Chapter 3.

Small town culture is good and bad. Everyone knows everyone else. If you’re new, you don’t know the history, you don’t know the stories. A big family moves in, the entire town knows about it. There is a long period of being a new kid. It can make a new kid more interesting than they really are. It took me a while to understand that.

Our family moved at the start of summer. None of us kids wanted to go. We had to leave all we knew, we believed it meant we had to start over, we would be nobodies for a long summer. It was nothing like that. People were really friendly, there was a lot going on. The town had a huge town pool, a great summer rec program, and every kid went. Turned out we didn’t spend that first summer in lonely isolation with each other until the start of the new school year, we fit right in.

I was never a standout. I am the middle child of five kids, I’d have to be exceptional, and I wasn’t. I liked being in the middle. I could hang with my two older sisters, or play with my younger sister and brother, or be on my own. I liked to blend in, to disappear. I read a lot. My favorite books were by Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder, E.B. White, Fred Gipson. I imagined I was in those books, I lived in the wild, on prairies, on farms, with talking animals and insects. I knew I was too old to think like that, so I spent a lot of time in my head.

I wasn’t looking for anything the night I went to the basketball courts in the summer of 1976. I was 12. My two older sisters played in the night league, all five of us went because we always travelled in a pack. I wasn’t looking to be special for anyone, not a twenty year old guy who was a referee for the early basketball games, then played in the loud, ferocious games that went on until the lights shut off at ten.

He was instantly overfamiliar, and gave me a nickname. It was strange, the feeling that he knew of me although I had no idea who he was, almost confounding to be called out by this older guy who was like a king on the court, and around the town, and somehow he knew about me. It turned out our families overlapped-he had younger sisters who were my older sisters’ ages.

After that, it felt like he was everywhere I was. Everyone knew him, he was a sports hero, a legend in basketball and baseball. He worked for summer rec, so he was at the pool, he refereed the basketball games, and it was a small town, so I’d see him drive by when I was on my bike. After that first basketball game, he offered to teach me how to shoot a basket, and offered rides when I was walking. Sometimes I’d be with friends, sometimes I’d be on my own.

Chapter 2.

I have kept some kind of journal since I was eight. My first one was a birthday present: pink, with a tiny lock and key, “Dear Diary” written in gold script on the cover. I loved it, so fancy! I lost the key, and that was the end of the Ur “Dear Diary”. However, it instilled my habit of writing and drawing in notebooks. I don’t remember feeling a need to hide anything I wrote until I turned fifteen when I started writing about things that shouldn’t be discovered. I kept those journals with me, or hid them where I hoped they wouldn’t be found.

There are boxes of my notebooks in our basement, journals from 1989 on, filled with my excessive self-scrutiny. I don’t look at them, or re-read much. For the most part, I’m not as interesting as I think I am. There are occasional time gaps of weeks to months in those entries because I don’t write when I am really depressed, and I don’t want to be reminded of bad times. Months can go by, then I’m Back! with little mention of what kept me away. “Rough patch…” was the start of an entry after a long interval in 2013-2014. The collection is not complete, though. Those from when I was fifteen to twenty two are long gone. I was told they were thrown away.

January 9, 2019. I started a new journal before the old one was filled–a symbolic move hoping a new one would give me a new perspective. It did not work. My retreat from writing had whittled down to random guilt-ridden rants about wasting my time, shame that I wasn’t living the dream as a novelist. A perfect example was my 1/9/19 Subject: Back to Journaling–one long, run-on sentence of self rebuke. Happy fucking new year.

January and February, 2019. Six entries in the new journal, three references to what I called white shocks that feel like flashbacks which caused physical pain, mostly in my chest, and really upsetting. Feb. 21, 2019. …I don’t want to write about this shit. I’m so done with it, it’s over. It’s been over for almost 30 years, no almost 40 years, Holy fucking shit. On Feb. 24, 2019 I made a list of things I was thinking on a Sunday morning. The list ended up with 14 things, starting with with to-do, then should-do, then, completely out of the blue: 13. I was sexually, physically & emotionally abused from age 12 or 13. It’s hard to get my mind around that. It does affect me, especially with intimacy… 14. Ultimately I believe I am stronger than #13.

Feb. 26, 2019 Intrusive thoughts. I have that incredible crushing feeling-more and more lately…it goes so far back. I haven’t thought of this stuff for years…I wish I could have known-and gotten away-if I could go back to one particular day to change things…to what started everything. I was 13…. There is part of me that is dead inside when I think of it. No. I feel sick-I feel scared, alone. I can’t talk. It was wrong. But I’m strong. I can hide things, so that is that…. except when the news hits with stories about teachers. I’m so sure he must be shitting his pants every time a creepy molester story hits, but I know that’s wrong. I am the one that is lost and crap my proverbial pants over this. HE has never seen it as anything but what he could do. So I either move on or do something about it. And seeing the shit that happens to people who try to do something about this kind of abuse, I need to move on.

That would be the last entry in the journal for months.

Chapter 1.

One year ago I launched into an entirely different career. One with no financial guarantees or security. I was going to write. I left my secure but stressful job as a nurse, twenty five years at the bedside seriously burned me out. I wanted to write. I had made something a name by getting published in a few independent anthologies.My goal was to finish and publish a novel that I was working on without the stress, anxiety and distraction of working at the hospital.

I had the full support of my husband who has always believed in me. Nearly thirty years together, he has been my greatest champion. He has always seen far more in me than I believe in myself from the day we met. I was a single mother, he was just a year out of college and beginning his career in engineering. We have made a good life together, I knew it was risking financial security by cutting my income for writing. He did not see it that way, we could manage. I was free to write.

I made a solid plan. I had a rough draft, and outlines for two more novels. I would start on New Year’s Day 2019 with revision. My goal was to finish by March 2019, then start querying. I had a list of publishers, and my written query letter. I was going to write for a few hours early in the morning, break to do real life things like walk dogs, clean, laundry, exercise, cook; revise in the afternoon. And it all went to shit.

I did not write a single word. I got nothing-I mean NOTHING done. My wide open day was a summons to go on the internet at dawn, and not come up for air until it got dark. I had to take small breaks to walk dogs, but otherwise, I was all in on social media, infotainment/news, political platforms, and celebrity scandal. Time just melted away. January became February. Hours and hours gone. Gone. No writing, just me and the internet. I followed whatever my feeds on Facebook and Twitter fed me. Buzzfeed, Slate, Huffpost, Atlantic Monthly, and my personal black hole of brain squandering, The Daily Mail.

It wasn’t good. I knew it. As soon as I got up, I’d log on and jump in. My brain was mush, and before January was out, my body was mush too. I gained ten pounds because I added a couple of beers as a way of finishing off my busy day of internet surfing; alcohol eased the guilt of not actually doing anything day after day. I destroyed my thought process in places that wrecked intentions, ideas and my ability to write.

February. I was spending more time on bad politics, mass shootings, and stories about power and abuse. I tried to rationalize this on 1. how could I focus on my writing in this world of imbalances? and 2. I had all the time in the world to write my novel. The January plan became a loose and open-ended guideline. Replaced by my new routine, which was crap. I began with topics that outraged me; stories that framed my personal wrath against everything I found wrong in the world, then off to shout about it on Twitter. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. I was a lunatic. Thank God I have a small following that put up with (or more likely) ignored me. I have no idea what I was trying to accomplish but believed I was doing something. In reality, was I was losing days, falling down dark rabbit holes, and drinking way too much.

At the end of February, 2019, we began the huge project of remodeling our kitchen. This had been years in planning and saving, and we were finally doing it. It was all very exciting until the actual demolition. It turned out the literal gut of the most essential room in our house brought on a physical and mental gut in me. I fell apart.