I’m 23 years old.
I’ve always been a very introverted person.
My parents got divorced before I was born.
I’ve always lived with my mother.
As for my father,
I’ve only ever seen him once in our house when I was young.
I said hi,
And left.

My mother is a teacher.
One time,
When I was around 6 years old,
I was supposed to be studying,
But I got up to watch T.V.
She got her broken broom,
And hit me with it on my hand.
When I started crying,
And pulled my hand away,
She started hitting me with it on my legs,
And my entire body,
From head to toe.

In that moment,
And for the first time in my life,
I felt I couldn’t breathe,
And was blacking out.
A few minutes later,
I regained consciousness,
And found that I had shoved my mother to the ground.
I felt a lot of contradictory feelings at that moment.
But there were two thoughts that stood out:
If she doesn’t get up,
Does that mean no one will hit me again?
But I quickly realized that that could send me to prison,
So I ran to my room,
And locked the door.
She was cussing me,
And getting up,
While I was locking the door.

When I was 14 years old,
I was very fat.
I was sleeping one day,
When she started hitting me with a stick,
Because a teacher called her,
And told her that I had been skipping school.
I remember that day very well.
I had a fit of anger,
And broke the wardrobe,
As well as her stick.
I decided to stand up to her.
I told her, word for word,
That if she ever laid a hand on me again,
I would harm her.
She said that she’d bring my older cousins to hit me,
Because she had failed at raising me.
I cut the telephone cable,
Went to the kitchen,
And grabbed the biggest knife I could find.
—I don’t know who I was at that moment—
I locked my bedroom door, and told her,
“Whoever you bring her,
Will go home in pieces.”
And that was the last time she ever hit me.

But the stress never stopped.
It reached a point where I would cry myself to sleep.
I decided to work on myself,
And I installed Internet at home,
Under the pretense that it was for her work,
So I could learn English from movies,
And anything else I could find.
I had two goals at the time:
To go to college far away from her.
It didn’t matter what university it was,
As long as it didn’t have a campus in my city,
And to find a job,
And provide for myself.

Years later,
I’m currently proud of accomplishing all of this.
I’m proud of my strength.
My perspective on a lot things has changed during this journey,
And I sort of lost the ability to feel empathy.
But that’s a small price to pay for being where I am today.