It's just one of those things that can happen.
Out of the house at 13. Starvation, fights. Communion with rats and stranger things in forgotten places beneath the streets. Running with the others. Making scores. Getting your tag up in the subliminal hum of the pedestrian unaware. Drawing the power to defend your psychic and geographical turf from rival gangs. Losing sometimes, watching your guys picked off one by one for a couple of weeks. More always rolling up. Younger ones taking the dead ones' places, the subverted and twisted ones' places. You fight a lot of duels. You wreck a lot of minds. You have a lot of names. Stash places all over town. An arsenal of weapons, psychic and otherwise, that you haven't even gotten around to using. More than twenty years have passed. You can't quite remember where you came from, why you were put out of the house, what happened there or to whom; those memories are buried beneath a hundred iterations of heavily mythologized personal narrative. You know the word for what you are. Same as the word for what everything else is. "Palimpsest"