AN: This is going to be a bit different than most of the other fanfictions out there. This is extremely non-canon. I had this thought in my head that Emma was a much more complex character than how she was portrayed in the show most times and wondered what a different Emma would be like. One where we see the circumstances that made her into the person that she was seen as by her friends and schoolmates in the show. I am still working on how for sure I want to format this, but I do know that several portions are going to read as a journal of sorts, as Emma tells us her story in her own words. The first few chapters are going to be kinda slow, as it is setting up the changes in canon in order to get up to current on the storyline I have in my head. I am thinking about having some chapters in current time( the time leading up to and during her writing her story), but I'm not sure when those are going to be just yet. I do want to go ahead and throw out a blanket trigger warning for this story. There are going to be mentions of abuse, drugs, alcohol, and violence. As I don't want to spoil when or how these are going to come about, I will post those warnings before the chapters that they appear in. Emma's story that she is writing is going to be told in 3 parts, and the transition of these should be pretty clearly marked. There is going to be some romance in here for our main character as well as some of the side characters, but I am not going to declare any pairings just yet(SPOILERS) as I want to get a feel for my characters. I know that there isn't as much of a following for this show in the fan-fiction community, but if I can give even one person a way to revisit characters that meant something to them, then I will be happy.

Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to Degrassi TNG or any of the characters, and I do not make any profit from this. The plot is the only thing that belongs to me.

Sorry for the long rant; they won't be this long in the future. With that, sit back and enjoy.

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My whole life, I have always been "that girl". You know the one; the goodie two shoes, the nerd, the teacher's pet, the princess. My whole life has been nothing but being the person that everyone expects me to be. Everyone thinks they know everything there is to know about my life and who I am. What I feel, my quirks and flaws, what things I enjoy, and who I love. The sad truth is, I learned at an early age exactly who everyone expected me to be, and honestly, it just became easier to pretend to be who they all thought I was. Anytime I tried to veer from that path, I was met with contempt, drama, and sneers. So I simply decided to stop fighting it. The only problem is, when you are living for everyone else, you lose who you are in the process. So that was my life, being the girl everyone knew, but at the same time, being a total stranger, especially to myself. Even as I sit here and write all of this out, I know what the people around me are thinking. "There is cause girl, typing away on some article meant to criticize and condemn or petition to take away our fun." It is enough to make me sick. Yet, here I am, surrounded by people who think they know exactly who I am, pretending one last time to be the person they expect me to be, writing out( if everything goes according to my plans) the very last thing I will ever have to say to the lot of them. I thought long and hard about where to start my story and exactly when I became this person that they all see, and I came to one conclusion. I must start at the beginning, but as I don't have the time to sit here and write an entire memoir of my life, I'll only hit the milestones up until a certain point. So here it is, the story of my life. I hope that by the end of it, at least one person comes away truly seeing me for the first time. Even if it may be too little too late, it would be nice to know that by the end, at least one person knew who I truly was.

Part 1:The Begining

My mother got pregnant with me when she was in high school. While this is a fact that just about everyone in our little town knows, only a handful have been privy to the whole truth surrounding this not-so-happy occurrence. You see, while I was indeed conceived by my mother when she was just 15 years old, and while my father's family and his later accident prevented him from being a part of my life is the truth, what many don't know is that the stress of raising a child, when my mother was only a child herself, was at times too much for her. To the outside world, we were a happy and stable home; while not rich, certainly not paupers, what they don't know is that my mother struggled not just financially but emotionally for years. She was constantly working to put on a facade for the outside world, too afraid of the judgment and condemnation if they found out how right they had been about her ability to raise me and provide a good home. I would like to state here and now before we get too much further into this portion of my childhood, that none of this is a criticism or judgment of my mother. While she certainly has her faults, as we all do, she did her best with me, and at the end of the day, that is all I could have asked of her. With that being said, my early years were not what you would call easy. My mother was always working multiple jobs and not really around as much as either one of us would have liked. There were too many times when the only times I saw her were when I was getting up in the morning, and she was coming home for the night from one job or another. I learned at a very early age how to be self-sufficient and take care of myself. This meant making my own meals, doing my own laundry, and getting myself ready for the day. And while none of this was particularly sinister or harmful, it definitely left a mark on me as a person. I had learned how to be alone from such a young age that I did not really know how to not be that way. Then there was the fact that my mother's coping mechanism was to hide from her troubles at the bottom of a bottle. It was such a normal occurrence for me to find her passed out in the living room or on the floor of the bathroom that I became proficient at cleaning her up and getting her into her own bed. My mother was not an alcoholic in the sense that most think of when they hear the word. She was not mean or violent, and she never let it impact her job or her ability to work. She never once had me in the car with her if she had been drinking, and for the most part, she wouldn't spend money on booze if we didn't have money for groceries or to pay our bills.
But, seeing her drink herself into a stupor more nights than not and having to hear her wailing and breaking over and over about the life she had was no picnic either. While to the outside world, my mother was a hardworking badass who took no shit from anyone and had her life put together, despite the circumstance she had to face, at home, she was a shell of that woman. She was insecure, a total and complete mess, and she was depressed. So on top of learning how to take care of myself, I also learned how to be the caretaker for her. After all, it was my existence that started the spiral that she seemed to be in in the first place, so it was only right that I help to take care of her. And that was pretty much our lives for the first 8 years of my life. My mother worked herself to death during the day and drank herself away any time she didn't have to be at work, and I tried to hold our house and family together with duct tape and sheer force of will. Sometime after my 8th birthday, my mother woke up one day and became a completely different person. She started to make meals in the house and help out with the chores, and I never saw her have more than a single glass of wine with dinner more than a handful of times. For the first time in my life, I didn't feel like I had to take care of everything and felt some of the pressure be removed from my shoulders. While I still heard my mother cry herself to sleep most nights, it was better than cleaning her up after she drank too much and got sick on herself. I was happy to finally feel like we were becoming a family. And while I knew my mother was still sad, she did her best to be happy and normal in front of me. About a month after my mother started to get her act together, she sat me down one night after dinner. Apparently, one of my teachers had been sending letters to my mother about my behaviors in school. She felt that I was far too withdrawn and quiet at school and not performing to the best of my abilities, and she worried that something might have been going on at home to cause these behaviors. My mother explained to me that while she knew she hadn't been the best parent in the past, all of that was changing, and nothing would make her happier than to see me be a regular kid. She wanted me to be more social, make friends, and be more involved. And so began the start of me being someone else to make those around me happy.