sonder.

Her mother was a schizophrenic crack addict who vanished for weeks at a time. She grew up on one bare mattress, and school was the only place she ate. At 11 she was moved into a one-bedroom trailer with three heroin addicts, and on her 14th birthday her grandmother put her in a psych ward. Years later a strip club bouncer made her a bet, and 24 hours later she was on a plane to LA to shoot p*rn. Her name is Ziggy. In the video below she tries to tell her childhood out loud and keeps stopping to apologize. The hardest part to say is about her father, and what he did to all three kids in the first two years of her life. She remembers one day most. He locked her sister in a closet so he could get to Ziggy alone. She screamed as loud as she could while her sister pounded on the door from the inside. When it was over, her sister crawled over to her. She says that moment bonded them and broke them apart forever. Today her sister can’t hold a single relationship. Her brother is starting to show signs of schizophrenia. Her youngest brother won’t speak to anyone. And her parents are still married. Her mom calls sometimes to say she’s sorry, then calls again months later not knowing who she’s talking to. When CPS stepped in, the kids were handed back to that same mother. One room, one mattress, no sheets, no pillow, no clothes. At school she told everyone she was just a disobedient kid who refused to shower, because nobody had ever taught her how. Later her grandmother kept her in lockdown rehab, and Ziggy says it was just so she could keep collecting her social security checks. The video opens with her listing everything she’ll never get: her mom teaching her makeup, her dad teaching her to ride a bike. She’s 25 now. She says she’s finally happy, and that none of it was her fault. So who failed her worse: the parents who did this, or the system that kept handing her back to them?