The "Story of My Life"

Introduction

I am Brittany Nicole Hovan, born March 12, 2000. I was born and raised in this super small town in Pennsylvania. I was born into a family of, at the time, just my parents. My parents were nearly 30 when they had me, after many miscarriages and failed attempts at pregnancy. I was their little miracle as my grandparents called me.

This is already where my first lie falls. You see, I was a twin, there is no denying that. But my twin was lost during pregnancy. I have told the story that I lost my sister in a car accident when we were young children, however this is simply not true. For many years, I truly believed this lie. I would shut down when the topic was brought up by others, I was truly grieving. After speaking to a psychologist when I turned 18, I finally understood why I had this "lie" stuck in my head. When I was a child, I had a cousin in which we did everything together. We were inseparable. However, after a family falling out, we were forced to stop speaking. I was heartbroken and distraught.

Shortly after this family fiasco, is when I found out I had originally been a twin. For a child, this was very hard to deal with as I had felt as if my parents had hid it and lied to me. To cope with such dramatic changes in my life, my subconscious mind developed a story in which combined the two tragedies. The psychologists had explained to me that my mind had combined them into one story because two separate facts were too much for my brain to cope with. For 10 years, I truly truly believed the conception that I had a sister, and that she died in an accident when we were young. I had named her Ashley, and today I know now that Ashley was actually the name my parents had almost named my twin. I tell myself to this day that I had no idea, and that I had never been told what name my parents had chosen. However, I somehow knew the name. This was probably my earliest sign of Schizophrenia, however no one had known at the time.

Anyways, when I was four years old, my brothers Jake and Justin were born. From a young age, I vowed to protect them with my whole life. My father once told me a story in which a lady had come up to our family in Wal-Mart and asked my parents if my baby brothers were twins. The lady continued to jokingly ask me if she could take one home because I already had two, and I only needed one. I angrily shot down the woman and demanded she leave my brothers alone. Obviously, she was just kidding but my young self wanted both of my brothers to always be by my side. I will always want my brothers to be by my side, and that will never change.

I grew up as a pretty innocent child. I always did well in school, however I had a pretty bad attitude problem. I enjoyed fighting with anyone and everyone who disagreed with me, but hey isn't that what all kids do?

When I was six years old, I lost my grandmother. To most children that young, a death isn't really understood and is often a relatively less traumatic experience. However, that wasn't the case for me. My grandmother's death greatly impacted me, and still impacts me to this day. We were very much alike: brown hair, brown eyes, webbed toes, extra fingers, literally everything. In the years after she had died, my grandfather never really recovered, he just learned how to live with it. This is  18, I got a tattoo in her memory.

Everything changed though when I reached the age of about 10.