Tag: Origin Story

Breaking Radio Silence – The Forest and the Little Girl

(I know I said last week I’d tell the story of the ‘first break’ in my silence as I called it but I’ll table that for another time)

Over the last week, I began to realize there was still unexplored territory to explore in this journey of breaking my silence. The unexplored territory is the true origin story that I’m just starting to work through. It’s of a little girl, a forest, and a silence that wasn’t.

When I was in elementary school, our recess area was bordered by a patch of forest with lots of trees, thick undergrowth, and lots of room to hide. More than once, I stood there looking at it thinking how much I wanted to walk in there, sit down, and never come out. Why? Because going back into a classroom or a playground where I didn’t quite fit in wasn’t what I wanted to do.

I’ve hesitated (to say the least) to write about myself back then. I’ve been afraid of hearing people come at me and say I should just get over all that shit from back then and let it go. I’m glad we’re talking about bullying and mental health like we are now, but for me it’s still a challenge. Yet I’m up to that challenge because here I can say ‘fuck off’ to any voice inside my head that tells me to just get over shit. So I’m going to bring that little girl, aka me, back to life here for a little bit.

When I was her age, there was a park behind the houses in the subdivision we lived in at the time. And I will confess here that I rode back there on my bike and walked around it all by myself. There was a swampy pond in the middle of it but I was never afraid of being around that swampy-pond like I still am sometimes around open bodies of water (residual past-life fear I’ll go into at another time). Instead, my overactive childhood imagination kept a lookout for Swamp Thing. I’d seen the movie when I was that age and yes it’s low-budget and campy, but I loved it because Swamp Thing was the hero of the story (he was a scientist who through an accident in his lab turned into this creature that everyone feared except the heroine of the story played by one of my favorite actresses of that day Adrienne Barbeau). But what I really liked about that swampy-pond forest space was that I could hear my own thoughts and no one else’s bullying belittling bullshit like I heard so much back then.

I love nature and have always felt comfortable in a wooded area or anyplace that’s without other humans. I’ve always been more than comfortable being alone but looking back I realize it was a matter of survival. Being alone was a place where I wasn’t being looked at and laughed at, or ridiculed for being clumsy, or intelligent. Not all my childhood was that shitty but there was way too much shit then and later on that I shouldn’t have had to put up with. Yet I’ve come to realize I found a way to deal with it. And no, retreating into silence was not running away from it. No, in ways I’m just beginning to understand my retreat into silence didn’t mean I lost my voice like I’ve thought. My voice was inside me all along. Now I’m just putting it out into the world.

Back then I used to have a rebellious thought: why do all the mediocre loud-mouth bullying jerks get to speak out and shut me up? Answer: because they don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves and empathy is an act of rebellion they have to fight against because they don’t have any. No, I’m not being mean here because of this: does anyone who mouths off about someone to their face or behind their back ever really think about the consequences of their actions? Answer: no. Because if they did maybe that would have stopped them from shooting their mouths off in the first place. But as I’ve come to realize now, that lack of thought and conscience isn’t my problem to deal with. And that’s something I’ve been telling that young girl I’ve been visiting these past few days.

Because if I could go back in time and sit down next to my younger self in the woods I’d tell her the following:

First, her imagination will always be with her no matter how awful things get. It will always be her safe and secure place and someday it will be what gives her a life of independence.

Second, I would tell her she is so much stronger than she will ever know. And that anyone who says otherwise or calls her weak is full of shit.

And then I would pull her into my arms and hug her like I wouldn’t let her go. I’d pour all the comfort I could into what little time we had together.

So yes, I will be writing about that little girl who grows up and all the shit and hope she finds in this life. And maybe over time, that big wound she’s made me see will close enough to where I can stitch it close to give it thicker scar tissue.

Stand or Fall – An Origin Story

The idea for this book came to me after the US Presidential Election in 2016, a time when I simply asked, “What the hell happened?”

I’ve been a flaming-liberal progressive Democrat all my life and have voted that way since 1992. I’d gone from the high of the first Clinton administration to the low of the second one. I’d gone through eight years of war-mongering and rising right-wing bullshit of the Bush, Jr. years. I fought to maintain hope through the Obama years and thought it would be Hillary’s time after that. But my gut was also telling me it wasn’t her time and hadn’t been since 1992 when she became the right-wing’s favorite villain.

But in the six years since that fateful election in 1992, I’ve seen just how bad things can get. They make the nuclear scares of my 1980’s childhood look tame because in addition to those nuclear fears (which have never gone away), I also fear the slow and painful destruction of our world through environmental destruction, pandemics we won’t be able to respond to, and genocidal violence from far-right groups around the world who want to finish what the Nazi’s started over seventy years ago.

I have struggled hard to even start writing this book because I was watching history happen before my eyes that would culminate with millions dead around the word from an pandemic that may have been contained if the right leadership had been in place worldwide. But most of all, I struggled to write this book after being told all my life that I have no ability to talk about politics or political and social issues. And all from people who honestly didn’t give two shits about me or what I think and feel about the issues of our time. I’ve been an avid follower of political and social issues since my age was in single-digits and though I’m not an expert by any means, I feel I have a perspective that’s not dry, too scholarly, or inaccessible.

I was born in May 1974, three months before Richard Nixon resigned from the Presidency. My late father was an avowed Nixon hater and at times I thought it was mostly just his raving paranoid lunacy. But as I learn more about Nixon and the rise of the modern right-wing conservative movement from the early 1970’s onward, I’ve begun to realize my father was right when he used to go on about Nixon and company wanting to bring back the Fourth Reich as he called it.

For me in the 1980’s, I felt like conservative Republican were just like the bullies I dealt with in school. These bullies singled me out for abuse simply because I was ‘different’ though I was only different because I was fat, shy, and clumsy. I’m a straight, white, heterosexual female but add in the ugly appearance, creativity, and compassion and you can see why I was targeted. So yes, my feelings towards conservative Republicans are personal. To me, any argument that politics isn’t personal is total fucking bullshit perpetuated by people who only want to silence anyone who isn’t falling into lock-step, jack-booted, Nazi-red MAGA hat wearing perfection.

But don’t worry, I won’t leave the left out on this one either. I don’t like left-wing purity culture that’s only minus the fucked-up sexual purity of right-wing purity culture. I also don’t like the doom-and-gloom of the left-wing sometimes, so much that I would love to bitch-slap anyone who jams their head up their ass instead of taking names and kicking ass by voting and giving a genuine shit about the world we live in.

What really prompted this book is the right-wing desire I see to destroy this entire world and everyone in it if they can’t have it all for themselves. In the 80’s and 90’s I thought right-wing Republicans were mostly harmless. Since the 2000’s, they’re deadly. They started two wars, one on false pretenses, and let an epidemic kill a million people in this country. And worst of all, they’ve openly embraced fascism, neo-Nazism, and attempted a coup on January 6, 2021 they still haven’t answered for in a court of law.

I have fought like hell to maintain hope that we’ll put this one out but sometimes I’m fond of saying, “I’ve seen this movie before and I know how it ends.” I grew up on dystopian science-fiction and it always gets worse before it gets better. Just how much worse, I don’t know. Before my generation got bogged down and gave in to the latchkey-pessimism we were raised on, I had hope. Or at least I did in 1992. By 2000, that hope had been broken and I’ve been trying to pick up the pieces ever since then. This book is the story of hope found, lost, and hopefully found again.

Breaking Radio Silence – An Origin Story

In the Fall of 2016, I set out on what I thought would be a straightforward journey: to use writing to try and figure out why I thought and felt the way I did. At that time, I knew there were things I needed to deal with and I thought writing them out would help me see exactly what they were and what I could do about them. I titled this project, “Untitled Self-Help/Memoire Hybrid” as I felt this project would be a combination of self-help and memoire used to illustrate the things I was working through. But in the Spring of 2018, that began to change when the title, “Breaking Radio Silence” came to me.

In the Summer of 2018, I felt like I was going through a Category Five hurricane of emotional storms every single day. I was physically exhausted by this and just barely holding on. In time I realized I was breaking the silence I had imprisoned so many thoughts, feelings, and memories not just to try and get away from the pain, but to keep them from coming out of me and being used against me as a weapon. I felt like I was having a conversation with myself like I never had before, felt like I was allowed to.

In the last months of 2018, I reached what I call the ‘storage unit’ of my mind. This is where I put my most-painful thoughts, feelings, and memories. In those last months of 2018, I went through that storage unit and opened some very painful boxes and sorted the contents out. Most of all, I put those contents into words in my mind and by doing that, I lifted weights of shame and guilt I never should have carried around in the first place.

But I still had a very long way to go to get to the point I’m at now. From 2019 till now, 2022, I had to keep asking questions to figure out why I couldn’t write this book. The big question that got answered over the last six months was this: why have I never followed through on anything I ever wanted to do? The answer to this one was one of the most painful realizations about myself because it was full of regrets and anger, a very volatile mix I had to work through.

The emotional storms are nowhere near as intense as they have been in the past. There is a calm and focus inside me because I’ve come to the most important conclusion about myself and the answer I didn’t know I was looking for. And that answer is at the end of the day, I am worthy and capable of love, and being loved in return. I have also realized that I can try my best to truly connect with people in any way I can, including through writing.

I will tell you right here and now that “Breaking Radio Silence” will not be an easy read, but it will be a hopeful one. And I hope that readers will get something out of it that will help them deal with their own thoughts, feelings, and memories.

The ultimate purpose of writing this book is to help other people, people like myself who have been through things like I have and are trying to deal with the wounds and find healing, and for people who are going through things like I have and need something to hold on to.  

In the end, healing can be had. It’s a long, hard road that never really ends. But it begins with one thing: breaking radio silence. And it continues with a conversation that wasn’t had before.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting excerpts from the book in progress along with related pieces to the theme of breaking radio silence. I feel this is going to be an ongoing project for me even after the book is finished and published.

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