Raptor Girls 010

Growing up in an interracial family, in a homogeneously white farm town ended up putting a lot of pressure on me and my family and how the rest of the world were to view them as my family on my mothers side carries their southern pride with them quite a ways, even to this day, my family holds their issues as my grandparents would have wanted them to. This however would be one of the hardest issues that would eventually tax me at the bottom of the family in their misplacement of shame.

Any time anything’s were to go wrong, even when things were good, my family pressured me to show up and show out, because being me wasn’t good enough. If I ever tipped the scale that would allow privilege to fall onto my brown family roots I was to never be taught to forgive myself for being brown. And that it was almost as if I was to be treated as a constant reminder of what was wrong with both families.

While I didn’t stick out much in my fathers family until my little cousins were born, I could embrace being myself more often and was very seldom to be made an example of. However my mother’s standards was that of a foreboding wayward story of the example she was in the family as the youngest for 10 years, which made room for an excuse for quite some time to placate understanding between her and I. This did not age well, and she refuses to acknowledge her crutching of this, what amounted to be a trauma bond, and how it effects our adult relationship to this day. That I should not only give her a break but be grateful for the ways I am treated and addressed when my name surfaces in passing. Let alone the silence I was forced to maintain, through all of the family get togethers, every holiday, anytime I was exposed to the white privilege, that I was to be made highly aware of my self control and what was beaten and punished into me as issue with it.

My parents have created a boogieman out of my reactions to their abuse, and believe that my anger is to be something everyone in the family should be ashamed of. But it doesn’t end there, this has bleed into my sexual identity and issues with gender.

My sister and I would play dress up as all kids do and when I started getting to a certain age around 5 my parents sat us down and explained that I was getting too old to be playing dress up and that we had to begin to separate, that bath time together wasn’t going to last forever. Which is obvious, but the way these things played out would slowly articulate our detachment from one another as siblings, as I used to fawn over my sister for a long time and would be asked to grow out of this, that it was shameful. This would create several different lanes for problems and the way we dealt with them over the next three decades. There were very few points of recognition of this and self awareness of just how far apart this would split us up. One of which would be the summers that would change everything and my mother would experience her first dramatic change in health due to a coma I helped save her from when I noticed how she wasn’t doing well, after I watched her get hurt hopping over a dog fence.

Our family had to acknowledge how close we were to keep the family as we could have been left motherless. My sister and I grew our adult bonds that summer and left much up to fate, but there was a sense of love and unconditional understanding, something that no longer exists after several problems I was to address about my anger towards women in my life, a problem that wouldn’t take place til much later in my adult hood into my twenties.

After middle school, with the exception of too many instances, my family no longer would spank me when I would get in trouble, but would revoke my privileges of anything from Music to TV and Videogames, my family decided their status was far more important than understanding and giving closure to any behaviors that would stand out as unconventional. Heaven forbid I get detention, and that every letter grade below a C ever be recognized as anything but “not applying myself” anytime I’d try to cut through the noise as a talented musician it would be reduced by my sister or my older cousins. Very often I was asked to be an active participant in supporting my older sister for ever concert, play, graduation and event, to sit still and not bug anyone. Many of my events would be filled with a “oh your sister is too busy to show up” or “what is she supposed to do, she’s in college, she can’t show up” and that once I was in college that I was supposed to be grateful that she showed up to one event I was apart of, that my parents showed up to very few events that ment something to me. That in 2012 meeting a Richie Hawtin and the inventor of the Traktor Controller was simply a understatement, that there was no room to encourage growth in my music career, as I was to gain access in the entertainment industry by simply getting my college diploma would be enough to compete in the worlds most sot after opportunities in one of the most competitive careers in the entire world.

During this time in my life it was thought to be realistic as a full time student, to sacrifice my summers from then on to be a professional musician and simply get a job on the side, and that experimenting with drugs was catalyst to a downward spiral, and had nothing to do with growing or making friends, but an act of rebellion that I would never be able to come back from with out going to therapy with my mother, as my innocence was lost, that there are no admirable life paths I could take from that point on that would salvage any thing left my mother would end up passing off from out of our relationship, privileges ment for her and I, that would be spent on to her other students, some of my friends, and other family members that didn’t mind looking the other way to accept such favors, as they were the backboard for venting from my mother.

I digress, with the abuse, came sexual self-exploration, escapism through music and art, to eventually experimenting with, what society would more than likely look at as soft drugs today, to a fist fight in the car with my father while he was driving, to flipping chairs down the stairs when they refused to understand what I was attempting to communicate for years about the astral realm and telepathy and cultural understanding. My mother was the lead cause as to why everything in the family has fallen apart.

With co-parenting my sister was treated with the utmost respect between the both of us, and that everything she failed at paled in comparison to the amount of let down and shame I brought and was to continue to bring to the family so long as I refused to cater to her commands. I sought out therapy in 2011 and then again in 2013 to begin to understand just what I had unlocked within my experience of becoming unsheltered to a world that encouraged me to do more in desensitizing myself to the capabilities that had been available to my peers for decades.

Mindfulness. This was a concept that was taught to me by my therapist at Columbia College Chicago in 2013 after my terribly abusive relationship with my ex girlfriend. It was during this relationship I discovered my rites of passages, in extremely unconventional ways, I was exposed to the magical world of hallucinations beyond human comprehension, that of which taught me who I was to be in the family and why I was going to undertake some extremely rare pilgrimage for both my mother father sister and extended family. I attempted to disclose this extremely sensitive information during my first round of therapy that was brought on by my suspension from college during an argument Kate and I had one night where we got drunk and started arguing, to which I would leave her dorm room and she would follow me into my dorm yelling at me, resulting in the biggest slap across her face, to where she would be found crying in the stairwell where an RA and security would meet me to escort me off campus, to where I would take the redline from campus to my sisters apartment filled with roaches, and crash to stay the weekend, and be reminded just how far apart my family has distanced themselves from me. I would reveal to my therapist that I was seeing a very evil person in the mirror who would tell me to shave my head, to which she replied you might have schizophrenia, to which my sister would encourage me that, no, we would have noticed something by now. This first go of therapy would result in my best friends closing me out of several opportunities here in Michigan and eventually taking me to a catholic priest to receive some light exorcising and a bottle of holy water that I would eventually gift to Candella.

A terrible few years in between living with Kate and a few other friends, visits from old hometown friends and them recognizing that I was no longer the same happy well rounded Alex they knew, awful drug trips and psychosis, terribly abusive and violent arguments between Kate and I, to an abrupt end in 2013 between Kate and I, a promise made to meet back up in our 30s or even 40s, an attempt to gain footing in my once popular friend group to becoming a complete stranger to their new circle of friends, was only then, I introduced to one of my favorite therapists to this day in 2026, where I was encouraged to take LSD and fix things with my family.

That summer I tried MDMA for the first time at a music festival where someone passed me a bottle of Molly water at Clams Casino, where I would stare at the clouds and change my life for the better for ever.

From then on I knew I wanted to be apart of Psychedelic therapy for PTSD and C-PTSD and shamanism and show the world how wonderful of an experience these hallucinogens were, and that fear mongering of these life events were completely out of line as to the usefulness of their leveraging of ones nightmares could be brought to a completion in closure that which the likes of nominal society was yet to truly understand.

It was during this era of my college that I began to focus on the scarcity of water, and how precious a resource water actually is here on our planet, and that it could some day be made to change how we even work together as humans on this planet. During music festivals I would always seek the moment where everyone that was tripping, who knew you were also tripping, would all look at each other and acknowledge the very fact that we needed water, and that this is a much bigger deal than what people even know or are willing to acknowledge their roles in society, what we take for granted sometimes, a lot of times, far too many, that there needs to be recognition for the process of leading everyone to clean water.

It was a position I was divinely guided to lead, after the years of searching for meaning of what had previously sent me through several psychedelic psychotic breaks, did this make sense of what I was truly to be apart of in the world, and what awaited me well into my thirties, as premonitions were creeping up on me to beat this, to moments in inertia that were stolen from me in extreme pettiness and envy not but 10 years later, would I have the hindsight to quantify and access true understanding of my sobriety in addiction that has sent me previously through these extremely difficult coming of age in rites of passage. To bring the message to the rest of the world though my music and art, to transitioning from man to woman, and have still yet to be acknowledged by a single soul I have attempted to instill these moments in as a computer does a hard drive, was this upended by my former roommates, Jessica, Cat, Sam, Candella, and Mars, and my neighbors, Maka, Finn, and Chris, and the several hometown friends my cousin Cade and Ian would eventually introduce me to, did this even become known as a possibility of a medium of expression, a platform to express ones self outside of our known three dimensional reality.