along with anything the tribe is doing, even if it crosses our morals or boundaries.

When I was 18, I trusted my best friend with my life. He was strong and loved to fight. He knew a lot of different people who partied and could always find us something fun to do.

High school graduation in the Midwest means drinking. Drinking means whiskey and tequila and vodka and beer means kegs and red kups and keg stands(being held upside down while you ingest as much beer as possible directly from the keg tap). Drinking is the official sport of the Midwest. I went to a lot of cool graduation parties the year I graduated, though I graduated 3 months late after summer school. I missed too many days in my Speech class, more on the Speech teacher later, and I had to retake Speech in Summer School to graduate. You get it, all my friends were graduating, and I still went to the parties. This party was at a lake. My girlfriend, with the Air Force mom, drove us. The only people we knew at the lake party were my best friend and a pseudo friend who was also my weed dealer. My girlfriend, not being a local North Dakota hoodie and baseball cap girl, looked incredible. I knew she was the prettiest girl at the party, and honestly, I liked that energy. Weed dealer guy approaches my gf and is hitting on her, I walk up and say jokingly, “Hey man, that’s my chick”, and playfully pushed weed dealer guy in the chest. I was very slender as a teenager, and he probably outweighs me by 100 pounds. He shoves me hard and yells some threat at me. I’m like, “Hey man, I’m just playing”, and we high-five and laugh about it. The party continues on, and people are drinking like it’s a competition. My girlfriend is driving that night, so I’m feeling good about having some drinks.

I turn away from the bonfire to walk to fetch more drinks. I take a few steps in the dark and feel a blow to my head. I see stars and hit the ground. I feel punches and kicks, and instinctively curl up to protect myself. I am athletic, but I really have no idea how to fight at this point in my life. I don’t know how long I was beaten for. I’ve seen fights like this where the person on the bottom is jumped by 5-10 people, but being on the bottom, I couldn’t tell you anything about it other than I was feeling pretty peaceful before that sucker punch. My girlfriend, whom I never gave much credit to at the time, is really an incredible person. My best friend, who loved to fight, didn’t break up the fight. It was my 17-year-old girlfriend screaming and pulling people off of me who probably saved me from suffering any permanent damage. I asked my friend why he didn’t help, and he said he would have been beaten up too, that there were too many of them. The guy who sucker punched me claimed that he thought I had a real fight with the weed dealer guy earlier and was sticking up for him. This guy will appear one more time in my story on a night when he became very peaceful and really didn’t want to fight anyone.

We left pretty quickly. Once in her car, I saw the giant egg forming on my forehead along with some other lumps, scuffs, bruises, and one black eye. Luckily, my face seemed to catch most of the blows, and my vital organs remained well protected. I know this is getting long, trust me, I wish this were the end of the story, insert moral here, post, publish, admire.

As I mentioned, I’ve never given this woman enough credit, but here we are driving home from nowhere’sville North Dakota, and I’m all beat up, and she’s trying to lighten the mood. It’s late, but realistically, you expect to be at a lake party until the beer runs out or the sun comes up. We were coming home around midnight, much earlier than we thought we would be making that drive. Gf starts driving on the opposite side of the highway. No cars around, it’s a back country North Dakota highway, and you can see for 10 miles at night. Woohoo, look at us on the wrong side of the road. It did make me feel a little better. At least we had each other. She turns her headlights off, then back on. That’s pretty wild. Out of the blackness, we see the brightest police lights coming through the ditch behind us and approaching from our rear.

She drank a bit but was not above the legal limit to drive; she was, however, under the age of 21. Gf is going to jail for minor in consumption of alcohol. I am 18, not driving, but am beat up and smell like alcohol. I am going to jail for minor in consumption of alcohol. Once we arrive in small-town jail in North Dakota, I realize that Gf has an Air Force mom who will come to bail her out. I called my brother and he was drinking himself and couldn’t come pick me up. I have nobody to get me on this Friday night, so I will be in jail for the weekend and have to go to court on Monday. I have a swollen knob on the side of my forehead the size of a baseball, and one of my eyes is mostly swollen shut. I don’t want to sit in small-town jail, this day can’t get any worse. This was supposed to be a fun graduation celebration, but now I’m looking at a weekend in jail, and the deadbeat that sucker-punched me is still having the time of his life at the lake party.

Once detained in the jail, we are separated. I think I just had zip ties on my wrists. I don’t think we were handcuffed. I heard the officers speaking that the mom was coming for the girl, and they were waiting on transport for me to go to the county jail in the next town over. I was sitting in this small town jail, bleeding and busted up. They left me alone. I looked at the door for a solid minute before I went for it. I went straight through the door and never looked back. Hearing the door close behind me, I expected footsteps, gunshots, tazers, and police sirens. I ran and didn’t hear anything. I was blocks away before I turned around, and there was nothing moving in the whole town. No headlights, no sirens. I don’t know if they even looked for me. I ran to my Grandma’s house across town, but I didn’t want to wake her and scare her. I snuck into her backyard and hid inside her shed next to her lawnmower. I slept there the half-sleep of a fugitive. You constantly have dreams that you’re being chased and wake up to every noise.

I woke up when the sun came up. I survived. I made it. I knew that the police had my information and that I probably made my situation worse, but I didn’t spend the weekend in jail. I looked for my grandma, and she had already gone to work at the grocery store. I knew I had to tell her what had happened, and she would help me sort it out. I walked across town in broad daylight, wearing the same clothes from the night before and my face all beat and bloody. Every car I thought was the police, and they were about to light me up. That fugitive life is too stressful for me. I walked to my grandma’s work, and she was surprised to see me, surprised at my appearance; I looked like I had been in a car accident. My grandma Esther has helped me so many times; she is effortless in her assistance of others. She lives to make other lives better. She helped me to get cleaned up, then she fed me, and we went to the police station, where I turned myself in and scheduled a court date.

My punishment for the minor in consumption and escape? A scheduled weekend in county jail doing yardwork.

After licking my wounds for a few days, a good friend and I went to the strongest person we knew and asked him to teach us how to fight. He was 3-4 years older and had recently broken his hand on a college football player’s face. He wanted us to teach him to be more peaceful, and we wanted him to teach us how to be more violent. We lifted weights at his place every day and fought his BOB torso realistic punching dummy. We got stronger, and he told everyone that he had our backs. The three of us ended up at a party with the winner of the sucker punch challenge from the lake party. He begged me to tell him which guy it was who sucker punched me. I tried to hide it to keep the peace at the party, but he found out anyway. Our guy made sucker-punch guy cry, and you could see the fear in his eyes, but he kept the peace and did not beat him up. Vengeance is a dish best served with force, not violence.

I can’t blame my mom for being homeless, and I can’t blame my friend for letting me get beat up, and I can’t blame me getting beat up for being arrested, and I can’t blame that gf for being arrested. I also cannot say that those events didn’t completely change my relationship with those two people, and just people in general. It’s difficult for me to really trust someone with anything. I’m working it out by writing all of these stories, so I don’t have to carry them around in my head anymore.

A million dandelions in your pockets will weigh you down til you can’t walk, but pick each one up, blow away the seeds, and they weigh nothing.