The cold, sterile walls of the social services office felt suffocating, even to a child. The air was thick with a tension I couldn't understand, but I could feel it pressing against me, the weight of invisible expectations. At just ten years old, I sat quietly, legs swinging from the too-big chair, clutching a tattered backpack that contained all I had in the world. It was as if the room itself was saying: You don’t belong here. The social worker, a woman with tired eyes and a clipped tone, shuffled papers on her desk without looking at me. Her movements were mechanical, as if this moment, this scene, had been replayed too many times. “You’ll be fine,” she said, almost as if to herself, her voice hollow. “They’ll take care of you.”
But “they” never did.
I would learn, time and time again, that the promises made by the System were hollow. Fine wasn’t fine. They didn’t take care of me. They moved me, shuffled me around, a nameless face in an ever-changing sea of strangers, each new home only a brief stop in the ongoing journey of uncertainty. From as early as I could remember, I was bounced between homes, each one more temporary than the last. A week here, a month there. Sometimes, the foster parents seemed kind, their smiles warm, but that warmth would quickly turn to frustration when I didn’t behave the way they expected. I was a child, after all, trying to make sense of a life that had no stability, no roots, no sense of permanence.
Each move was a new set of rules to learn, new people to disappoint. The tension in each home was palpable, a low hum beneath every conversation, every gesture. I was never really there, always a little out of place, always just a little too aware of the fragility of it all. I could feel the cracks in the walls before they appeared, the subtle shift when the kindness of a foster parent turned to frustration, when they no longer saw me as a child in need of care, but as a problem they couldn’t solve.
In those fleeting moments, I learned that the word family didn’t mean the same thing to everyone. Sometimes it meant security, other times it meant chaos. It meant love when it was convenient, and neglect when it was easier to turn away. The concept of “home” became a dream, a whispered fantasy that was always just out of reach.
Every time I settled into a school, just when I thought I might make a friend or get used to a teacher, I’d be uprooted and sent somewhere new. I was never allowed to truly settle anywhere, never allowed the space to grow roots. My education was a patchwork quilt, stitched together with fragments of lessons, with gaping holes in places where lessons had been abandoned. Math lessons left unfinished, history classes never begun. Geography was taught in passing, but it was never enough to understand the world beyond the next foster home. I learned early on that I didn’t have time to make friends, and I stopped trying. It became easier to keep my distance, to protect myself from the inevitable hurt of goodbyes that always came too soon. By the time I reached my teens, I wasn’t learning anymore—I was surviving.
Surviving meant adapting, shifting, pretending to be someone I wasn’t just to fit into whatever role they needed me to play. Surviving meant quieting the questions in my head, the doubts about my own worth, the fear that I was somehow the cause of all this instability. My mind was a battlefield, a place where the ghosts of the past would often surface, asking me to believe that it was my fault.
I stopped trusting the people around me. Trust was a luxury I could no longer afford. The social workers, the teachers, the foster parents—everyone seemed to have a plan for me, but no one ever asked me what I needed. No one ever asked what I felt. It was as if my existence was something to be fixed, something to be molded into the version of me they thought I should be. My needs were secondary to their expectations.
And then there was my mother—whenever I was allowed to see her, when the visits weren’t interrupted by some new “situation,” some new rule that kept us apart. She always said things might have been different if I’d just stayed home, if I hadn’t run away so many times. But I wasn’t a troublemaker, not in the way they thought. I wasn’t trying to cause problems. I was just trying to find something familiar, something that made sense in a world that felt like it was constantly shifting beneath my feet. But I was one of the “troublesome kids,” they said. A runner. Every time I ran away, they moved me further from home, from the streets I once knew, from the only place I’d ever felt like I belonged.
By the time I turned fourteen, I was in Wales, far from the streets I once knew, far from the people I once loved. Far from the warmth of the sun-soaked memories of my childhood. Wales was a foreign place, full of unfamiliar faces, and no one there could understand the longing I carried, the ache in my chest for a home that didn’t exist anymore. I had become a stranger to myself, a child lost in a sea of paperwork, of case files and social workers who came and went like fleeting shadows.
The promise of a better life, the hope that one day someone would understand, that one day someone would truly see me, became nothing more than an echo in my mind. I realized that the System’s promises were not promises at all—they were just words spoken in the sterile rooms of offices like the one I’d sat in as a child. They were a series of well-intentioned lies, designed to placate, to make it seem like someone was doing something. But in the end, it was just a cycle—a machine that ground children like me through its gears, a system that saw us as numbers, as cases to be closed, rather than lives to be nurtured.
But even in the face of all this, something inside me refused to break. Even as I was torn from place to place, even as I learned that promises were often empty, I still held on to the flickering hope that one day, someone might see me—not as a problem to be solved, but as a person worthy of care, of love, of a home.
By the time I reached my teenage years, I wasn’t the same child who once sat in that cold, sterile office, clutching a tattered backpack. I had become something else—something stronger, something unyielding.
The System’s theft, its aching toll, forged a survivor, not a victim. I carried with me the lessons of survival, of resilience, of holding on to the parts of me that no one else saw. And though the world had tried to break me, to convince me that I was disposable, I stood tall. I had survived it all, and in the end, I was not broken. I was just beginning to rebuild.
©zars
Z