Edit: Sorry for the wall of text, but it's 6:30 AM and I work in about 9 hours so see y'all later

I was born in... relative wealth. At least, it would have been wealth if my father wasn't a manchild with no concept of a budget. And it kept getting worse from there. I attended my first funeral at 5 - did nothing but watch people cry about a man I didn't hear much good of and that I never even knew. Started having some responsibilities at 8 - mostly shielding my little sister of my dad (who at that point was a little bit more aggressive than a few years prior because his idiocy lead him to not being able to find a job again after about... 2002? AND with no backup money - because he thought he'd always have that huge salary. I won't go into details here) and doing what my dad wouldn't do - which was, often, to pick up stuff at the corner store and pretty much everything that involved Windows (because he was a fervent Linux-master-race kind of person) and networking (because, since he used to be a sysadmin, he refused to network the computers other than how he wanted it). Had my first nervous breakdown at 10 because my father kept force-shutting-down the computer (he didn't want me having a computer that young 'cause "computers are for grown-ups" - mind you, this was in 2004) without letting me save anything, and at that point the computer was all I had (no friends IRL 'cause I didn't trust people, and if I remember it right it was for good reason). I don't remember much between 10 and 17 really - I talked a bit more to people, but I felt like we were very little more than polite acquaintances because I didn't let them too close out of fear that they'd backstab me or compromise everything I worked to get to, socially. And then the hill went back down. I had to start working almost straight out of high school because we didn't make enough (by finishing high school, my parents lost what I gained them in child welfare money from the govt) to keep the (expensive) apartment (that my father picked while I was still in high school). Then my older sister (who, because of my dad, wasn't really in the family picture from about when I was... 6? to when I was 16) had a serious breakdown because of shitty relationships and of how afraid she saw our family's direction taking. Then one of the first good events I remember in the last few years - we moved apartments... without my father. THEN I started having narcolepsy - and discovered that pretty much none of the glands, in my body, that were pretty important for my continued life (thyroid, adrenal, gonads) stopped working BECAUSE the master gland (thalamus) stopped working, and the doctors were surprised I was even conscious, never mind walking. Then my mother almost died of pretty much the same thing (because she almost never left the house she had very little reason to go see a doctor until she couldn't stand because of blood loss because her body didn't produce the hormones to make her period stop that month). Then about a year later I almost lost consciousness because of a rotten tooth, and had to spend not-insignificant money to get it extracted (I still have another one to get extracted and about two to get fixed but can't afford it right now, at least they're not painful). And about a year later, I almost lost my mother again - this time because of heart issues that required a quadruple-bypass surgery (the doctors didn't understand how this happened, as the rest of her circulatory system was completely fine), AND my sister had another breakdown because of old wounds in the head (which mostly involved her feeling rejected from the family because she wasn't there most of the time). Oh, did I mention that in that time, my little sister had so many assholes fuck her up in school that she developed permanent anxiety towards school to the point of headaches and nausea? Which means that now that SHE is going to turn 18 (because I live with my mother and my sister - my mother didn't work because she never worked, and my sister because she was trying, despite her issues, to finish high school through adult school - I am the main source of revenue of the home right now), both my mother and my sister are desperately trying to find a job to cover the part of welfare that my little sister provided (then again, if she can't, she may try signing up for welfare even though it's not going to be much).

But hey, my 21st birthday was pretty okay, and I got a relatively steady job with possibilities of advancement and raises... but yeah, depending on when you define "start your journey", the answer is either "a tiny bit better than most", "bad", "very bad", "depressing and tiring" or "only still going 'cause I have something to lose".