Committing Statuscide - 1

Committing Statuscide - Chapter 1 - Intro - Memoir of Bryton Gore

When your world burns, don’t waste time looking for firefighters, they’re not coming. In tragedy, watch for the rose-colored glasses that try to blind you to reality and for those who strike a match in your hell, turning it into their salvation. Their angelic disguises “sending prayers” or “let me know if you need anything”, are just masks to soothe their guilt, allowing them and their pity to gawk at your flames while remaining blind to the fact that it could just as easily be their world burning next.

They’ll blame you to feel better about their own lives, and their help is just a means to gloat about it to others for clout.

You are alone. In fact, you have never truly been surrounded. If that truth makes you bitter or angry, turn back now because my story isn’t for the faint-hearted. It will show you how we’ve all been bitched from the start, that saviors don’t exist, and that “help” is just another fairytale sold to adults, a story told to children to mask their own damnation.

Your only power lies in embracing this truth. But to do that, you’ll have to face the harsh reality that has stared back at you your whole life; a reality that doesn’t care if you want to look away; that is being afforded humanity is a luxury, one based on your image and the perception others have of you. It should never have been a luxury, but it always has been.

From the beginning, our worth, our dignity, and even our right to be seen as human have been tied to our image, how the world uses that mask and how those closest to us choose to perceive it. Humanity has always been treated as a prize awarded on shallow perceptions when it should have been a birthright.

So don’t sell me that self-love bullshit. No matter how much we convince ourselves that self-love is enough and that our worth isn’t tied to others, it’s a lie. The world’s perception of us has real, tangible consequences, it affects our opportunities, our safety, our dignity, and even our survival. You can love yourself all you want, but if the world perceives you as “bad,” it will treat you that way, and it will make sure you suffer for it.

Conditional humanity decides your opportunities and worth in ways that self-love alone cannot fix. And that’s why my tragedy; and yours, is only valuable to others when they can gain something from it.

My name is Bryton Gore, and yes, I’ve been branded a loser, a threat, even crazy. But this isn’t a story about staying down; it’s about shattering the rules the world imposed on me. People crave the power to mold you into a convenient image, preying on your vulnerability. So I orchestrated my own statuscide, not to wallow in self-destruction, but to expose the cruelty of exploiting real lives for a superficial narrative and the illusion of success based solely on image.

I ignited my defiant light in the darkness, to ensure that my flame would burn long after the sparks faded; because what I have to say will shatter the illusions of image forever.

STATUSCIDE

(Excerpt from the memoir of Bryton Gore)

CH.1

Sixteen years old. A dim, borrowed bathroom. Two pink lines on a plastic stick.

A verdict. A sentence. A life I barely controlled was no longer just my own.

I wasn’t surprised. I already knew I was pregnant before I even took the test. Maybe it was instinct, or maybe it was just another unspoken truth I had learned to carry. The kind of truth no one comes to save you from.

Because when your world burns, don’t waste time looking for firefighters. They’re not coming.

People will watch from the sidelines, pretending to care. They’ll send prayers, empty words disguised as concern, offering “help” that’s just a performance to soothe their own guilt. They’ll watch your flames and be grateful it’s not their world burning instead.

And if the fire gets too bright?

They’ll blame you for lighting the match.

A year and a half earlier, I had packed up my childhood and left home for good.

The government had swept my twin sister and me away from our mother’s house and placed us with a couple who lived nearby. The move was meant to be a fresh start, but it wasn’t. It was just a transfer, one chaotic home for another.

Our new “guardians” weren’t safe. They weren’t stable. They were just a broken, resentful pair scraping by on government money. And in the middle of their constant battles, the man became the one who got me pregnant, eventually I'd be able to financially emancipate myself.

I was a virgin in year 8 when I first met him. He was older, working at the convenience store I passed every morning before school. At first, I barely noticed him. I was just an awkward, gangly teenager in an ill-fitting Lutheran uniform, avoiding my own reflection in the freezer doors. But he noticed me.

At first, it was free drinks slid across the counter, no explanation. Then came the backhanded compliments. “You look like a dinosaur,” he’d smirk, humiliating me under the guise of humor. I was weird, painfully self-conscious, just another invisible girl trying to figure out who she was. No one had ever paid attention to me before. Even if it was the wrong kind of attention, I didn’t know enough to question it.

By the time I moved into their apartment, everything was already tangled, too close, too convenient. His partner worked with my sister and me at Baskin Robbins. We all coexisted in the same suffocating space, pretending things were normal. But when no one else was looking, he’d slip away from the bedroom he shared with her, and find me on the futon in the lounge.

At first, it was a game. He made me feel special, desirable, until that attention became something I owed him. “You should be lucky I even give you attention,” he’d say. “No one else would.”

And I believed him.

Then came the threats. “You wouldn’t want to lose the roof over your head, would you? Your sister’s head too?” His message was clear: my silence wasn’t optional. It was required.

Pregnancy didn’t make me a victim. It made me a mother. It made me strong.

By seventeen, I was raising two daughters in a country that wasn’t mine, my family had moved my sister back to America after my mothers death, & I was alone in Australia. I was working, studying, clawing my way forward in a world that had already written me off. I became an audio engineer, then took a traineeship with the Australian government. That turned into a permanent job as an Events and Project Manager.

It looked like success. It looked like redemption.

But it wasn’t.

No matter what I built, no matter what I achieved, I could never escape the labels.

Crazy. Threat. Loser. Society had decided who I was before I even had the chance to speak. I'd fall into cycles of people who just kept mooching off me, because I stupidly stayed silent about my life, my achievements, my hard work, eventually, those labels weren’t just whispered behind my back, they became public discourse, weaponized in legal battles against me.

I was never given the luxury of fighting back. I had no powerful allies, no safety net, no one in my corner & never enough resources. I could either play the part they cast me in, or burn the whole script down.

So I took a Molotov to the narrative.

I purposefully killed the name Bryton Gore, and transformed myself from a patient into a Doctor, stealing back the respect I deserved. I cut ties with a name that was being used to destroy me, because I wasn’t about to let anyone else dictate my story.

This isn’t a tragedy. It’s not a redemption arc.

It’s a statuscide.

Because if the world insists on making you a villain; you might as well be the one writing the ending.

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