🏠What it means to have grown up in the child protective services or foster care system
Growing up in the system meant your childhood was measured in caseworker visits and court dates, where your life was reduced to paperwork and trauma checkboxes that never captured your real story.
You may have learned to perform "okayness" for social workers and officials, knowing that showing cracks might trigger another upheaval in your already unstable world. Your survival depended on strategic self-presentation—being good enough to avoid trouble but not so needy that you'd be seen as problematic. Home was never permanent, and you kept bags half-packed long after leaving care, never fully trusting that any situation would last.
You may have developed a deep distrust of institutions that claim to "help," having seen how help can tear families apart and create more trauma than it prevents. Relationships might feel temporary to you, as you brace for people to vanish at any moment. You learned that you're not a person with individual needs—you're a case file, a placement, a problem to be managed rather than a child to be loved unconditionally.