As children, we are taught that monsters are not real; the one we think is hiding under our beds at night or in the closet is, for the most part, a figment of our imaginations. There is something profoundly frightening about being in the dark, especially when our brains begin to play tricks on us in the moment.

It's not until we are older and learn the horrible truth that monsters do exist, but they aren't otherworldly entities like we thought, but just like us in appearance. Humans, as with animals in the wild, can be rather brutal and vicious at times, something I'm well acquainted with.

As I previously mentioned, I was ostracized from society at a young age, mostly due to misunderstandings about who I am. Growing up, I was labeled a monster, murderer, and rapist by my classmates, who parroted what their parents said about me. The fact is, I was born with a genetic aneuploidy, which to this day is poorly understood and for which a very biased study was performed in the 1960s using incarcerated criminals as test subjects who reportedly had my same aneuploidy.

As it turns out, my aneuploidy, while classified as "rare" by the government, is actually relatively common, and unlike other genetic abnormalities such as Down syndrome or Williams syndrome, I appear normal physically.

However, back in the 1990's, when I was growing up, the previous study, while debunked by then, was still fresh in experts minds. It wasn't just classmates who alienated me; it was teachers as well. Teachers felt uneasy with me in their classes and demanded I be segregated from everyone else, but it wasn't always like that.

Before anyone found out my dark, deep secret, which I was even in the dark about,. Teachers described me as smart but slow; while it's true that I didn't care for other humans or interacting with them, I loved to learn; I just did it at my own pace.

It wasn't until the age of ten that I learned about my secret, subsequently finding out that my parents had notified my school about my medical situation years earlier.

I'm not even sure how anyone found out about me; I had my suspicions, though. You see, there was a bully of mine whose mother worked for the school. How it happened didn't really matter; the damage was done, and the daily bullying went from insults and name-calling to physical violence.

I have always had an extremely high tolerance for pain, something I think might be attributed to my aneuploidy. I never really felt the pain inflicted upon me by those bullies, so that isn't what bothered me. 

What bothered me the most about the daily beatings was not so much the fact they were beating me, but rather the indifference shown by the people around me who just stood there and watched. Some egged it on, others chanted, "That's what you get, freak." The inhumanity of it all was astounding to me, and to this day, every time I close my eyes, I still see every kick, punch, slap, and swing. As with my genetic aneuploidy, it's going to be with me until my dying days.

Life goes on, though; dwelling on the past does nothing. Pick up and get moving. I keep to myself as an adult these days and stay true to myself. Recently, I found a website for expecting mothers to give support to each other and found numerous posts about women who were pregnant with babies just like me.

I realized in that moment that it's still happening; my kind are still being demonized, and I had an epiphany of sorts. In the past, I have tried in vain to find others like me genetically speaking and failed. I came to the realization that a lot of us get aborted, and it made me feel something unexpected: anger.

Normally I wouldn't care about strangers, but this is something at the center of my core being and a fight that is deeply personal. I'm prepared to do something that is new to me—actually fight for something meaningful instead of just dismissing the plight and chalking it up to humans being humans.