1 Prologue: My First 16
My name is Alec James Calderon and I was born on July 12th, 2000 at 3:57 p.m. in Torrance, California. I grew up in Winnetka, California and attended an Episcopal Christian school called St. Martin in the fields until the end of the 4th grade. My family and I then relocated to Santa Clarita Valley as a result of my dad taking a pay cut at work.
I still can't quite pin point what sourced such a drastic shift in my young psyche, but come the 5th grade, I remember becoming truly depressed, irrationally disturbed, withdrawn and isolated from family, and even suicidal. It's not that I lost ties with anyone pre-move, or didn't make new friends to make up for old relationships. I did, but the feeling that I didn't want to be here, or didn't belong, that I must have had from an even younger age, became drastically and devastatingly emphasized over the course of 5th and 6th grade.
I sought out sex, drugs, and violence at the ages of 11-12 and found what I was looking for. I rejected and felt rejected by the "mundane" & privileged life I was given and wanted to pursue something separate from all of it. I was deeply loved by many but I was never able to feel it at the time. I was into everything that was "bad". All of it... I felt a sense of self, accomplishment, power, dominance, in making a pact with & embodying all the worst things I could find in this world. I resolved conflict & angst I had with the world by extreme self harm and harming others.
Fast forward, I was a full blown heroin addict by the age of 15. It started with me leaving home to live with tweakers in my local river bed and falling in love with drugs like meth, LSD, prescription pills, weed, all of the above really... Heroin brought me to my knees real quick, though, and was one of the few things I got into that I knew had to stop, and became a continuous battle attempting to overcome. My story involves the consistent fluctuation of opioid relapse and recovery, always a couple months each phase, using and then abstinent, back to using, and so forth...
During my periods of abstinence from heroin & fentanyl use, (which are often interchangeable for one who has a physical dependence to opioids of that caliber) I would often indulge in psychedelics and what I considered to be less blatantly harmful drugs.
As I had mentioned, I had the influence of Christianity in my early upbringing. By the age that my mental faculties & truly attempted self reflection sprung into action, which were indeed flawed, incomplete and tainted with a self deprecating tint, I had concluded to myself & verbally expressed to my parents that I did not believe in the god that I was taught of.
All concern with spirituality & the idea of metaphysical forces at play in my reality remained irrelevant for the first hellish 16 & a half years of my life until my psychedelic experimentation progressed and began truly speaking to me on a level I had never before experienced. At least not beyond the veil of amnesia and limited sense of reality, acquired upon the birth of my current body and mortally limited sense of identity, in the dream spell of a time line I had once, without reservation to consider more than my limited perception and conception of time, refered to as my life.
