“Figuring out how to be strong and-there’s not a nice way to put it-how to get over the past and not let it define my future was something I was forced to learn.”
She also understands the pain of repeated rejection: Pezzulo is trans, a truth her family and community didn’t accept. Her biological parents split up when she was two, and her father wasn’t in her life after that. Pezzulo knows the trauma of losing such familial bonds. It also wasn’t the first time that a child carried baggage beyond their suitcase, some of it born from being separated from family and bouncing from one stranger’s home to another as part of the foster care system. It wasn’t the first time a child or tween lived with Pezzulo.
