I didn’t grow up without love, and I didn’t grow up neglected. That distinction matters to me, because it would be dishonest to say otherwise. My mother was there. She stayed home with us. She cooked, cleaned, worried, and did the quiet daily work of keeping children alive and tended to. There was attachment. There was care. There was a sense of home.

What we didn’t have was steadiness.

My parents married young, too young, really, and my father arrived in that marriage already carrying more history than the relationship could bear. By the time I was born, his life was a tangle of past marriages, abandoned responsibilities, unsteady work, and appetites that rarely stayed contained. He didn’t bring calm into a room; he brought movement. Jobs changed constantly. Cities shifted. Schools came and went. The shape of our lives never quite settled long enough to feel permanent.

As a child, I didn’t experience this as fear. I wasn’t hiding or shrinking. I wasn’t walking on eggshells. I was living inside a system that regularly reorganized itself, and my body learned to reorganize right along with it. When life shifted, I shifted. When things fell apart, I adjusted. This wasn’t bravery. It was adaptation.

My body, meanwhile, had its own ideas about instability. I was a sickly child from the beginning, infections, hospital visits, breathing problems, and eventually type 1 diabetes. While the external world remained unpredictable, my internal world required vigilance, monitoring, and constant attention. Long before anyone explained responsibility to me, my body taught it firsthand.

By the time I was old enough to understand what diabetes meant, I was already learning how to manage it largely on my own. I checked my blood sugar. I gave myself injections. I walked to clinics. I learned how to listen closely to my body because no one else could do that job for me. Childhood, for me, was not carefree, but it was functional. And function became the goal.

Looking back, I can see it clearly now: my nervous system didn’t learn survival because no one loved me. It learned survival because love existed alongside disruption, and disruption was the louder teacher.