No one really knew me or knew what was happening

You might want to grab a coffee and settle in. This is gonna take awhile to explain…

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I was born three-quarters of the way through the 20th century. Circa 1975, because it’s hard to remember that the 20th century is really the 1900s. My childhood was entirely contained before Dec 31, 1999, otherwise known at the time as Y2K, the day the world was supposed to end. It did not in fact end. Instead on that evening, I was caught in the middle of a bar fight between my boyfriend and another guy I had barely met who tried to kiss me (or maybe did, I was pretty drunk). 

How did I get here, on the precipice of my adulthood, one hundred percent UNprepared for the world I was about to face?

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Our hero’s journey is set in a middle class town north of Boston. Our hero enters kindergarten in September 1982. A socially shy, full of butterflies and autumn sunshine, raised by the wooded land she lived in; already intellectually confident, very curious, creative, and very tender five year old, she steps onto the yellow school bus… here I will pause, because what she did not know about herself was that she will turn out to have some internal handicaps that she does not at this point know about. But she will also turn out to be a f’ing badass bee-yatch mother f’ing alpha wolf* (see important info about wolves in the images at the bottom heah). Strong not because she knew how to fight, or speak up, or protect herself, or even see the dangers coming… but because she is smart and wise and creative and can learn quickly, and turns out to be right about a lot of what she is told isn’t real or true or important, and she is incredibly stubborn (it’s that Taurus energyeeeeeeee), and will not stop believing that things could be better and she will never stop working to make them so… So that later on, her life becomes everything that it wasn’t able to be in her childhood, and she claims her freedom.

We are now going to take a station break to get some Sweettarts from the EMarket. It’s Saturday morning and I want candy!!!

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The schooling and upbringing I experienced in my childhood years turned out to be more like a game I was pretty good at. School was comprised of wall-clock-staring contests, pencils-on-paper riddles and, later, slogging through Sunday afternoon essay writing on an Apple IIE. It was mostly about compliance and a call-and-response type of education that would prove moderately interesting and developed my sense of tireless perseverance and unreasonably high standards for myself and others. I was able to achieve pretty damn near perfect results in this system… so upon my graduation from college just before Y2K, naturally I was poised for a bright future in the real world, or so they said.

The next nearly twenty five years - 2000 through 2022 - would be spent trying to put that education to use in the form of being productive and doing the life things. What actually happened was that I was repeatedly blindsided by crises in work, family life and romantic relationships - crises that appeared out of nowhere and knocked me off of my life raft of understanding of the world. The world was not, it turned out, a place where you could rely on people to be any base level of considerate, fair, reasonable, or moral. Here, there were no teachers or parents to keep order or punish those who couldn’t keep themselves from causing harm to themselves and those around them. And there also didn’t seem to be much by the way of established systems or plans to deal with these incidents. They happened abruptly and spontaneously, on a random Tuesday or Saturday, it didn’t really matter when - and left a nice big bag of mess for me to cart around for years as I made small progress here and there in resolving and offloading the fallout from these events.

I know that it’s annoying to read something where the writer never tells you the specifics of unseemly acts. Those with decency feel obligated to protect others, because it’s decent to keep such matters confidential. And with some of these things that happened, they were health-related matters that I will indeed keep private. Other events, however, were the result of series of choices made by fully capable people, and if those people didn’t want their name out there attached to such acts, they ought to have thought of that beforehand. Keeping this information to myself has proven detrimental to my own well-being. So going forward, I won’t have a problem talking about the details as they relate to my own experience. 

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So as I neared the next quarter century mark, just after the COVID pandemic, I was brimming with  accumulated anxiety, distrust in people, the world, and myself; unease, disappointment, isolation and loneliness, and lack of fulfillment and joy. I was now in the midst of an episode of major depressive disorder (which in 2023 would be extended to include generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder and cPTSD). I asked the heavens for a job. Just a job. I was without structure, direction or purpose, floating mostly untethered in the world, and I just needed to have another game to play or purpose to serve. Right then and there, sitting in my backyard, the word sounded itself out in my head, but I heard it just like someone had spoken it out loud.

Substitutor.

The word was given to me and I took it. It was the beginning of the next chapter. Obviously this is not even a real word, which is brilliant, because even the definition was left up to me. This was a new game, and this time I was going to create it - using the truths that I had become familiar with and the ideas of the person I had always wanted to be. I would not be doing business as usual. I would be like a substitute teacher, the good ones who let you talk and chew gum in class and who shared stories rather than making you do your work. Predictability and routine would be broken up by spontaneous freedom and random snippets of intriguing information and activities. I would tutor - myself? others? - with the wisdom I had gained. And I would not be following many rules, but instead following breadcrumbs, my creativity, offers from God, and my heart’s desires. I would be taking a left turn from the life I knew. It took all the courage I had, accompanied by all the blind desperation of someone who feels so lost that they want to throw themselves off the side of the Earth (if only it were flat, there would be a much easier way to commit suicide…RIP William Olmsted and David Foster Wallace)

I believe one of the truths I have uncovered is that there are only a very small number of decisions that you can make that can actually “ruin” your life on the spot. And those are really pretty obvious. Most things just don’t matter that much. (If they did, humans probably wouldn‘t have survived very long.) Why so many people had impressed upon me that so many smaller things mattered so very much… I guess that was more about them, and less about me.

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This website contains my story, or it will, when I get more on paper. I’m still writing it along the way. I am not writing it for anyone but myself. Sometimes, because 45 years is a very long time to live as someone who felt they had to fit into this world that was NOT MADE for them, I need to remind myself who I am and what I have been through. This is my reminder note.