“As I grew older I learned to be ashamed of being poor, too. It became humiliating, something I'd do everything I could to hide from the rest of the world. I developed an overwhelming sense of being excluded from everything. Everywhere you look you see people with things that you do not have, and it has a profound mental effect. That's mostly during the teenage years.”

“Everywhere you look you see people with things that you do not have, and it has a profound mental effect.”

“Inside the house was as dark as an oil slick, so you couldn't see anything moving in the room but you could sense it. It was the same sort of sensation you would experience if a closet door were to swing silently open behind your back. Later I learned a term to describe that sensation - air displacement. What I was sensing was air being displaced by something moving from one spot to another.”

“I began doing my own research into Wicca, reading about it and even meeting a group of local teens who were followers of the religion. They were a good source of information, but I couldn't stand being around them. They were all extremely flaky and melodramatic. I felt embarrassed for them, as they didn't have the sense to realize how socially inept they were. Wicca is a beautiful religion in theory, but I distanced myself from anything to do with it because I couldn't take the people. Many of them are people in their thirties who still try to live and behave like teenagers. Wicca seems to draw a great many people who cannot or will not grow up.”

“The only thing that could soothe and calm me during this era was music. That's continued to be true throughout my life. My mother would put my sister and me to bed and turn on the radio to sing us to sleep. There was something very comforting about being in a dark, cold room with Prince, Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper, or Madonna playing quietly. I didn't have to think about anything - the music took me away from myself and I got lost in it. I needed it like a drug. I felt disconnected and alone, and I realized around this time that things would never get better. It got so bad that I would pretend to be sick at school just so I could come home and lie in bed listening to music. It was like being adrift on the ocean at night. I still have trouble falling asleep without music now.”

“For a split second today I could smell home. It smelled like sunset on a dirt road. I thought my heart was going to break. The world I left behind was so close I could almost touch it. Everything in me cried out for it. It's amazing how certain shades of agony have their own beauty. I can't ever seem to make myself believe that the home I once knew doesn't even exist anymore. It's still too real inside my head. I wish I had a handful of dust from back then, so that I could keep it in a bottle and always have it near.”

“I learned a long time ago that you have to experience something for yourself or you never really comprehend it.”