I was conceived on LSD, my mum smoked 3 packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day throughout the pregnancy, and at 6 months she decided to cut live wires from the ceiling. The way she described it to me — repeatedly — was that she saw black wires hanging out, grabbed a chair and a pair of scissors, and was violently thrown across the room.

She told me (and my stepfather, her second husband) the electric shock made me stop moving for so long she thought she’d unalived me.

Then they dragged me out with forceps.

My mum told me that part many times too — how the last words she heard while trying to push me out were her OB/GYN saying, “Shit, knock her out.”

When she woke, newborn me was handed over with a “perfectly rounded head” and dark bruises at my temples, and she freaked out because nobody had explained what happened.

What I’ve never understood is why, when she later decided to write down the story of the summer of my birth in 1969 to “share” with me sometime in the last decade, she left out the forceps entirely.

Some people like rewriting history.

As we’re no longer speaking, I can’t ask her why. And no mental-health professional has ever known what to do with any of this information.

I’m done with being considered mentally ill when my nervous system was sabotaged before I even took my first breath.

People get confused when I say my nervous system took a serious hit before I even entered the world — but that’s exactly what happened. There was no “blank slate.” Zero chance at a regulated baseline.

And yet every psychiatrist I’ve ever met tried to squeeze me into diagnoses invented for people who started life under more or less normal conditions. None of them knew what to do with my history, so they pathologised the aftermath instead.

I’m done with that story.

What I am is a warrior who’s survived impossible things again and again.

I needed support I never got — as a child, as a young woman — because my mother, like many boomers, tossed me into the shark tank thinking it would “make me stronger.”

Decades of therapy and writing later, I finally understand: I will never be “normal,” and that’s fine.

Normal was never the assignment. Survival was.

So when do I finally get to thrive?