My name is Rebecca Jean Allen.This is my life.

My name is Rebecca Jean Allen. I am a woman from St. Louis. I have lived forty-six years, and none of them were a project. They were a life. I have made mistakes. I have been given a second chance. I have loved people, taken care of other people's children, sat in recovery rooms, gone back to school, wrecked a car, lived in hotels, signed a lease in my own name, and kept a household together when it was heavy. I am still here.

I am writing this in the first person because that is the only honest way I know to tell it. I am not a lawyer. I am not an expert witness. I am a human being assembling the story of my own years so that I can go back to school, go back to work, and live. If a court ever reads this page, it should read it as my account — alleged, lived, unfinished — and not as a verdict against anyone.

I will not publish other people's full names here. I will not publish case numbers, badge numbers, addresses, or the identities of children. I will not use this page to accuse a neighbor, a relative, or an officer by name. That is how I keep this public and court-passable. What I will do is tell the truth of what it felt like to be me.

I lost my mother when I was twenty-two. She had served as a Navy radioman. My father was already out of state that same year. I was a grown woman on paper and a child in the world. There was no one in the next room to call. That is the fact that still explains me.

When you lose your mother that young, you learn two things at once: how little the systems around you will catch you, and how much you will someday want to catch someone else. I did not have children of my own. I have spent most of my adult life taking care of other people's children anyway — nieces, cousins' kids, teenagers who needed a house that would not give up on them. I understood damage. I had my own.

I am pursuing what I believe remains owed on my mother's benefits — radiation-exposure compensation, veterans' benefits, disability. I do not publish her legal name on this public page. I do not treat a claim as a check that has already cleared. I am a daughter doing the paperwork a daughter is supposed to do.

I made mistakes. I am not going to dress them up. I have a record. I have been through the justice system. I have known what it is to lose a job, a car, a place to sleep, and a version of myself I liked better. I am not proud of the worst years. I am proud that I got up.

In 2015 I hit rock bottom. I say that without theater. I relapsed after I had already started to build something better. It took me a while to stand again. I did. I sat in NA and AA rooms. I chaired meetings. I sponsored. I shared. I learned that a story told honestly in a circle can keep a person alive until morning.

That is why I later went into human services. I registered with the Family Care Registry. I worked the front desk at a behavioral-health provider. I worked for a family-services organization. I wanted to be the adult I did not have at twenty-two. Some people thought I was being used. I knew I was practicing the only kind of love that has ever made sense to me — the kind that stays.

By 2018 I was back in school. I bought a car. I rented a house. I got out of the hotel. I can still feel that stretch of months as the first time in a long time that my life had a floor. I have a photographed diploma from Hazelwood West, class of 1998. I studied greenhouse and grounds work at Century College. I studied culinary arts at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park. I completed Relias continuing education. I made a dean's list. I was invited into Phi Theta Kappa. I am not finished. I want to go back.

I also built things with my hands and my voice. Silent No More 314 is the name I gave to telling the truth in public after years of being quiet. STL Made With Love is an atelier I started in 2023 for flowers, herbs, and candles — paused before a full launch, and pointed at a 2026 relaunch. Heighley is lineage research, a way of holding the people I come from after the people I come from were gone.

Alpha & Omega is this page: the front door to the collection. It is also the name I gave to keeping a lifetime of papers, photographs, and notes from being misplaced again. The other doors are live. I intend to keep them usable places of work. They already represent me. They are not hobbies I will put back in a drawer.

In 2019 I had an accident. I wrecked my car. I ended up back in a hotel. I got in trouble in a St. Louis County municipal court. I believe that encounter was not handled the way it should have been handled. I am not going to name the officer, the docket, or the building. I am not going to try this matter on a public webpage. I will say what is mine to say: that year is the hinge. My life has been hard since then in a way it was not before.

I want that chapter taken care of. I want the harassment I have described in my private notes to stop. I want a court, not a website, to decide what is owed. I have spent the last year finding every record I could find because I believe records have been made difficult to keep. That is my account. It is not a finding. It is why this page exists as a memoir and not as a dump of other people's names.

I got out of the hotels again. In 2020 I rented an apartment in my own name. In 2021 a long-term partner bought a house. By the next spring we had taken in three teenagers. I kept my private life private. I provided. The older two finished school. In 2024 the household broke apart. We left for six months. We came home around Valentine's Day 2025. I still try to help from a distance. I do not name those children here. They are not on trial on this page. They had their own damage. I remember being twenty-two.

I want my life back. I want to go back to school. I want to work. I want to keep a house in order and a car that starts. I want to invest in STL Made With Love, even if the name has to change. I want to turn the documents, photographs, journals, and how-to notes I have already made into honest work — guides, catalogs, books — so that the years I already lived can feed the years I have left.

I believe there are overlapping areas of law in which I may be owed something: my mother's benefits; the years I spent inside the municipal-fine cycle of tickets, bonds, lawyers, tows, impounds, lost cars, and lost jobs; and a civil record I am still assembling about interference with my peace and my papers. I do not publish dollar figures here as if a judge has spoken. I do not name cities as if I have already won. I am asking. I am documenting. A court can do the rest.

If anything is ever awarded, I want to put it back into communities that suffered the way I did, and into schooling for the children in my extended family. I have no kids of my own. That has never stopped me from showing up. I have come a long way since 2015. I am still coming. This is my life. I have lived it. I would like to live the next part in the open, with work in my hands, and without fear.