Author: FeralWriter

I don’t have an address right now. But I did have halfhearted mole enchiladas delivered a few hours ago.

I’m back in the United States. I don’t want to be here—reentry felt like whiplash. Immediately after crossing the border into upstate New York, a rented delivery van rode my ass for over 50 miles. Frustrated and starving, I stopped at a gas station and bought a chicken salad sandwich that tasted like tuna and a carrot cake cupcake with cream cheese frosting that defined its own state of matter.

After a few days avoiding Appalachian spirits I ended up here, close but not too close to the nation’s capital, in a quiet condo in a pleasant neighborhood with two dogs that I didn’t know that my soul was aching for. Something in me is finally not running.

Everything I own fits in my car again. I was like this before I got married; when I came back east after getting my English degree it all fit in a 1992 Saturn. Back then I couldn’t stop the spiral: I drank until I didn’t know how much I’d consumed, ended up dead on a table, coughing up the dead parts of my lungs, and somehow ended up creating two people at the same time. When I slammed into the bottom of the spiral, stunned, I built my way back to being human by cleaving to what other people said was true. I followed the rules. I anticipated the results.

And I lost myself.

Now my things fill a larger, newer car, and I’m pretty sure that everyone I know is deeply worried. The past is looping through the present like static under my skin; everything feels familiar and fragile, like it might break the same way twice. When I talk to people, there are weird silences that I try to fill by trying to explain a perspective on my own life that cannot possibly make sense to anyone who has not lived it.

I’m not trying to create my own originality. I’m not trying to consciously create a distance between myself and the people that I love–and I hope love me in return. I’m just no longer trying to twist myself into something legible. I’m trying to remember how to be honest. I’m trying to understand my own life. I’m trying to create space around the stories that have already been told, to try and remember what was there before the narrative went wildly off the tracks.

The PTA secretary and Girl Scout leader can go in this Sterilite tub over here. The annoyed middle-aged college student can slide into this hanging file. The desperate sci-fi novelist who typed out 38,000 words when she wasn’t copyediting the church newsletter or figuring out if she’s supposed to be a priest can finally take a nap between the pages of that pile of journals stacked next to the bed. The second career teacher trying to both rescue kids destined to be forgotten and change the system so that it never happens again can close her laptop and listen to the birds on the porch.

I can’t remember who I was. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be her again. But I do want to carry the parts that kept glowing, even when everything else burned down.

I promise that someday I’ll have an address again. I’ll set up an altar with a Roth IRA and a lease contract. But right now I have a Toyota RAV4 and a walking appointment with a couple of borrowed senior dogs named Basil and Siena.

And for the first time in a long time, I’m not afraid of the quiet. If you need me, I’ll be learning the language of the birds.

It’s hard right now.
I’m out of the country, but yesterday I heard about a list being compiled by the U.S. government—people diagnosed, in their medical records, as being on the Autism Spectrum. My son is on that list.

The realization carved out a hollow space in my chest. People are already speculating about what comes next, drawing comparisons to history too terrible to name. I woke up in a panic, wondering how to get him out of the country.

Then I spoke with someone far more connected to the divine than I felt in that moment. She asked me what I feel when I’m grounded—when I move beyond panic. I took a deep breath and told her this story.

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My son was diagnosed with Autism when he was three.
There was a poem circulating back then about how having a child with special needs was like planning a trip to Italy and landing in Holland instead. For me, it wasn’t Holland—it was Bangladesh. I didn’t know the language. Everything felt too close, too loud, too crowded. I wasn’t anywhere near Kansas anymore, and suddenly there was a list—an endless list—of things I had to adjust to.

The 16-page evaluation from the university’s psychology department placed him in the moderate to severe range—what we’d now call higher needs. He barely spoke—maybe three words, one of which was “train.” The string of deficits detailed in that report was terrifying. I enrolled him in a social communication study immediately. I read everything I could find.

For the first time in my life, reading made it worse.

A few months later, exhausted and paranoid, I went to a family reunion in Northern Michigan. Fifteen of us packed into a big house on a lake. My grandfather and his sons—scientists, all of them—sat discussing how to fix the world through engineering. My grandmother, who’d raised ten children, chatted with those of us wrangling kids.

As the day wound down, the kids wandered to the dock to fish. One pontoon boat sat idle—it wouldn’t start. My son climbed into the captain’s chair, playing with the throttle, pretending to drive. He was smiling, chattering in his own language, lost in the joy of a machine he didn’t need words to understand.

My grandparents came to stand beside me, watching him quietly. They knew about his diagnosis—it was early in the days when Autism was entering public awareness. We stood there, the breeze rustling through the trees, saying nothing.

After a moment, my grandfather spoke:
“That kid’s going to be fine.”

Then they walked back toward the house. I stood there, tears streaming down my face—not from sadness, but because it was exactly what I needed to hear. My fear didn’t vanish, but it softened—from red alert to a cautious yellow.

I held onto those words for years.
Through therapies, through preschool, through the Autism program, through mainstreaming, through the shift from special ed to a 504 plan. Now he’s graduating—top 10 in his class. The kid isn’t just fine. He’s thriving.

I always joke that I’m the worst special ed teacher because I tell everyone—parents, teachers, and most importantly, the kids—there’s nothing wrong with them. There’s nothing to fear.

That doesn’t mean we don’t do the work.
I did all of it—read the books, attended every meeting, stayed in constant communication with his teachers, questioned every expert. I finished that study and was so inspired by the advocates around me that I made special education my career.

But really?
The kid was always going to be fine.

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Right now, things are scary.
My son’s name is on a list—alongside hundreds of thousands of other sons and daughters. That means hundreds of thousands of parents with the same hollow space in their chests. The same rising panic. It’s easy to believe that all we can do is run.

But that wise woman helped me drop beneath the fear—back into the ground, where truth lives.

The kid’s going to be fine.
And so is yours.
And so is yours.

We can do this.
We can fight this.
We just have to do the work.

Yesterday, I was given the gift of perspective.

Some friends have been kind enough to let me stay at their cabin for the month of April. It’s beautiful—on a lake, in the mountains, in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know if I’ve ever known such peace. The ice on lake is melting. The robins are back.

I go for walks in the evenings before dinner and scare the deer with my footsteps on the gravel road, their tails flashing white as they retreat into the brush. I learned what a red-winged blackbird’s song sounds like a couple days ago and realized that not only was the one above me trying to tell me something—he was talking shit about me with a dozen other blackbirds across the rolling farmland. I’m still trying to figure out what they’re saying. When I do, I’ll get back to you.

Anyway. As one does in a cabin in the woods, I’ve been pondering. I’ve been settling into my body, integrating, and trying to figure out what the hell actually happened in my life—as opposed to what other people told me was happening.

Last night, before bed, I had this sort of vision. I pulled out from inside my life and saw it from above—like the view of a landscape from an airplane. I saw woods, and bogs, and winding roads. And I realized those places, those tough moments, were just part of a whole. While I was in them, it was like being trapped in a haunted house where every moment was terrifying. I walked through it in fits and starts, keeping my children close, but inside I was trying to predict when the clowns would jump out of the corners or when the undead woman in the white dress would come at me with the bloody knife.

I was breathing carefully. I was memorizing patterns. I was just trying to get through it.

The only difference is: the haunted house was real.

But from above—it sucked, yes. But it wasn’t everything. It was just part of the whole. And I got a little, tiny bit angry.

It is very easy to label what happened. And I admit: I took on the label of abuse like a life vest after I was finally able to get away. It was comforting. It gave shape to the experience. It made it real—after years of being told, or telling myself, that it wasn’t.

But I thought back to another time, another bog. I was walking home when a man grabbed me from behind, threw me to the ground, and shoved a gun in my face less than a block from my apartment. My parents came to town that weekend from the quiet place they lived—where this supposedly never happened. My mother said, in awe, “This is the kind of thing that makes men crazy and live on the street.”

Her words weren’t prophetic, thank God. I didn’t end up living on the street in that particular way. But her label didn’t help. It didn’t describe the experience. And even calling it a “mugging” now flattens what happened.

I experienced the fear and helplessness of being on the wrong end of a gun held by a teenager who had no other way to survive. I experienced the consequences of having the mistaken identity of someone who had resources I didn’t have.

The haunted house I lived through years later was far more complex than anything the word abuse could hold. Sure—some parts of it meet the definition. But the lived experience of terror, hypervigilance, disassociation, and strategy—it went far beyond that.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the label abuse was created and defined by institutions largely built by men—men trying to name the mistreatment of women, children, and sometimes other men. I think it came from an honest place. I think they were trying to apply the logic of Linnaeus to something wild and bleeding. But that’s the problem.

Labels like this imply there’s a method. A system. That if you name it correctly, if you follow the steps, if you do the right paperwork or tell the right story, everything will be okay.

That’s not how it works when you’ve just left the haunted house.

These labels, and the protocols attached to them, were built by people who mostly have not walked through the wild. In fact, a lot of the time, those people helped build the haunted house—whether they knew it or not.

And I’m sure, from their perspective, it all looks very different. If it was so bad, I should’ve spoken up. If it really hurt, I should’ve named it. If the person running the haunted house didn’t know, how could they be responsible?

Something that terrified me can be perceived as an honest mistake. I know that. I know people—experts, even—can look at every part of my life and chalk it all up to miscommunication, bad luck, unfortunate timing. They can slice it up and explain it away.

That’s fine.

They can keep justifying their systems. They can preserve the illusion that everything makes sense, that every haunted house is really just a poorly lit hallway.

But they—and the systems they operate in—do not get to name my terror.
They do not get to name my pain.

That forest. That murk. That thing that, from above, has no real name—they’ll never know it. They’ll know their name for it. But they’ll never know me.

This is an ancient story. It just keeps changing names.

I lived the story. I made it through the wild.

They’ll never understand, and their expertise—fought for, published, defended—means nothing.

When I was in the depths of my marriage, I went back to college to become a special education teacher. 

At the end of two long years of classes, I had my Internship Year, which is known everywhere else as student teaching. My first semester was my special education placement, and I was in a school with a woman who was famous in the urban district in which I’d previously worked. When I told my former colleagues that I was working with Katie, they just sighed while looking into the middle distance.

Katie was divorced–loudly and unapologetically. She was also high-energy brilliant, but we all know which of these is more important. I felt a kind of fear around her, like if I didn’t hold my ground my feet would slip out from under me. One day, she was talking about her hot mess of teenaged children, her condo, and the minivan that served as a relic of her marriage to “that asshole”. While I was politely listening and wondering when we were going to get to the teaching, a voice from my reptilian brain said, clear as a bell, “She just didn’t try hard enough.”

In the midst of the rage after my own divorce was finalized, this came back to haunt me. I was pacing the downstairs of my crappy, expensive rental house while my kids were at their father’s when it flooded back. My hands flew to my face as my eyes started to burn with the coming tears. I realized that I had been a fucking cunt.

I took a lot of philosophy classes in college and I’d never been comfortable with Plato. The idea of soldiers only seeing the shadows of reality on the wall of a cave seemed reductive and kind of lazy. However, as an older and wiser woman I know that sometimes this is devastatingly true. 

When I was married, I had been looking at the shadow on the wall of what I was supposed to be as a wife and mother and defining my entire life around being of service to men and children, when really all I was seeing was a shadow. And now that I’ve turned around, seen the truth, and exited the cave altogether, I have to admit that Plato was right.

If you’d asked me at the time, I would have told you that I had been raised in a tradition of powerful women who just happened to have large numbers of children. They commanded the room and were considered brash, their laughs were too loud and they were comically delusional in thinking that they knew the ways of men. How could they? They’d been in a house raising children their whole lives. 

At the same time, they were revered for their amazing brains: my paternal grandmother had been the third woman to graduate from a major polytechnical university in New England and the first to graduate from its architecture program. My grandmother on my mother’s side knew the stats of the Detroit Tigers like the back of her hand.

However, neither of these women, even my brilliant, visionary, trailblazing architect grandmother, served any real economic purpose. When they married, they were strictly mothers. Their purpose and contribution to society was their children. This was more important than anything else and was the crux of their value, to the point that they weren’t allowed to work outside the home. The children were more important than any money they could bring in. 

I’d like to say that it was just the times, but it continues to a certain extent today. I know. I stayed home with my children under the guise that we couldn’t afford child care. 

This tradition of service, in the shadows of the cave, looks like the responsibility of mothers in a gauzy haze of love for their children since the beginning of time. Their devotion looks like a potent combination of hormones and duty that is built on sacrifice but is worth it for the love and connection. 

However, the reality is that the structure of the American family balances on the fact that we have reduced children to resources that are so valuable that the primary function of their mothers is to ensure they become contributing members of society. Children, whether we’re able to admit it or not, are potential economic units that in the future will produce the labor–and therefore dollars–to keep the future economy running as smoothly as possible. Ultimately, it is hoped that they will continue its inevitable expansion as America retains its economic primacy. 

It all falls apart, however, when this family structure evaporates. What happens if a woman is brave enough to go against the primary economic provider for the family–the children’s father–and go out on her own? 

They’re called custody battles for a reason. Assets are divided, and that includes the children. Attorneys must determine not only the value of the house, cars, and the 401k, but they also have to quantify and balance out time with the kids. Who owns these precious, potential means of production? 

The end run of associating the family with capitalism is that when the family breaks down, it is the woman who suffers. The reason a family dissolves is usually associated with morality, because that’s what we’ve been led to believe that a family is based on. But in the end, in the final quantifying, it turns out that the economic value of the unit of production is greater than the moral, somewhat romantic shadows created by the fire in the cave. And this is where it can get ugly.

Consider the women after the contract is officially broken by the court and they’re left alone in a house with children who are a little bit lost and definitely unmoored. If a woman dares to be proud of what she’s done, and dares to create a new type of family instead of pining away for what she’s lost in depression, substance abuse, shame, or a combination of all three, there are definite consequences. 

She’s creating something for these young economic units outside of the realm of to whom they really belong. She’s sneaking around outside of the purview of not only men in general but, more importantly, out of the realm of the man who owned them. The children are resources that belong to the man who was kind enough to put her in charge of maintaining the children. In the shadow of the cave, this kindness was duty. When you turn around and look at the objects in the fire, the kindness turns out to have teeth.

This woman has forgotten that she does not own them. They are resources that she has stolen. She is brashly claiming something as her own that she has no right to, that does not belong to her, and is nurturing and training them outside of the male gaze. 

The act of creating something beautiful out of change makes her a dissident, to be sure. But in the eyes of those in charge, she is a thief. 

I left a marriage, a country, and—maybe most of all—a version of myself I had to believe in to survive.

I left safety that wasn’t safe. Roles that didn’t fit. Apologies I didn’t owe. Expectations I never agreed to but still carried like debt. I left spaces where I was constantly translating myself into something more palatable, more helpful, more silent.

What I’m writing now is what I couldn’t say then.

I’m writing the edges—of grief, of reinvention, of rage that became clarity. I’m writing what it means to escape both a life and a narrative and to rebuild something that actually fits. I’m writing about leaving a country that promised purpose but delivered sickness. I’m writing about women and systems and the lies we have to peel off just to breathe.

This isn’t a blog about healing, exactly. Healing is too polite. This is about aftermath and freedom. It’s about the messy, gorgeous middle—when you’ve jumped but haven’t landed yet, and the wind is the only thing keeping you upright.

If you’re here, I hope something in this speaks to the place in you that’s also standing at the edge—wondering what would happen if you took the breath they always tell you to take, but instead of looking inward, jump.