When I was 8 years old, I fantasized about being a beautiful teenage girl. I'd have long, sleek blonde hair, wear the trendiest fashions and designer sunglasses, and I'd have a whole entourage of girls who were jealous of me and wanted to be me, not to mention swaths of boys who wanted a shot at the coveted title of "my boyfriend". Basically, I wanted to be Sharpay Evans and Avril Lavigne all in one. Sadly, that wasn't on the docket for my life. Shortly after my parents' divorce, my mom, who had custody, decided to homeschool me and my siblings - and yes, cut out that rotten Disney Channel nonsense corrupting my brain with visions of stardom and adoration. Only Andy Griffith and Narnia for you, little missy. That along with forced, neotenous isolation, constantly being berated for daring to exist under their roof with a headful of secular programming that lingered from the beforetime: in other words, before my mom decided Sarah Duggar was hot shit. I turned 13 in 2012 a bespectacled, greasy little blonde monster trapped between two worlds: the one where I watched grating SpongeBob edits on YouTube and posted to excess on a Warrior Cats roleplay forum, and the one where I was harshly rebuked for doing so and told I was breaking my mother's heart. Shame. Guilt. Self-loathing. Crying. Laughing. Dopamine. Screaming fights. Hitting my baby siblings to take the edge off and ward their grubby hands away from the few prized possessisons I was still allowed to have. Repeat. I found solace in fictional characters and imagining they could protect me from the looming fear of the next time I'd be called a brat and a pig, forced to come to terms with the "reality" of what a wretch I was. Bowser from "Super Mario". Tigerstar from "Warrior Cats". KITT from "Knight Rider" (yeah, we went WAY retro in that house). And then came summertime. Somehow, for some reason, that's when everything crashed down on me all at once. My dad's house felt like my one safe place - sure, Dad had his issues and could get annoying. He could be a massive attention-seeker and seemed to demand my siblings and I participate in whatever goofy impromptu ritual suited his whim (no doubt in part because of how firm my mom was about withholding us), but hey, for the most part he understood how precious that time we got to play video games and engage in online culture was to us. One week, though, it didn't feel like that to me at all. The couch I slept on was, for some bizarre reason, in the kitchen, and above it was a poster of a painting that made me nervous. Munch's "The Scream". It felt like a sick joke the universe - or in some disturbing psychic way, my dad himself, maybe to punish my ungrateful, hormonal teenage ass for refusing to sing the "Waffle Machine" song one too many times - was playing on me so that I wouldn't get as much enjoyment out of that precious time. For some reason, in the middle of that weeklong visit it hit me square in the chest that that Disney Channel high school experience I'd wanted so badly as a little girl was now completely out of my reach. I was about to be freshman-aged, and I was doomed to spend the next four years separated from modern culture, watching helplessly on Facebook as the girls I'd known in my brief time in public elementary school played sports, became cheerleaders, got boyfriends, maybe won college scholarships. Meanwhile I'd be babysitting, reading Warrior Cats, watching G-rated movies on Friday nights and spending most of my free time alone. I found myself, for the first time, realizing maybe it'd be for the best if my life would just end. The afternoon of July, 20, 2012, found not only the 68th anniversary of the date Hitler was almost killed with a bomb left under his desk (there happened to be $68 dollars in the little purse my aunt gave me where I kept my sparkly red Sansa clip) and an outbreak of panic surrounding an Aurora, Colorado theater where a man in a Batman mask had opened fire in the middle of a screening of "The Dark Knight Rises", but 13-year-old Ellie hunched miserably over her dad's half-dead laptop watching Hetalia videos on YouTube, posting to warriorcatsrpg.com, and inhaling the choking smell of the taco meat her dad and "second mom" were cooking only five feet away from where she was sitting. Sick to her stomach, feverish, clammy palms and wanting to escape life (ungrateful little shit). Then she remembered something - a cartoon she'd watched back in April and had dropped because watching cartoons was "embarrassing".