Origins

Twelve in12

Reading
Queen’s Play ~ Dorothy Dunnett
Pride and Prejudice ~ Jane Austen
Sentimental Education ~ Gustave Flaubert
Finished
Mirror, Mirror ~ Gregory Macguire
Witchling ~ Yasmine Galenorn
Changeling ~ Yasmine Galenorn
Something Wicked ~ Catherine Mulvany
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ~ J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ~ J.K. Rowling
Myst: Book of Atrus ~ Rand Miller, Robyn Miller and David Wingrove
The Game of Kings ~ Dorothy Dunnett

DEFINING MOMENTS
There isn’t one moment that has defined my entire life. There are many moments, strung together, which have led me to this point in my life. I’ll try to keep it to a Cliff’s Notes version…

I was born. Pretty defining, huh? I am the oldest child of two oldest children. I was the first niece, the first granchild and the first child. I have no siblings, though I’ve always wanted an older brother. When I was younger, I remember my mother telling me I would never have an older brother. I couldn’t understand why not and got extremely mad at her. Years later, my mother had a very late miscarriage about two years before I was born. It was supposed to be a little boy. I’ve always wondered about that.

Childhood was pretty boring, although constantly defining, I suppose. My mother was stay-at-home until my father decided to go back to college. He quit his job at the butcher shop and ended up with a law degree. He’s been a volunteer firefighter since he was 16, and never gave that up. My mother went to work as a public school music teacher, and was my teacher in first grade. Due to this, I was never able to shake the goody-two-shoe reputation I got in elementary school. I knew all the janitors, administrators and teachers. With a father in school and a young child at home, my mother’s salary did not leave a lot of extra money. I spent a lot of time with my dad as he attended classes or one-on-ones with professors. At a young age, I had to learn how to sit quietly and amuse myself. Coloring books, doodle pads and Highlights were my friends. My parents were very active in our church, the same church my father had grown up in. There were some serious problems within the church, causing deep rifts and eventually my parents’ departure from the church. I was young and didn’t understand why, but later I would learn the whole truth. The shortest version is the pastor was doing something wrong, but when approached by my parents and leaders of the church denied everything. The entire church split between those who believed the pastor and those who believed my parents. It nearly destroyed the church, even after the pastor came clean.

A huge defining moment in elementary school was me starting to play oboe. Its a cute story and if you’re really interested, check it out.

I wasn’t popular in elementary school, but I wasn’t really unhappy. I had a beautiful pair of rose-colored glasses on my face, which really didn’t let anything get to me. I may have been a little overweight with glasses, but I actually enjoyed school, enjoyed my friends and my family too. Then puberty hit and I entered junior high. I didn’t really fit in anywhere. Too many new people mixing together and I didn’t make the cut. I wasn’t cool enough or cute enough or thin enough or smart enough or whatever enough. I didn’t know where I fit in, and I tried to fit in everywhere. Somewhere in the madness, I made a few friends, one of whom I still have today.

Megan sat next to me in English class. In our grade, there were cute twin boys. Megan liked one; I liked the other. For eighth grade girls, this is enough to start a full-blown cult. We were from two different worlds and had really nothing in common. Except a decade later, we’re still best friends. Talk about defining moment…

The other bright spot in junior high was the music department my eighth grade year. I was choosen to play piano in the jazz band, where I met a a guy named Settle who played the drums. I was starting to do well on my oboe. The drama department was doing Mikado and I was named the musical director. I think the teacher just expected me to play piano. Instead I arranged the music and put together a student-run pit to accompany the musical.

By the time I entered high school, I had found my niche. I was a band geek. I decided, unlike junior high, I was going to enjoy high school. I was who I was, and if people didn’t like that, it was their loss. Somehow, that actually worked for me. I made friends. Lots of friends. Friends both inside and outside the music department. Those friends that I made became unbelievable supports in the years that followed. And I needed those supports.

This is the really short version of defining moments in high school. Its too hard to get into everything in depth. I made trips #4, 5 and 6 to Scotland and England and fell even more in love with the country and land. Trip 4 was with my parents in the summertime for vacation. Trip 5 was with my father in February, mixing clan business and vacation. Trip 5 was with my church handbell choir for the international symposium. I fell in love for the first time with a boy named Matt. I don’t know what might have happened with us because he passed away from leukemia during my sophomore year. I went stag to junior prom, as I couldn’t find a date, even just as a friend. Settle wanted his best friend to take me, but he wouldn’t. I found out later it was because he had feelings for me and wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Manny and I started dating the night of prom at Settle’s house after the prom. I still hold this over his head. After we started dating, Matt’s little brother Jeremiah died from the same leukemia. This all took a toll on my relationship with Manny and I broke up with him the summer before my senior year. Senior year is when I met Tim and we started dating. There were problems within the senior high youth group, which eerily echoed the problems of my parents years ago at our old church. It never escalated to the extent of involving the entire church, but there was still a split and I lost friends. But like my parents, I knew I had done the right thing and wouldn’t go back on it. Didn’t make it any easier. Senior year wasn’t all bad though. I played in the All-State Symphony Orchestra as principle oboe and got my first taste of what it might be like in a professional ensemble. And I really enjoyed that. During my senior year, I discovered my friend A was having a relationship with our band teacher McN. I didn’t know how far the relationship went until he was arrested for statutory rape a month before I graduated. This was the man who had promoted my music career and pushed me to stick with the oboe. The truth of his arrest was kept secret from the rest of the students until school ended. I had to lie to some of my best friends about what was really happening and hated it. Graduation was tainted by these events and the fact that my high school mentor was awaiting trial.

In the fall, I went to western Michigan to attend a Christian liberal arts college. It happened to be the same college where my parents had met, although that was not the only reason I was going. I did like the school and music program, but especially its strong liberal arts base which would allow me to explore other avenues for a career. Except it didn’t go excatly as planned.

Tim ended up breaking up with me and ending all forms of contact. I was very much in love with him and it hurt to lose him not only as a love, but as a friend. Mix this with having lost my high school mentor and many of my church friends. It made my first college experience very trying. I didn’t trust my professors due to the experience with McN and I didn’t believe I was as good as he always said I was. Had McN been telling the truth or just trying to get into my pants? To this day, I still don’t know. Everything took a huge toll on my mental state and while at school was the first time I seriously thought about killing myself. But Settle made me promise something which still holds me back today. I’m allowed to kill myself. I can go ahead and do whatever I want. But I have to talk to him first. I can’t leave a message; I have to actually talk to him. If I can’t get a hold of him, then I have to wait until later to kill myself. Somehow that works for my brain. At some point while I was at school, Manny and I started our long string of dating and breaking-up. When I went home for Christmas, I found out one of the guys in the gang’s new band, Missing September, had taken his life. I’d only met him once or twice, but he was part of the gang. Everyone was suffering and the time that should have been spent catching up with laughter and fun, was spent grieving and searcing for answers. Its an event that has forever linked us together. Over the break, I also tried to convince my parents I didn’t want to go back to the school. But they convinced me to finish out the year and work on transferring somewhere else. I went back for two weeks, at which point the band professor called me and screamed at me for not being in his band. The ensembles in the school were only semester long and you could not be forced to be in one ensemble or another. Being in band reminded me too much of McN and I didn’t want that anymore. This professor didn’t appreciate my decision and railed on me for it. Told me I would never amount to anything as a musician. Really great for my state of mind. Within two days I packed up everything I owned and boarded a train. My nineteenth birthday was spent on a train from Chicago to Albany, where my parents picked me up. I had been on the road for 26 hours.

2003 – The conditions of my returning home were to go into counseling and either be in school or have a job. I got a job at a hotel and went into counseling. The hotel money was good; the work was easy. But the kitchen boy was grabby. I worked overnights and he came in early to start up the ovens. He was nice enough and we joked around. But one morning there was a problem with the computers and my manager asked me to try and fix it so she wouldn’t have to come in. I was in the back by the main frame, where there were no cameras. The kitchen boy came up behind me and trapped my arms at my sides. He started kissing my neck and told me he wanted to go home with me and… You get the idea. I couldn’t get him to let me go, until another employee started around the corner. I went to my boss, but her response was basically that because there were no cameras to catch the act, she could do nothing about it. I tried to deal with working with him, but I couldn’t do it and ended up quitting. I was going back to school full-time anyways. The therapist I had been seeing was Lori. She was convinced all my problems had to do with the bad relationship I had with my father. If I could just talk to him, everything would be solved. I never admitted to her how depressed or suicidal I was, and quickly realised how ineffective she was. I convinced my parents I was doing better, going back to school, and didn’t need any more therapy. I took lots of summer classes and worked at my father’s law firm. Manny and I continued to date on and off, fight and make up. In october, the demons I had been trying to ignore finally broke free. I remember the night clearly. It was a Matchbook Romance and Missing September show, the band that had lost its bassist less than a year earlier. I remember the pulsing in the crowd, the internal heartbeat of an audience that loves the performers. The music lifted us and somehow joined us, healed us. I’ll never forget the feeling that night. Or the crash that followed. Its a twenty-minute drive from the concert hall to my house at that hour of the night. In less than five minutes, I was trying to keep myself from driving off the edge of the road. Remembering my promise to Settle, I called him, but couldn’t get a hold of him. I tried Russ and Feather, but to no avail. I ended up talking to Manny and he helped get me home. The next day I told my mother how serious things really were and asked for help. This is when I met the infamous Jenny, my therapist. She immediately put me on medication and helped me work though a lot of my issues, settling on a diagnosis of depression.

2004 – My twentieth birthday was spent getting my wisdom teeth out. Feather was supposed to come over and keep me company. She never showed, which wasn’t a huge deal. But once the drugs worn off, I discovered the storm that had been brewing. Feather was mad at me for being too close to her family and some things about McN and A. I didn’t really understand it all, considering I was still doped up on drugs a little. What I remember was standing in Feather’s living room being screamed at by Feather, A and their other friend Waffles, who I’ve never liked. None of them were making sense but all were attackinng me. A lot of hurtful things were said that night and in the days that followed. Not everything has been worked through either, and I don’t think it ever will. But I lost a best friend in one fell swoop. In February, Jenny decided to change my diagnosis to bipolar II disorder, and began to really live with it. My mother told her parents and sister, but no one else in the family was really told, upon my request. At the summer family reunion, I finally told my uncle who was also bipolar. In April, Feather and I made an attempt at making up. We ended up at a pool hall, being silly and goofy. This is where I met Mike. About two weeks later, I lost my virginity to him. I told excatly two people – Megan and Feather. Feather and I got into an arguement over telling Manny or not. I said would tell him eventually, but not right away. Feather threatened to tell him if I didn’t. And we stopped talking again. In August, when I finally told Manny what happened with Mike, he admitted Feather had toldhim already. Then in September, my mother’s father passed away and we spent a week in Florida. It was extremely difficult as we had seen him at the family reunion over the summer, perfectly healthy and normal. On the other hand, all the grandchildren remember him that way, instead of sick in a hospital bed. My grandmother told me he said he hoped I would tell my other grandparents and the rest of the family about my bipoarism and soon. My hesitation at telling my father’s family was due to his parents. My mother’s brother is also bipolar and they are constantly saying things like he should just grow up and get over it. I wasn’t ready to have those things said towards me. At the luncheon after mt grandfather’s memorial service, I told the remaining aunt and uncle about my bipolarism. We buried my grandfather a month later in Jersey, in the same cemetary as his parents, grand parents and great-grandparents. Amazingly enough, this is also where my grandmother’s parents, grandparents and great-grandparents buried. Its about an hour from our house, and I returned less than a week later to refresh the flowers and talk to him a little bit. On the way back, I got a phone call from my mother. All she knew was there had been a crisis at the firehouse and could I be home soon. By the time I got home, she was able to tell me the whole story. A member of the firehouse, who went to high school with me, had been in his car with his girlfriend when he pulled out a shotgun and killed himself, right in front of her. As this happened inside our district, the EMS had gone out to our boys and they had found him. During all this, I had started working full-time at the law firm. Aside from petty drama and girlish fights, my life was pretty boring for a while.

2005 – I turned 21 and realized I wasn’t really doing anything with my life. The law firm was slowly sucking my soul away and the friends I had weren’t nearly as good for me as they liked to pretend. The entire experience over my birthday weekend really showed me how much I didn’t belong there, with those people. I was supposed to be something more. There was some drama at work and I realized that being an attorney’s daughter, I would always get the shitty end of the stick in an attempt to waylay accusations of special treatment. My boss would stick up for the other secretaries, but I was left hanging in the wind. Its not that I needed someone to fight my battles, but she never backed me up when approached. I started taking evening classes and prepared to transfer to the college I’m at now. In June, I had an audition scheduled to be able to attend school in the fall. The day I was to leave for the audition, I got a call from the transfer admissions office. My GPA was .05 below the requirement. That’s all. I was devastated. I had worked so hard and so long, but it hadn’t made a difference. By the end of the month, Jenny was also changing my medication to include anti-psychotics, which helped me to slow down and sleep a bit. In July, we met up with my father’s side of the family to celebrate his parents’ 50th anniversary. That week, I decided, I would tell the adults about my bipolar disorder. My parents knew of my decision and really supported me. It was perhaps one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, and there was lots of crying by me and those listening. My grandparents took it much better than I had expected, and in the end, it felt good to have them know. I had written a paper for one of my classes that spring about living with bipolarism, which I was able to give them. Doing the research for that paper also helped me be able to talk with my friends about my disorder. A lot of my friendships had suffered due to my lack of knowledge and understanding of what I was going through. After the trip to see my family, I was able to sit down with Settle and talk with him. I believe this is one of the reasons why we are still able to be friends now. That conversation gave us the opportunity to repair and rebuild our relationship. In September, I quit my job at the law firm and started attending classes full-time in an attempt to get back on track. I started to feel like my life was getting back on track. In November I found out there were problems at the church. The handbell director, CK, was getting fired for stealing money to support his cocaine habit. Thankfully, as opposed to the lies and deception during the situation with McN, the church leaders were honest with the congregation and told them the whole story. Handbells are a huge part of my church’s existance, so I ended up taking over one of the choirs when he left. A week after all this went down, I was on my way to Western NY for my audition. The school wasn’t perfect, but it was what I needed and what I wanted. And I was accepted into the School of Music.

2006/2007 – Excatly three years after I dropped out of college and took the 26-hour train ride home, I started the road trip to my new college. It was a pretty good way to turn 22. Around Spring Break time, I found out one of the oboists in my studio, Sarah, had lost her mother in a car accident. About the same time, Mike’s brother (who was also my age) hung himself in his apartment. When I returned home from school, Feather and I started to make up again. After two years, we started to repair our friendship. That summer I had my first real nervous breakdown, unable to name, recognize or use something as simple as stairs. Even with medication and therapy, I had to start accepting that I may never be completely “okay” and would possibly get worse. That fall I moved in with Jenn and Mel. It was supposed to be great. Except Mel went crazy and basically chased me from the apartment. I moved in with another girl who had crazy rommates and just needed a place to live. And we survived the year. But all the struggles seemed to be a warm-up for my summer. In June, I was attending an oboe geek conference and someone rear-ended my car. I ended up with a sprained shoulder and elbow. I was still on the Vicodin when my father’s father passed away a week later. In August, my cousin got married. It was a beautiful weekend, but difficult so close after our grandfather’s death.

2007/2008 – That would be this past school year, and I’m not sure I know what has been defining or not yet. Too near.

I haven’t included everything; not every death or every birth, not every happiness or saddness. I tried to cut it down to those that have really shaped me to who I am. But some of who I am is the everyday things, the cooking, organizing, first dates, meeting new friends, reconnecting with old friends. It took me a few days to get through all of this, and it has been theraputic. But perhaps this gives a little insight into me.

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