That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

I started my social work career in early 2008, shortly after moving to Idaho. I got a job at a small mental health services agency providing community-based care to those experiencing severe mental health issues, sometimes known as Axis I and Axis II diagnoses. Schizophrenia, Bipolar I, Major Depression and Attention Deficit Disorder were some of the more common diagnoses cropping up on my caseload.

Another diagnosis that would come up often would be Borderline Personality Disorder. Mostly women, these clients were some of the hardest to work with at times, primarily due to the lack of consistency in their patterns of behavior. Caring and kind one visit, completely out of control the next. Sometimes you knew what set them off, other times it was pretty well under wraps.

I had also heard about Borderline Personality Disorder in a different context prior to and since the start of my social work career. "Borderline Bitch" was one of those derogatory terms used, typically by men, to describe women that they had come across. It seemed like this was the de facto term to replace "moody" or to absolve men of hurtful or inconsiderate behavior.

Borderline Personality Disorder, according to DSM-IV (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)*, is as follows:

 A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
(1) frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5.
(2) a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation
(3) identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self image or sense of self
(4) impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5.
(5) recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior
(6) affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
(7) chronic feelings of emptiness
(8) inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)
(9) transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms

Now, some people that know me professionally and have fallen victim to one of my rants about the DSM know that I hate this book. Written by what one can assume was primarily wealthy, white, male doctors, this book has been used as the primary diagnostic tool since the 1950's. There have been updates but it does not negate the fact that homosexuality was once listed as a mental illness, nor does it negate the lack of compassion throughout the book. On a good day, I call DSM the "billing book", used merely to select the juiciest disorder within reason to ensure that clinicians gets paid for their services. On a not-so-friendly day, I call it the "stigma book" or "oppression manual".

I have been informally diagnosed as Borderline in my own life. According to the criteria above, technically I guess that could be true. It was especially true in my 20's. I have always been hesitant to accept this diagnosis fully, in part due to the stigma around it ("Borderline Bitch") and partly due to the bleak "treatment options" and expected "recovery" from this condition. As with most mental disorders, a combination of therapy and medication is recommended but when it comes to Borderline, most researchers and healthcare professionals have decided that it is unlikely that one can recover from Borderline. A death sentence by way of DSM.

This is where I call bullshit. Re-read the diagnostic criteria with an open heart instead of a clinical mind and one will find that whoever has been diagnosed with this disorder has been hurt by others. Badly. And most likely often. This diagnosis screams abandonment, trauma, violation, violence and most of all, betrayal of trust. Over and over and over again. No surprise that mostly women are diagnosed with this.

Why do we, as a society, find it necessary to pathologize hurt? To pathologize pain and mistrust? Why have we accepted that a death sentence according to DSM is good enough in relation to trauma and betrayal of trust? Why do we, as a society, make each other sick and then blame each other for getting sick? Get me off of this ride.

I will be the first to admit that I am not always easy to get along with. I am not always easy to get to know. It takes a long time for me to let someone in and oftentimes, even when someone thinks I've let them in all the way, it's so far from the truth it's almost heartbreaking. Im getting better as I get older and further removed from my childhood and adult trauma experiences but I can still be difficult to navigate. I live with myself every day and sometimes I find myself difficult to navigate. 

So what has worked for me? Medication? Talk therapy? Hardly. Both have been expensive and stressful wastes of time.

What has worked for me is a small but powerful circle of support consisting of friends I've known for a year to over fifteen years, a man who patiently loves me and sees me through the noise, a spiritual advisor who challenges me to heal myself through loving myself and a couple of fuzzy kids of the cat and rabbit variety who are the only beings on this planet to have "seen it all" when it comes to me, and love me unconditionally anyway.

So how do you treat Borderline Personality Disorder?

Love.

Fierce, patient, real love.

Because that's all a Borderline Bitch wants and that's all that this Borderline Bitch wants to give.

I Want You To Want Me

Love is the most complicated emotion out there. While this is not an earth-shattering statement, it is a statement that can't be more true. There are countless songs sung about it, books written about it, art made as a result of love found and love lost. Love is beautiful in its complication and can also be incredibly hurtful.

I have realized that I have spent a lot of my life refusing love. I have had men love me or want to love me in the past and have turned it away. I have chosen men who have been uninterested or unable to love me. I have had opportunities to live with an open heart and participate in the grace that comes with being vulnerable and allowing love in and have chosen not to.

I had a rough start with love. People that were naturally supposed to be "assigned" with the task of loving me failed. Decisions that I have made in the past have disallowed love from coming into my life. I have treated myself with less than love in many ways-drugs, alcohol, sex, food, anger, criticism and physical harm.

Things have changed and are changing. I love fiercely. I give love. I ask for it back. I fight for it. I stand up for it.

I still get shot down sometimes. It still hurts. I still ask for love in clumsy ways at times. It's still complicated. But instead of engaging in old patterns of pushing it away or reacting in anger, I sit with this vulnerability, move through the feelings by feeling them all, dust myself off and look for more opportunities to love.

If I've done one thing right in my life, it's been my decision to love myself and others no matter what.

Finest Worksong

About six months after I graduated from undergrad, I had quit my job at the racetrack and taken an admin job at the American Heart Association. As someone who had been working in the fast-paced environment of a horse racetrack and as a smoker of almost ten years at that point, this job was an ill fit. I was bored out of my skull and didn't really connect with anyone that I worked with. The pay was alright but the commute sucked.

I quit that job on the spot one day. After another long, boring lunch in a nondescript office park, I came back, put my belongings in a box and, on the way out, told the office manager I was leaving and not coming back. The shocked look on her face barely registered with me as I walked out. I spent the next nine months unemployed.

This period of unemployment would end up being the catalyst to one of my longest running problems in my life, my unhealthy attachment to work.

I have put a lot of emphasis on work before I was even old enough to do so. I could hardly wait to get a work permit in high school and have pretty much worked nonstop since I obtained that permit. I've worked two, sometimes three jobs at a time and that nine-month stint had been my only period of unemployment. I have always been on a career track, never satisfied with just having a job. My family had never been a big advocate for the career track. Most of them had nondescript government jobs or, in my father's case, barely worked and found a way to live off of others as quickly as he could. So where on earth did my drive come from?

One root was fear. Without the safety net of stable and supportive parents, options for borrowing money or moving back in with my parents were nil. I would live on the streets again before I moved back in with either of them. Another root was my need to control something. In many other aspects of my life to date I had had no control over my circumstances-my childhood, my parents, where I lived, who touched my body. Work was similar to school in that there were certain things that were not allowed to happen there without repercussion and, since I was good at creating and engaging in routine, work presented as a mirror to the lifelong security of education.

Another root was pure spite. When I was thirteen, one of the many drunken rants out of the mouth of my stepfather aimed towards me was one where he predicted my future. He said "that bitch is going to be on drugs and pregnant by the time she's sixteen!"

That statement stuck with me and I made a promise to myself that day that I would prove that fucker wrong. It lit a fire under me that has done me a lot of good in many ways, but has also been highly destructive to my self-worth, my unhealthy need to control and my over-indulged ego. I gave that statement-and that man-an obscene and exhausting amount of energy for more than twenty years.

That nine-month period of unemployment smashed my ego. I felt useless and worthless. Even though I was living with a boyfriend at the time and he was being incredibly supportive of me financially and otherwise, I was in a deep depression. I made the impulsive decision to move to Idaho to get a job, made the impulsive decision to move back to California less than three years later, have taken jobs that weren't a fit, didn't pay enough, had bad commutes, bad bosses, bad benefits, you name it. All so I could say that I have been employed.

I'm currently unemployed and have been since January of this year. I lost my job at UW in a tough, "blow to the ego" type way. I had started and run a successful program for three years and had only gotten paid for one of them, only to get laid off at the end of the first and only paid year. The program was my baby and I was cut out of it.

While the last few months have had good and bad days in relation to my feelings of self-worth, they are nowhere near as devastating as they would have been in the past. I have a few job prospects but not many, a small financial safety net, a large student loan and Trump-era anxiety. But I have a strong support network, a professional network that respects me, I don't want for much, and I have this current gift of time to process, heal, grow and get to know myself. I've met amazing people through work that I am proud to call friends. I am able to be defined by so much more than my work these days and now realize that I always have been. 

Oh yeah, and I'm not pregnant or on drugs ;)

Precious Things

When I was in my sophomore year of college, I went to my first dance club. It was an all ages club and I was looking forward to this rite of passage. I got dolled up, got picked up by a couple of girlfriends and headed out.

Since we were underage, we of course shared a fifth of whiskey in the parking lot before going in. Simultaneously overwhelmed and overjoyed by all of the flashing lights, people and heavy bass, we walked into the club feeling and acting like we owned the place.

We danced in a small cluster, knowing almost instinctually that we needed to protect each other. Men would come through the circle and dance with us but would typically move out of our circle in the pleasurable and organic flow of dance. This energy was short-lived. As we were dancing, a couple of men joined our group and began to dance with us. Suddenly, I felt my skirt being pulled up and a man's hand attempting to work its way into my panties. I turned around and away from him, looking at him with shock and disgust. He gave me a look of pleasure and entitlement and walked away. Needless to say, I felt violated.

As someone who had been violated sexually before I could even understand what that meant, this was an especially cruel experience. It also shot me back to another loss not so many years prior.

I was couch surfing after I left home and was staying with my friend Emilia. Her parents were immigrants from Mexico and owned a small residential and commercial cleaning business in Anchorage. Many of their jobs were after hours so most evenings at Emilia's were without adult supervision, which was ideal for a homeless underage runaway. She had an older sister who was somewhere around the age of twenty-one. One of the nights that I crashed there, her sister was having a party.

Even though Emilia and I were only thirteen, we were allowed to join the party. I had a couple of beers, a welcome addition to my sad circumstances. Since I was so young, the beer hit me pretty hard and soon after, I left the party to go lie down in the bedroom that Emilia shared with her sister. I shut the lights out and drowned out the party noise, slipping quickly into an alcohol-induced sleep.

I was awakened by a man over me, biting my neck and grinding my breast into my ribs with one of his hands. He was using the other hand to pull my pants down. I was half asleep and still feeling the effects of the alcohol, so it was difficult for me to register what was happening or do anything about it. I started to struggle but he was much older and bigger than I was. I could hear other voices in the background but the lights were still out so I couldn't see anything. In the parallel universe that is rape, I consider that its own bizarre blessing. As this man violated me, I could hear the other men laughing and saying "come on man, bone the bitch so we can get out of here."

I was an errand to be completed, a party favor, and all I did to get here was have a beer and go to bed. I was thirteen years old and had had one positive sexual experience. I shouldn't have had any sexual experiences at that age. What is happening? Why?

Unsurprisingly, my adult years have been fraught with struggles around sexual intimacy. I spent a good portion of my adult years violating my own body through my actions and struggling with distrust and anger towards men. I have been informally diagnosed as borderline in the past and struggle with the shame of that diagnosis and the shame around how I've gotten to a point where someone could feel that they know enough about me to relegate me to a label as simple and derogatory as that. I struggle with anger that people can violate others to the point of sickness, then arrogantly slap a detached and academic label to it and express frustration that the violated can't "get it together."

When a precious gem is tarnished, it is cared for. It is not re-labeled and tasked with polishing itself. Instead, the gem's caretaker knows that there is beauty under the dust and understands that it takes time and patience to unearth it. Why is that same honor not extended to women, one of the most precious things on earth?

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

One of my first jobs and my longest-held job was at Bay Meadows Racecourse, one of the last-standing horse racetracks in Northern California. I was still in high school when I started working there and didn't leave until after I graduated from college. When I was eighteen, one of the admins in the group sales office, Angie, gave me an expired ID to use as a fake ID and told me the places to go that wouldn't card too closely. There were a lot of old school bars near the track that catered to track personnel (racetrack rats, we were called). Armed with a fake ID and other folks from the track, I was hanging out at bars most weekends, three years before I was legally allowed to.

These early bar experiences were the start of a couple of journeys. The first journey was my slow but eventual descent into struggling with alcohol abuse. From the age of eighteen until I was about thirty years old, I struggled with fairly consistent episodes of drinking to excess. I wouldn't drink every day but by the time I was twenty-one I couldn't exactly count on one, or even two hands, how many times I had been drunk. My struggle with alcohol would take on different circumstances and different levels of severity over the next twelve years but my early days at the track were certainly the training ground for all of them.

The other journey was one of learning how to socialize. Given the variation in types of bars, ranging from upscale to pretty damn rough and skeezy and my comfort with going into any of them, I was conditioned pretty quickly on how to identify dangerous situations, how to engage in humorous banter, how to listen to strangers and their struggles and how to spend time in a bar alone. My upbringing helped me ease into some of these dynamics but these experiences overall have certainly helped my social work career. Relating well to different people in different situations and the ability to size up these situations quickly are minimum requirements of a good social worker and are skills that certainly don't hurt when navigating life.

I drink a lot less these days. I made a decision a handful of years back that I didn't want to follow in the footsteps of my mother and chose a different path. I still know how to get a healthy buzz going but I also know when to stop, a skill that took a while for me to grasp.

However, I still socialize in bars often. Sometimes I have a few drinks. Sometimes water, sometimes coffee. I've been a regular at different bars over the last few years and can slide into this role easily; an attractive and kind girl who is willing to listen to and care about people, laugh at jokes and crack her own, and handle herself is most always a welcome addition at any bar. I also get the fulfilling privilege of meeting people from all walks of life-the divorced jokester with the Wisconsin accent who loves his kids and struggles severely with depression, the sad 20-something cutie struggling with a cocaine habit, hell, even the tweaked out, shit-talking painter with a bad habit of stealing have all contributed countless stories in my repertoire and has given me a unique window into how people deal with their circumstances and each other.

I've sat with a man who was having a couple of drinks alone because his son was in the ICU again for a debilitating chronic illness. I've listened to men and women process their broken hearts. I've been present for conversations about babies being born, children going to college, memories of peoples' favorite concert experiences and have learned a lot about different cultures, bands, books and places around the world. I've certainly dropped my joys and sorrows off at bars over the years. I've sung "Me and Bobby McGee" at the top of my lungs at a bar. A bar was the first place that someone told me that I was a talented writer. Just last night, I met a guy that I'll probably never see again, but we cracked jokes, solved the Jumble, had a fun conversation about old movies and he taught me how to two-step.

Each of these conversations typically begin and end with a raised glass and an acknowledgement that you exist.

Bars aren't for everyone, of course. But having a place where you can connect with people, step away from your day-to-day and really, step out of your own bubble is one of the greatest things about being on this planet. Connect. Enjoy. Acknowledge each other. Raise a glass.

Canon in D

When I was sixteen, my dad let me get a cat. As soon as I heard the word go, I was off to the humane society to find my new friend. The first cat I saw upon entry was this little black kitten sharing a cage with another little tabby kitten. I found her to be very cute but figured I should check out the other cats before I made a final decision. As I cruised around looking at the other cats, I couldn't get that little black kitty off my mind. Looping back around to the front, I looked in on her again. As I was watching her I saw her get up, get a bite of food, then move back over near her cage mate. As she sat back down, she sat on the head of the other kitten in the cage. Soon after she sat down, the tabby reached his paw up and tapped her a few times, like he was saying "hey uh, excuse me could you move a little?" The little black kitty just squinted her eyes and dug in further. I laughed, appreciating her attitude. This cat was mine.

She came home with me that day. Tiny and shy, she hid under the bed for the first three days. I named her Raven.

Raven was my companion through college when I was living alone. Shortly after I graduated from college, I started dating a man that I had met through a mutual friend. Raven was very territorial of me and was really a one-person cat so this new man in my life was not a development that sat well with her. She was combative and aggressive towards him. One night, he was drunk and messing with her and she scratched him. Hard. In a drunken fit of rage, he picked her up and threw her. I should have dumped him right then.

Raven traveled with me through this relationship, a move to Idaho, a move back to California and multiple houses and apartments in between. She lived through the addition of three cats and a rabbit to the household. She hated all of it.

I didn't give her as much attention in the last three years of her life as I had for the first six. I was wrapped up in stress, depression and an unhealthy relationship. I was making poor and impulsive choices, and a lot of them, the first few years after undergrad. She was still my girl and I still loved her, but my life was full of other chosen distractions.

When we moved back to California into a tiny basement apartment in San Francisco with the other three cats and rabbit in tow, she started to deteriorate. She spent a lot of time in a room by herself because she didn't like the other cats. My current cat, Noodle, used to look at her through the window of this room. I always thought he had a bit of a crush on her.

About a year after we moved back to San Francisco, she started to lose weight rapidly. She stopped eating and her once soft and shiny coat, like black silk, had begun to dry out and became dull. I took her to the vet. Raven had cancer. The options were expensive and painful surgery that would extend her life for six months at the most or put her down. The decision was obvious-I wasn't going to make my little girl suffer-but the decision was heart-wrenching. I knew that Raven had given up.

I felt tremendous guilt for the life I had given her in her final three years. She was my girl and I had let her down. I spent the last night of her life on the couch with her, crying and pouring love on her, the love that she deserved. The next day, I took her in to the vet and let her go.

After she was gone, I felt a strong urge to listen to Pachelbel's Canon in D. It was the first classical song I had ever heard and I loved the beautiful, flowing sadness mixed with pieces of joy. Much like Raven's life. I listened to it over and over again in the days after she passed. She died eight years ago and I haven't listened to the song again until now. It's been too hard to do so.

I still feel guilt around the way her life turned out. I think that's the reason that Noodle is spoiled rotten. And I'm ok with that.

Pish

Midway through my first year of college, my dad came to visit. We took a day to go to the grocery store so that he could stock me up with groceries to last me for a while, then went to a consignment shop so that he could try to find a dining table set for his place in Washington.

At the consignment shop, my dad and I split from each other to look around. He was on the hunt for his dining set and this amazing purple couch had caught my eye. It looked like something Hendrix would have and it was oh so comfortable. I was relaxing on the couch when one of the employees came up to me, a young guy about my age. He said something shitty to me and I responded in a similar fashion. He followed up my response by calling me a bitch.

I found my dad and told him what had happened. The shop owner was apologetic and my dad demanded that she make the boy apologize to me. The boy refused. The matter was not pressed and my dad and I began loading his newfound dining set into his truck. As we were loading the set into the truck, my dad looks at me and says with a chuckle "I would have returned this dining set because of that situation but she was offering the set at such a good price."

My worth was less than the price of a consignment dining set.

Go Your Own Way

My first year of college I worked at a dog grooming business. The owner was a nutcase. Mitchell. A mid-30s white man who struggled with his sexuality.

I started out as a cashier at the dog grooming place and was soon working in the back room as a dog bather. I worked with Cindy, a glamorous but aged and world weary blonde and Ruth, a 70s throwback lesbian who had a girlfriend and a crush on me. I had a crush on her but had no idea what to do with those feelings. Ruth and I smoked a lot of weed together, on and off the job. She took me to my first concert in California, Fleetwood Mac. It was amazing. Prior to the concert, we went to her house to pre-game on some weed and beers. I was nineteen. She went to go get ready, which I can now say meant that she went into her bathroom to do a couple of lines. She asked me to roll a few joints for the show. I had no idea how to roll a joint but I sure did know how to grind up shake and I gave it my best effort.

I quit that job at the dog grooming place. The owner lost his shit one day and started calling me an idiot and a bimbo and I told him to go fuck himself. I started walking home, with tears in my eyes. Halfway home, I turned around, walked back to the shop and demanded my final paycheck. He told me that I could wait. I told him that wasn't happening. Something about the way I said it made him think twice about his choice and he cut me a check. That was the first time I had stood up to someone of authority in that way and not the last time that I would experience conflict at work. My disenchantment with employment had begun. 

Long Snake Moan

I started college at San Jose State University on my 18th birthday. Aside from my paternal grandfather, I was the only one in my family to attend college. School had been my source of stability for my entire childhood so I was thrilled to be able to stay within the safe confines of an academic institution.

My first year was a shock to the senses. I was nowhere near college level in any subject and didn't even test into college level math. I was sent to a remedial math class, reviewing algebra with a professor that had the thickest East Indian accent I had ever heard. I still hadn't adjusted to all of the different cultures in California and, having no hearing in my right ear, the variety of accents paired with the large class sizes of undergrad was overwhelming. I flunked that first semester of remedial math.

Shortly after my first semester ended, I received a letter from San Jose State informing me that I was going to be given one more shot at completing remedial math. If I didn't pass this time, I was kicked out of university. This school didn't mess around. When I showed up for my first day of class and was met with another huge class and a professor with a thick Asian accent, I felt that I was doomed.

I reached out to my former high school math teacher, Mike Coutts. He was my favorite teacher who happened to teach my least favorite subject. I'm pretty sure I passed math in high school with pity grades. I explained my predicament to him and he quickly agreed to tutor me through that semester. I passed with a C but I passed. We spent hours on the phone and hours at his house, toiling away at high school math, over and over again. Most of the time I was high, which didn't help.

I was working two jobs at the time and carrying a 12 credit courseload. I was commuting by train twenty-five miles each way. I had no social life and no time for the great college experience. My father had moved out at the beginning of my senior year of high school so I had been deep in the work world for a year at that point. I was making $9 an hour at one part-time job and $11 an hour at my full-time job. I was exhausted.

In my second year of undergrad, I struck up a friendship with a guy named John in my plant biology lab. He was a long haired metalhead who had an affinity for the band Tool. So did I. He did a lot of acid and soon after, so was I. He lived with his parents in San Jose so we'd get together and trip on acid, try to do lab homework and marvel at his collection of pet snakes. He had about seventeen snakes in his room in all colors of the rainbow. I was afraid to touch them but loved to watch them move silently and delicately around their tanks.

I am still fascinated by snakes to this day. Their solitary existence, their quiet beauty. The level of fear that even the most gentle snakes can instill in people, including me, is mesmerizing. Snakes are often attributed to a negative and deceitful person, someone evil. Master strategists, snakes live their days in silent travel, only bearing fangs and striking when necessary.

John and I lost touch after college. He wanted me so bad, but I was still dating my high school boyfriend and never took him up on the offer. He used to draw these intricate fine pen drawings consisting of small circles and lines that would fill the page. Each 8x10 page had to have had at least 10,000 lines on them and the page was filled with brilliant colors done by colored pencil. It was an artful manifestation of a brain on acid. These gifts were a bone of contention between my high school boyfriend and I and I eventually threw them away to keep the peace. I wish I hadn't done that.

Only God Can Judge Me

Two days before my fourteenth birthday, I had become a resident of California. I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people, the tall buildings, the traffic, the palm trees, the weather. I had to start school in a couple of weeks and I was nowhere near ready for that.

My dad had enrolled me in a private, non-denominational Christian school. He wasn't really sure what he had gotten himself into, taking me on. We shopped for school uniforms at the uniform supply store and I started school.

The first week was a nightmare. I had uniform store-issued clothes while all of the other boys and girls had more stylish, mainstream options. The misfit from Alaska was now the misfit from California. I was confused, angry, depressed.

The Friday of my first week at that school, I overheard a couple of girls in the bathroom gossiping about me and was crushed. I went home and told my dad that I hated that school and didn't want to go anymore. We got in a big argument, which resolved nothing. Later, after we had cooled down, his only remark was "you fight in a very logical way." While I didn't completely understand what that meant, I took that as a compliment and aspired from that day forward to be sure and be logical.

The school was its' own private hell. Non-denominational meant that they could change denominations depending on what mood the administration was in and what sort of punishments they wanted to put forth. If they wanted to ban certain things, they were Southern Baptist. If they wanted to scare kids, they were Pentecostal. As someone who had very little experience with organized religion, it all felt like confusing bullshit to me.

Conformity was key. We had weekly chapel service on Wednesdays that required the girls to wear long skirts and the boys to wear dress shirt and tie. We were forced to recite "Good Reports Edify and Testify-that spells GREAT" over and over again. When I was a junior, it was found out that two seniors were having sexual relations and they were forced to admit their sin to the entire school, K-12. As I grew more into my high school misfit persona and less of a shy, mousy girl I started getting into trouble. I rolled my shirts to make them shorter, dyed my hair black, wore Doc Martens, got caught smoking. In my senior year I was suspended for three days for refusing to pray. I couldn't wait to get the fuck out of there.

I graduated on honor roll and was accepted into college at San Jose State University. My dad was beyond proud and took me to the nicest dinner I had ever had up to that point, at Van's Restaurant. I wasn't even sure if I wanted to go to San Jose State, that was the first school that accepted me. But he was so happy and proud that that's where I decided to go.

My graduation ceremony was stressful. My mother and her parents and my father's parents flew in from Oregon and Seattle, respectively. My mother and father had not spoken in years, or at least not cordially. My father and paternal grandfather sat on one side of the room at the reception, refusing to talk to my mother and her folks. I spent my graduation day jockeying back and forth between the two parties, ensuring that everyone was having a good time. My dad and grandfather were indignant and rude, too wrapped up in their personal melodramas while my mother spent the day looking stressed and hurt. None of that day was about me.

King of the Road

After almost a year at Covenant House, staff attempted to facilitate family reunification with my mother. They called her in and didn't tell me. I came home from school and one of the social workers led me into a small conference room, where I was sat across from my mother. A state social worker and another shelter staff were also in the room. I was blindsided. I don't remember what was said or who said what, I was in that disassociative fog that I can still get into to this day. The talking seemed short because my mother started yelling and verbally abusing me, calling me a whore, a homewrecker and a mental case before grabbing her purse and storming out. I had said nothing in this meeting. The social worker and shelter staff looked at me sheepishly before excusing me to the common area in the shelter. I walked down the hall to the common area in a fog and played Sim City on one of the computers until it was government cheese and jailhouse slop time.

A couple of weeks passed, I think. I was still going to school daily but had to have been physically showing the wear and tear of my experience. Cheryl, the mother of a classmate that I didn't know well approached me at the end of a school day and asked if I would be interested in staying with her family.  She was a City Councilmember in Anchorage, that was all I knew. I moved in.

Her home was full of love and warmth. She had three kids-a son my age, a daughter who was nine and a three year old daughter. Her husband was a quiet, nice guy and she was a happy, Christian woman. She was a good mom. She had her two daughters share a room so that I could have my own room and let me use an old radio/CD player/tape deck because she knew I loved music. She did too. I had been able to retrieve some of my belongings from my parent's house with a state escort and took a few childhood mementos and all of my CD's. I listened to Pink Floyd "The Wall" and their live album, "Delicate Sounds of Thunder" endlessly. I had insomnia most nights and when I would get tired of playing my same handful of CDs over and over again, I would tune in to a late night conspiracy theory show on a local radio station.

That was the first time in my life that I had received love and discipline in healthy and equal doses. When I did something wrong I was reprimanded, not abused. When I needed love, I got it. The house always had music playing and the food was always good. One night, Cheryl had some friends over and they drank iced tea and listened to AM radio. Her favorite song, "King of the Road", came on and she blasted it, singing and dancing with abandon in her kitchen.

About three weeks into my stay there, I developed what I thought was a rash on my right hip. It was about an eight-inch series of small black dots from the top of my hip to the middle of my thigh. It was incredibly painful. I couldn't sleep on my right side and taking clothes off and on was excruciating. I said nothing. One day, I bumped into the refrigerator door in her kitchen and started to cry. Cheryl asked me what was wrong and I told her that I had a rash that really hurt. She asked to see it. I pulled my pants down and showed her and she reacted with shock.

"How long have you had this??"

"A couple of weeks."

"We need to get you to the doctor right away! Why didn't you say anything?"

I didn't know how to answer her. The answer was too big.

We rushed off to her family doctor and it was determined that I had shingles. I was in a lot of pain, scared of what I had and feeling guilty for stressing Cheryl out and making her have to take time out to deal with me. Cheryl held my hand as the doctor scraped a sampling off of my thigh. We both laughed when I said "that didn't even hurt, she said it was going to hurt!"

I stayed with Cheryl and her family four about three months until my biological father in California was identified as "next of kin" and moves were being made to unite me with my father. In August of 1996, I boarded a plane with my biological father, a man I barely knew, to San Francisco to start my new life there.

Wheel in the Sky

I left home for good the winter of 1995. I was clocking almost ten years of sexual abuse at that point and a good three years of physical and verbal abuse. I had been suspended twice in junior high for fighting and was the scapegoat for everything fucked up my household. I was the resident slave, tasked with cleaning the house and picking up after the drunks. I was done.

 I spent the next six months couch surfing and sleeping outside. It was winter in Alaska so it was cold and snow covered. I would find deep piles of snow and dig out burrows to sleep in over at the park adjacent to Baxter Bog. I would squat in abandoned buildings downtown with the drunk pedophiles and fucked up young folks. The police would find me from time to time, toss me in McLaughlin Youth Center and toss me back out. I continued to attend school, as it was the only stable sanctuary I could find. Most teachers turned a blind eye to my deteriorating physical and mental state until I got into trouble in English class for falling asleep, drooling on my notebook and sliding out of the chair. I was sent to the principal's office where I unloaded my life. I still remember the look on that principal's face. He was probably in his mid-30's, with a full beard and a fitted plaid shirt. The look of horror and helplessness that emerged and remained on his face made me feel guilty for bringing this to him. I knew firsthand that this shit was overwhelming. He informed me that he was mandated to report this to the police and I was happy to hear it.

About an hour later, a detective from the Anchorage Police Department showed up at the school to take me to the police station and record my statement. She was an older woman, probably in her mid-fifties. She was stoic and all business but nice enough. I was brought to the police station in the back seat of a cop car and escorted into a soundproof room equipped with a set of government-issued table and chairs and a recording device. We spent what felt like two days going over everything that had happened in my household to date. She then led me to a small waiting room filled with children's toys and a TV blaring some sort of cartoon. The reception was so shitty and my brain was so fogged that I couldn't tell, nor did I really give a shit. It is unclear how long I was in that children's waiting room but I do know that I slept the hardest and darkest that I have ever slept. No dreams, no recollection of falling asleep or waking. I was sleeping the sleep of the dead.

I was woken up by the same detective, told I was going to need to call my parents to do a wiretap on their phone to try to get them to confess what they did over the wiretap. I hadn't spoken to them for months. The detective set up the wiretap equipment and made the call, giving me no direction on how exactly I was supposed to get them to confess all of this over the phone. The wiretap failed. It was a five minute phone call, answered by my stepfather, who proceeded to verbally abuse me over the phone and hang up. "Well, guess that's not going to work", the detective sighed, as she shuffled me into the back of another police car.

I was transported to Covenant House, the only youth shelter in Anchorage. I was passed off to some intake staff and told that I was going to stay here for an emergency overnight while they got me hooked up with a CPS worker and completed the process of making me a temporary ward of the state.

That emergency overnight turned into almost a year. In my typical fashion, I created order out of chaos and had my daily routine of getting up to shower for school in the group shower, get my sack lunch and two bus tokens and take the People Mover, Anchorage's public transit system, to school. I'd come home and eat government cheese and jailhouse slop off the food line at the shelter and go to bed.

I bunked with a girl named Mariah in a room that held about six girls at a time. I had the top bunk and she was below me. She was a beautiful girl too and had the same hair and features as Alanis Morrissette. She was my age but had the looks and figure of a girl in her 20's. We became close, two girls bonded in our trauma. She had been brutally sexually abused by her grandfather. One night, she had come back from the showers and the room filled with the smell of rotten fish. Other girls started to remark and make cracks about the smell and I saw Mariah looking sheepish and ashamed on the edge of her lower bunk. I asked her if she wanted to come up to my bunk for a little bit and she agreed. She confessed to me that the smell was her-her grandfather had stuck scissors up her vagina and caused major damage. The smell was a side effect of that physical damage. We spent the rest of the night listening to Journey's "Wheel in the Sky" on tape before we fell asleep next to each other. A week later she was gone. I never knew what happened to her.

Nothing Else Matters

As my funny little relationship with Brian started to get tiresome, I began spending more time with Job. He was this goofy Tlingit boy with a heart of gold. He was funny and kind and is still the best guitar player I have ever known. At the age of 12, he could hear a song once, learn it and then adjust it to make it his own. We both fell in love with Metallica and began to quickly fall in love with each other. It was puppy love at its finest. 

The defining moment in our experience with each other was after we had been circling around each other for about a month in our group of friends. I was still with Brian and he had increased his bullying beyond private bashing and began to embarrass me publicly. I was the angry girl but I was still the sad, scared and shy little girl so I never stood up for myself. 

One day after school, I went over to Cameron's to meet Brian there. He flaked on me. After waiting on Brian for a bit, I went next door to Job's house. He was home playing guitar. He saw that I looked down and asked if I was ok. I started crying and telling him about how Brian had flaked on me and how he had been treating me poorly. He listened intently and calmly but there was a fire behind his eyes as he listened. After I had finished my monologue, he said "hey, I need to run up to the gas station on the corner will you wait here for me? I'll be right back." I was a little put off because I had heightened anxiety about being left alone again by a boy twice in one day. But I relunctantly agreed, too tired to say otherwise.

My fears were quieted however when he came back ten minutes later with a single red rose that he had bought from the gas station. He handed it to me and said "you deserve for someone to buy you flowers."

After that, Brian faded away quickly and Job and I became super friends. We spent day after day together making prank calls, smoking weed and listening to music. I continued to marvel at how he seemed to grow into his guitar by the minute. As the violence and alcoholism raged on at home, I began to leave in the middle of the night when the fights between my parents would get bad and run in the dark to Job's house. It was about twenty minutes away on foot but I always got there faster. I would knock on his window in the middle of the night and he'd help me climb through the window. I would tell him about what was happening at home. Or I wouldnt, he knew. We would then listen to music all night until we fell asleep on the floor of his room next to the radio. 

We didn't have sex until we had been spending time together for a solid year. It was another night that I had run to his house for peace. We were smoking Marlboro menthols that he had stolen from somehwere, one after one. He kissed me, in a shy and non-assumptive way. We had sex that night and, since we couldn't find a condom, used a plastic bag from Safeway. Even though it was a pretty derlict excuse for a condom, he was undoubtedly the most respectful person I have ever been with as far as safe sex went. 

About a month after we had sex, I left my family home for good. I turned my stepfather in for abuse then started the year-long journey of couch surfing, sleeping outside and staying in the youth shelter downtown. The stress of leaving was overwhelming and, as it was the days before cell phones and Facebook, Job and I lost track of each other. After a whirlwind year of homelessness, I was on a plane to California just days before my fourteenth birthday. 

Job and I saw each other once after that. It was 2003, I was twenty-one and on my own in California. I made a trip to Alaska to stay with my grandparents and looked Job up in the phone book. He was shocked to hear from me but remembered me vividly. We spent the rest of my trip together. Job had changed since I last saw him. He was still an amazing guitar player; the years of practice and love of music had turned him into some sort of prodigious musician. His life circumstances and journey had given him nowhere to outlet this talent. He was living with his older brother in a run-down trailer park near the old neighborhood and had developed a very heavy drinking habit. He had gained quite a bit of weight because of his alcohol use and had lost interest in things like basic hygiene. His eyes were still warm and full of life and we spent the first few days of my trip happy to be back in each others' company. He gave me a small diamond ring that he had been saving.

By the third day, things had started to deteriorate. He had been on a two-day bender at that point, which culminated in him taking an axe to his brother's dining table and chairs. I had a conversation with him on the stairs of that dumpy trailer, encouraging him to get help for his addiction. He refused. We did not speak again and I wouldn't return to Alaska until the winter of 2017.

About eight years later, I reconnected on Facebook with an old friend from Alaska who had also known Job. He said that Job had fallen very deep into alcoholism and was now homeless. He had a daughter somewhere that he never got to see. His mother had died and he didn't know. I cried, long and deep for Job that day, knowing that he was gone. 

In January 2017, I was in downtown Anchorage, presenting at a Health Summit. I was walking downtown, soaking in my old hometown and internally remarking about how much and how little Anchorage had changed in the fourteen years that had passed since I last set foot in Alaska. I walked past the downtown bus depot and looked up to see a man my age in an oversized coat, staring off into space. He was very much intoxicated, exhibiting that wobbly stance that alcoholics have. I locked eyes with him, merely because of the movement of another person in my line of vision. The connection was brief and I didn't miss a step in my movement forward. A few seconds later, something hit me about that man and I realized that I knew him. I turned around to get a second look at it registered in my head and heart that this was Job. I stumbled a little in my walk forward, conflicted on whether or not I was really seeing what I was seeing and conflicted on whether or not I should turn back around and find out. I was still mid-decision when I turned around and he was gone. 

Girls Chase Boys

By the age of 12, my life as I had experienced it thus far had started to wear on me. I went from the shy, nerdy kid getting picked on to the pretty, angry girl hanging with the stoner boys. Cigarettes easy to come by, my parents smoked them and Alaska was home to some of the best weed in the country. The Alaska Thunderfuck strain still gets me nostalgic.

I started having interest in boys and they took a quick interest in me. My first physical experience with the opposite sex occurred around this time. I attended a sleepover at the neighbor girl's house where we camped out in tents in her backyard. Midway through the night I was chilly and hungry, so I crept into the house to get something to eat and warm up on the couch. As I was dozing off her brother Ryan, three years my senior came over to see if I was awake. He quickly pushed into kissing me on the couch and then led me to their garage. He sat me down in front of the water heater and we started to kiss passionately, or at least as passionately as teenagers can. He removed my shirt and began kissing and fondling my breasts. I felt like I was in love. The next day and every day after that, he barely acknowledged me.

Shortly after my experience with Ryan, I met my first "boyfriend", Brian. He was a young stoner punk I went to junior high with. We started smoking weed together and that quickly led to marathon makeout sessions. I began to spend a lot of time at his house with my friend Emilia. It was a great place to hang out, as there was little adult supervision. About three months into our relationship, we were alone at his house and our makeout session got a little more heated. I lost my virginity that day.

In the weeks after we had sex, Brian began to become a bit of a bully towards me, calling me stupid and uncool. I found this hurtful but it wasn't that I hadn't heard before so it rolled off my back. I continued to run around with our group of friends, which expanded to include Cameron and Job, a couple of boys that lived in a nearby neighborhood but went to a different school. Both Cameron and Job lived in rough households, albeit households that were typical to Alaska-alcohol, minimal to no adult supervision and teenage drama. I spent a lot of time smoking weed, drinking alcohol, taking mushrooms and moving into the lifelong love affair I would have with music.

Alcohol

Not much had changed in my day-to-day upon moving back to Alaska and I entered into my preteen years. My stepdad had left me alone for about a year as I was going through puberty. I was breaking out and gaining weight and my emotions and moods were all over the map, some of that attributed to hormones. Once puberty ran its course and I really started to fill out and become a woman, his interest once again piqued.

Another dramatic shift occurred at this time as well. My parents, who had drunk alcohol only occasionally, began to drink to excess. It started with my stepfather knocking back can after can of Budweiser and verbally abusing my mother. Soon, my mother started drinking Franzia box wine and fighting back with words. It didn't take long for this dynamic to quickly turn to physical violence between the two of them.

My parents had bought a two-story house with an unfinished basement on Keyann Court that year. My stepfather finished the downstairs bedroom and I finally got my own room. I was thrilled at this new room with the pretty new carpet, a window and privacy. This joy was short-lived.

As their alcoholism grew and their interpersonal violence increased, my room became the place that one or both parties ran to. My mother would run down the stairs late in the night and wake me up, crying and drunk. My stepdad would be there soon after, and usually something in my room would be broken before they both calmed down, went upstairs and passed out, leaving me to try to go back to sleep, alone and wondering what the hell had just happened. My personal physical space had never been off limits and now my room wasn't either.

The strangest violation of my room was when my mother, sister and I went to Hawaii. My stepfather was going to come but they had gotten into a huge argument a few nights prior and he refused to go. It was a blessing. Kind of.

My mother was so excited to go to Hawaii. She had saved for this trip for two years and had never been to Hawaii. We were looking forward to it too-it was the middle of winter in Alaska and we had never been anywhere outside of the state. We went to the beach, a sugar cane farm, shopping and restaurants. I had never been to a beach before. I felt rich and adventurous.

My stepfather harassed my mother from a distance the entire trip. One night, they had gotten in an argument over the phone and she had hung up on him. For the next five hours, the phone rang off the hook and she refused to answer it. She also went into the bedroom with my sister as I slept on the fold-out couch, listening to the phone ring over and over and over again. I never understood why she wouldn't just turn the ringer off.

When we got back from Hawaii, my parents got into a drunken and violent argument almost immediately. My stepfather ripped the undeveloped film from our Hawaii trip out of the camera, ruining all of the pictures. He was at the top of the stairs, raging for what felt like hours; ripping things off of the wall and yelling "she's got a dirty shirt on!". I listened to this episode with indifference as I put my room back together. He had trashed it while we were in Hawaii. As I was putting it back together, I found that he had cut all of my bras in half at the fabric connecting the cups. I never told my mother and never understood what the hell that was about.

Scary Monsters

I was three years old and remember being in my mother's arms as she and my father were talking/arguing with each other. Time slipped away into the fog between dream and reality and sometime later I woke up on my grandmother's couch. My first memory of dreams and reality weaving together.

I saw my grandmother in her old brown living room chair with the matching ottoman. "Your mother went to go deal with some things, you'll be here tonight." That's all she said about the situation and I was too young to even know that there was a situation.

The next memory logged was my mother bringing a new man into the house. I spent my fourth birthday in day care while the two of them got married in a civil ceremony. I stayed with my grandmother that night so that they could go on their honeymoon.

Almost immediately came what felt like an endless stream of moving from one place to another. Eventually we settled down for a year in a small blue one-level town home somewhere in Anchorage, as my mother was pregnant with my sister. I remember being very excited about having a baby sister, telling my mom "we'll have our own Downy baby!", thinking of the fabric softener commercial showing a happy baby swaddled comfortably in a soft pink blanket.

After the birth of my sister, my life changed dramatically. My sister was colicky and had strep throat constantly and starting at a very early age. I found out much later in adulthood that my sister's health problems were attributed to my stepfather's exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. Studies of Vietnam Vets had shown that their offspring often had severe immune deficiencies and were born with no enamel on their teeth. My earliest memories of my sister are of her bawling while getting ice baths to drop her temperature and lying awake all night while she cried and screamed in her crib. My mother would get up to soothe her occasionally but usually my sister just screamed until she wore herself out.

Shortly after my sister was born, the abuse started. My stepfather and mother spent a lot of time after the birth of my sister having sex. On good days, I would be parked in front of the television during their fuckfests, on bad days I was called to join. It is, to date, still the most surreal and confusing situation that I have ever been involved in.

By the time I was five, I was the shy but brilliant kid. I was ahead of my class intellectually but almost failed kindergarten because I could not learn how to tie my shoes. My mother had gone back to work at the Anchorage Bureau of Land Management offices and had a small baby on her hands so she no longer participated in the sexual abuse but my stepfather did. The next five years were a blur of excelling in school, getting bullied in school, getting sexually abused at home and moving. A lot.

When I was nine, we moved from Anchorage, Alaska to Stehekin, Washington. My stepfather had gotten a job with the National Park Service and felt that he had really arrived. We packed it all up and spent three weeks driving to Washington. Stehekin is a tiny rural community near Lake Chelan and accessible only by ferry. As a young girl, I loved the ability to ride my bike anywhere and did well in the small one-room schoolhouse with twenty kids. It was less overwhelming and kids were kinder to me there, although I was still shy and awkward. There were a couple of families that bred Norwegian Fjord horses and owned an outfitting company for tourists interested in pack rides so I was thrilled to have access to horses all the time.

The abuse continued and increased in frequency. I would wake up to my stepfather's genitalia in my face and any time he wanted to go fishing, I vacillated between being excited to fish but knowing that there was going to be a price to pay. I spent most of Stehekin feeling dirty and sad.

We lasted in Stehekin for about nine months. The big job that my stepfather had gotten was actually working in the sewage treatment plant, a fact that I found humorous and fitting in my adult years. My mother had take a leave of absence from her job at Bureau of Land Management and was bored and uninterested in being a housewife or socializing with others in town. It was one of the more isolating times of my childhood.

We moved back to Anchorage and lived with my grandparents while my parents got back in their feet. My mother had been saving our Permanent Fund Dividends for college but then spent all of it on the move back. That was the last I ever heard of a college fund. I re-enrolled back in my former school and life continued as another three-year blur of abuse, bullying and school attendance.