Thirteen noteworthy facets of me
The sort of stories you share when you are getting to know someone you really like thus far, and so you tell stories that let you get to know each other much better
One time I took a class where the prof asked us to write a surprising fact about ourselves on a sticker, and then put the sticker on our chest so everyone could read it while we walked around the room introducing ourselves and making small talk with our new classmates. I’m not sure if there was more to it, like it was supposed to be sorta like a Post Secret type thing, or a fact relating to our particular damage or baggage or struggles in life. I’m pretty sure we could be as open or closed about it as we wanted, and the whole point was that everyone’s got their own shit to bear down.
Still, sometimes I feel like I am so much a product of my life experiences and circumstances1, that I want a name tag that lists these sorts of things: hurdles overcome, scars that never quite healed, victories one forgets or dismisses, big lessons learned, coping mechanisms, and infinite gratitude for our special blessings.
But if you’re gonna be reading my writings, it seems appropriate to let you know some of these bits about me. Like the stories you share when you are getting to know someone you really like so far, and you want to share stories that let you get to know each other better2. So in no particular order, here are some deets.
Poetry is my primary method of personal artistic expression, but truly I wish I could write songs. Music is my favorite art form in the world (although I adore visual art as well!). Because of this, I really love analyzing song lyrics and figuring out where (if!) songs belong on the timeline of my life, and who the song is associated with from my perspective.
It was a great coping mechanism for me when I realized that I could create themed playlists to chronicle my relationships and experiences. Part of the reason this was so helpful is because in my own thoughts, I was living in the past or in the future, re-experiencing my life through the music, feeling it in the here and now and suffering because of it. All this was remedied when I learned to organize where the songs fit on my timeline/playlist. Totally helped me compartmentalize my experiences and digest the idea that you can still have feels, but this is not happening to you now. Not sure if this method would help anyone else, but there you are.
I have something that everyone wishes for and everyone should be so lucky to have: the bestest best friend ever in the whole great big wide world. We’ve been a pair since we were 11 years old and now we are in our mid 40s. Despite a near two thousand mile living distance, we talk daily and I can’t imagine myself in the absence of her. Our love and friendship is so strong and our souls so entwined, that we are family forever.3
Karma is my besties Even better than that, I got a two for one deal on the bestie, because my bestie’s little sister is my bonus bestie, and when I am with the two of them, I know who I am. I feel seen, heard, understood, and loved. I couldn’t say who’s more amazing, brilliant, talented, and true, cause they both just continually delight me with their presence, insight, and skills. I’m so very very lucky, and I try to never forget that.
Part of the reason I’m so grateful to have amazing friends is cause I’m a weirdo. An acquired taste, shall we say? A new co-worker friend once remarked that she thought I would have been one of the cool kids in school, and I was very surprised, cause I feel like she could not have been more mistaken. Many times I was the kid in class who didn’t have friends, and was always picked last for teams, emotionally stunted, and painfully awkward.
A teacher once told my dad that I didn’t “socialize normally,” and my dad reacted by suggesting I start passing notes during class to my (non-existent) friends. I mean, I wasn’t such a pariah as the kid who always wiped snot on their sleeve, but only just a scant step up. Dorky, nerdy, weak, and never cool. However, having an amazing best friend helped me navigate the darker waters of middle school and high school socialization, and well, I guess it’s not so obvious anymore. *shoots finger guns*
I was a teenage mom4— conspicuously pregnant throughout most of 10th grade, and then for the next two years I made use of the ever-so-convenient teen parent daycare on campus, which enabled me to complete high school. (Teenage pregnancy was pretty prevalent in my home town… must be all that quality sex education! *eye roll*). My parents didn’t really help me much, except they let me live in their house and didn’t kick me out. I guess technically they HAD to do that legally, but still I’ve never been one to deny where I was provided with assistance. Having a roof over my and my kid’s heads was more than a lot of young parents get from their families.
We show off our different scarlet letters, trust me, mine is better. It was kinda my identity throughout the rest of high school to be the most badass responsible teenage mom I could be. I took two city busses to and from school with my bulging backpack, my baby bag, a sizeable folding stroller, and oh yeah, a baby getting heavier every day. I took as many AP classes as I could, I got all A’s, and I never cried about not going to the fucking stupid ass prom (sorry, there just seem to be too many teen mom movies where that happens!5) I was too poor to go to that shit anyway, so I never felt like I missed out on anything that I wouldn’t have missed regardless of having a kid.
My senior year, after transcripts, essays, letters of recommendation and an intimidating interview, I received an offer for a full ride honor’s scholarship to a small respected university 3.5 hours away from my home town, which happily satisfied my goal of escaping my shitty parents. After graduating high school, me and the babe (now over two years old!) moved into our very first apartment. Then I bungled my way through the next 4 years of liberal arts education (less than 1,000 students).
I did well my first year, but progressively accomplished less as my stresses increased. I switched my major from Biology to English after a couple years in, thinking that I would do my required teaching, then get my master’s and become a school guidance counselor. Eventually, I proved to be a waste of a perfectly good scholarship. I still feel pretty ashamed by this, except that it did bring me to the next right thing, so I guess I have no regrets. In my defense, I was juggling a lot of balls at the time, and I ended up dropping every single one (except at least the baby didn’t die.6 Nailed that!).
In many ways, I had some good traditional university experiences, but also my kiddo was six by the time my new college friends were graduating- the time I should have been graduating, but wasn’t. I left university defeated and broken-hearted. It was a rough time in my life. I moved back to my home town and into my mom’s hoarder house with my shitty parents. Humbling, and generous of them to take me in.
I now have a BA and a BS. I got the BA in English back in the day, after another 3 years of university in my hometown (thankfully not living with my parents for long). Immediately after earning my English degree, I moved across state and was working towards my M.Ed. in Counseling when my dad died. The aftermath of that pretty much broke me irreparably for a long while.
I dropped out of grad school, and moved my small family to my husband’s country, Canada, where we would have a better standard of living, health care, and my amazing in-laws (Also, mediocre food options *sigh* There’s nothing like good southern food and Tex-Mex).
As a new immigrant, I started a post graduate diploma program in Social Work, but being wholly broken at the time, I was unsuccessful. I ultimately only completed half the SSW program. Still, that was enough to get my foot in the door working at the homeless shelter a few years later, and I worked there for about 7 years, slowly burning out. I never did find a job that utilized my English degree.
At nearly age 40, I went back for a BS in a very employable career, nursing, and now that I have that BS (lol!), I work half as many hours to make more money. That was exactly my goal. I help people still, but working less leaves me time to manage my family duties effectively, take care of my mental health, and now WRITE! This financial security and work/life balance (and meds, don’t forget the meds) have made me the happiest and most content I have ever been in my entire life. Infinite gratitude.
I met my husband of 20 something years while gaming together in the late 90s. This was back when having an “internet relationship” was considered weird and dangerous! We were just friends for the first 5 years. Then we were both long time singles, spending every day together gaming and chatting and being best buds, when it occurred to us to give it a go. He came to visit from 1500 miles away, and never left my side again.
A perfect poem we heard together at a poetry slam, written by my most beloved Literature prof, convinced me that I didn’t need to have a big wedding shin-dig, or do things a certain way just because it was the supposed “right” way to do things. We spent about 150 bucks getting married, including the marriage license, silver wedding rings, and dinner afterward. I possess a single polaroid of the event. It was just me and him and the 7 year old offspring with a county judge. I wore my nice jeans to the ceremony. Earlier that day, I attended my summer school psych classes (prepping for grad school). I had it planned in my head to say “I’m getting married later today!” but I never did end up saying it to anyone ‘cause I didn’t really have any friends in those classes (see point #3). I assumed that if I didn’t invite anyone, then no one could get mad for not being included. I was wrong. Instead everyone got mad. Go figure.
My husband is the most wonderful, kind, funny, smart, and supportive man I know. I don’t understand how I could have endured this life without his love, and I hope I won’t ever have to be without him (second verse). We’re lucky in that we almost never fight or disagree, and we could spend 24/7/365 together and be content as clams- i.e. Covid isolation was decidedly not hard on our relationship. Gaming is still a big part of our lives. Living the dream! Haha!
My daughter is one of my very best friends. I didn’t set out for it it be this way, as I think parents need to be parents foremost, but she’s been an adult for over a decade now and we’re close the way anyone would hope mothers and daughters could be close.
A friend commented once that we were like the Gilmore Girls, and I conceded that the premise of the show sounded enough like us. However, I have since watched a few episodes, and I’ve never been so reckless and immature and worried about my precious pride as Lorelai Gilmore. Also, my offspring is just regular awesome sauce, not an absurdly precocious overachiever more responsible than her own mother. I dunno, maybe the show gets better. I can get real sensitive about what I deem to be inaccurate portrayals of teenage parenthood. I never watched any of those Teen Mom shows back when they were popular ‘cause I always ended up yelling at the damn TV.
Anyway, so yeah, me and my kid are practically besties, but she wouldn’t like me talking about her too much, so I sure won’t be doing that.
I share my life with seven cats, but I am not a cat hoarder! I know this because I was a cat hoarder when I first moved back to my parents’ house after failing out of university.
The road to cat hoarding hell is paved with good intentions.
Get your pets spayed and neutered!
If you can’t afford that and ongoing basic medical care, then you shouldn’t get a pet. My parents never taught me this, but luckily my husband did.
Basics about my parents. My parents and grandparents are all dead, which helps with the writing at least. No one alive anymore to be afraid to hurt their feelings, or cause embarrassment.
I mean different things when I say my parents. Usually I mean my mom and my step-dad, sometimes I mean my mom and my dad, sometimes I mean all three. My mom and dad divorced when I was two, and apparently fought over me quite a bit (which I have a hard time imagining of my mom given her all-pervasive apathetic aura). It was the 80s, so of course mom won custody. But when my great grandmother was near the end of her life and declined to move into a nursing home, my mom took on caring for her, and let my dad take me full time.
I lived with my dad from age 6 to almost age 10, then my dad went to prison7, and after some rigmarole, I ended up moving to Oklahoma with my mom and new step-dad. At the time, I deeply loved my dad, and missed him terribly. All that I wanted was to be back together with him. When he got out of prison and came to find me, it was pure joy! However, he was still up his wily conman ways.
He went away on a business trip and never came back. We didn’t know where he was, but it turned out that he’d been arrested again. It seemed like a long time passed before we found that out. I was 11 then, extremely worried, and I felt abandoned. My mom and step-dad chose to use every opportunity thereafter to paint my dad as a bad guy. Truthfully, I had an easy time finding stressful memories about when he had hurt me, controlled me, manipulated me, and in the words of my aunt (who deeply cared for him and was his favorite sister-in-law), “treated me like a slave.”
I spent the next few years afraid of resuming my relationship with my dad, and my mom took that window to have my step-dad legally adopt me. Despite wanting to say “Fuck no!”, I let the adoption proceed because I didn’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings. She had tears in her eyes when she first asked me, “Do you want Dickhead8 to be your real Dad?” How does a 12 year old kid say no to that?
Anyway, a year or two later my other aunt, my dad’s only sister, kinda guilted me into giving my dad another chance, saying his health was very poor. It was the beginning of seeing him as Dad with an expiration date. I agreed to a visit and he immediately drove all night to meet me the next morning. After that, I had to sneak around to be able to see my dad without pissing off my mom and step-dad.
Also, my dad was still as controlling and manipulative as ever, so I was very wary of him. However, I always knew that he loved me unconditionally, which I would not claim to be true about my mom. It’s not that I think she didn’t love me, she just didn’t ever do anything to demonstrate love or tender care (for example, work.) She was never interested in what I was doing in school, or with my friends, or what I thought, or wanted, or generally giving me any attention at all. Television was always more interesting than me.9 Waving me away from blocking her view: TC, you make a better door than you do a window.
So, my dad and I didn’t really resume a normal relationship until I went off to university. Then Dad manipulated the situation to make it so that I spent every weekend with him, doing his shopping and errands, working in his business, hanging out, gaming and watching movies. It was surely part of the reason I wasn’t successful at my first 4 years of Uni, and I resented it at the time, but in hindsight, I am glad he pushed for it because it made us close again after we had been so estranged. He died when I was only 25, so if he hadn’t fought for our rebuilding our relationship, it would have been one of my greatest losses. So again, gratitude. The universe unfolds as it should.
I feel like the worst thing anyone ever did to me was when my uncle, my dad’s brother, repeatedly accused me of murdering my father after he died. He convinced half the family of this “possibility”, including my grandma and half sister, and created an entire situation that denied me the comfort and support of my paternal family while I grieved MY DAD’S death. This understandably caused me a lot of mental distress. Near daily for many months or years I woke from nightmares gnashing my teeth, fuming angry, and crying at the purposeful misunderstanding and injustice of his accusations. The experience overwhelmed my ability to cope and I would discuss it crazily and constantly to just about anyone.
It finally (mostly) stopped when I accepted that I could choose not to be angry anymore. I could choose to control my feelings. But his betrayal still smarts like a mofo, and someday I will finish telling my side of the story. But mostly I just felt like, WTF!?! Does he know anything about me at all? I’m not the killing type. I’m just about the stabby feels.
My mental health is currently excellent, but that’s all because of good support, and medical care. Finally having the basics on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs satisfied makes a big difference too. For as long as I can remember, I was always prone to melancholy. I’ve been hospitalized for mania induced psychosis twice, and as much as it felt like being jailed, it was necessary at the time and got me the medical help I needed to get better. This wouldn’t have been possible without universal health care. Now I’m doing very well with my self care, and my medications, but I know they aren’t for everyone.
The universe. I dig it. But really, I’ve been on my own journey to find spiritual truth since I was an adolescent, and I have a lot of stories about my pitstops along the road, and why I took certain directions. My parents were different flavors of Christian (the two most normal ones10), and aside from a few brief bursts of consecutive church-going weeks, we generally only went to church on about 25% of the important holidays. Sometimes Easter, sometimes Christmas, maybe a little ashy here and there. With my mom and step-dad, we didn’t talk about God or religion ever, which is probably good because I was always one to argue points that didn’t make sense to me.
In college, to my great delight, there was a Religion/Philosophy requirement, and so I took a class on the Old Testament, which was taught by our Rev. Dr. Prof who could read Hebrew and everything. From what I gather, we studied a textbook with a very moderate perspective on biblical interpretation. The stuff I learned in that class made me feel like everything I’d been taught as a child about the bible was just some fantastical bullshit story. I marveled that our Rev. Dr. Prof could know so much about the book and somehow retain his faith in it.
Another few years passed before I felt like I could truly give up on my belief in Jesus as the “only begotten son of God”, cause it was such a part of my indoctrinated culture growing up. But also, I was a teen mom myself, and that “virgin” Mary story was always sus AF11.
I wanted to find spiritual truths that made sense to me. I found solace in some Pagan ideas, and researched Wicca and Buddhism, and learned things that resonated and things that didn’t. Read some semi-scientific ideas about the Holographic theory of the universe. Then I kinda went hardcore atheist for awhile, as I’ve seen many people recovering from the religion forced upon them as children will do— well, I was never completely atheist, just more adamant that everything I’d ever been taught was entirely based on unreliable or out of context information.
Eventually, I found a happy place with a sort of pantheistic, everything is god, and we are all just little pieces of god having an existence so the universe can experience itself. We are all one, really. …or maybe not. Maybe we’re all just a computer simulation. What is consciousness anyway?
Bottom Line: The ultimate thing I truly know is that I’m never gonna completely know.
A mystical definitive information source does not exist. I am not going to discover it, and Poof! reveal the undoubtable proof for universal spiritual principles.
Sure I have my own personal, magical experiences, but thinking scientifically, I can never assume that it’s not all just coincidence, or the result of some natural law we don’t know about yet.
In our infinite universe, with infinite possibilities, there’s a planet with sentient mattresses springing upon keyboards to peck out Marlowe’s complete works, word for word, or something like that.
You don’t know there’s not. I don’t know there’s not. We are never going to know if there is or not, so believe what you want (provided you aren’t contradicting science that we DO Know, I’d say, but hey, those flat earthers have a right to be wantonly ignorant if they so desire). Whatever makes the most sense given the information at hand. Whatever generates joy and hope and makes you be a better version of yourself. This is the way.
You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with god, whatever you conceive them12 to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.
13 “Live by the foma14 that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.” I talk to the dead with tarot cards sometimes. Or use the randomizer on song banks to commune with the Universe. The bigger the bank of songs, the more legit magical synchronic it seems. Most recently, I am putting prompts into AI generating art, and considering the results in relation to the universe leaving easter eggs. All this makes me brave and kind and healthy and happy. I think songs will enter our lives when we need them. Or maybe my brain only notices them when I need them.
I’ll never really know and that’s fine and dandy.
Note to self: post about Byron Katie’s idea, Who would you be without your story? Certainly all these “facets” are just the story I tell about myself.
Generally followed by a reciprocal story told by the listener. Mild interjections permitted.
I warned you that I was soppy and sentimental. But what ever could be so wrong about that? I do dare love fierce and fearless, enjoy my dry peach, and make waves in the universe.
This life event is the major catalyst for the most of my early poems, and I will eventually post some of those. They’re not my favorites or anything, cause they just feel so 18 year old me, but they are still worthwhile I think, and certainly capture my stabby feels at the time. Stabby feels has always been my style.
Even one is too many. Boohoo. Cry about something that matters. Parents have have real responsibilities.
Note to readers: this is a direct reference to the Amanda Palmer song I have linked, which has a sometimes humorous and always an honest, heartfelt perspective on parenting. My words here definitely do NOT include any sensitivity to parents who have actually lost a child, which I obviously have much compassion for.
What were his crimes, you ask? Grand larceny. According to dad though, “I never stole from anyone who couldn’t afford it, T.”
Note to readers: Not his real name, so I substituted a close equivalent.
Because of this, I had a pronounced hostility toward television watching for many years. I’m over it now.
Most normal according to me anyway, lol!
Quoted from Desiderata, however, time for more inclusive language here, don’t you think Max Ehrmann? My quotation, my right to mangle as I see fit.
Holy shit! I just thought that I’d bang out a few facts about myself, but here I am just done with number 13 and it feels like some crazy manifesto!
According to Kurt Vonnegut, who is here quoted and who invented the word, foma is defined as harmless untruths.
Oh, what a frustrated me, I am. I've reposted this because the formatting got all f'd up, only to find that again, posting it, the formatting is all f'd up... The way it looks when editing, is not the way it looks when on my display.... Alas! Sorry for the absent line breaks!!! I hope you'll still bear with me!