Now that all the other people involved are dead, I can tell the story a little more fairly.

I have been afforded a world view that is lucky, has privilege, but also that comes from poverty, parental alcoholism, abuse, neglect and all the lovely things that adoptions agencies are supposed to shelter children that are already damaged are supposed to be protected from.

My mother tried her hardest, but was trying to prove a point to her parents.. and to my father who left, and in that I became weird collateral damage.

The one blessing such a strange childhood that had zero stability gave me was critical thinking skills that I have been honing from my earliest memories.

Being sent to schools where I they tried to indoctrinate me into religion I was uncomfortable with at 6, being told to question it’s base principles had me not trusting any adult in the room.

When presented with my cousin’s Sara death at 5, being presented with reincarnation, heaven, the possibility of no after life, or just “I don’t know” .. the only constant was the lack of consistency.

To those of you who are raising children, I am not saying you shouldn’t present multiple options to children, or answer your children with only absolutes.. but I was in a home where nothing was really for sure at that age. My school had changed multiple times, my father’s participation in my life at that age changed by the week..



Lack of consistency gave me a wonderful skill of comparing doctrines, and poking holes in every theory that was presented to me.



I came off as precocious.. and thank goodness loved reading. I was constantly pushing boundaries. I played with literal matches, but did so in an area that was all cement, because I knew it was safe.



Fostering the philosophy of Christian religion, yet ideas of evolution is wonderful.. but not understanding how a 4 year old might find that that conflicting is funny now. Instead I trusted no one to have the truth, and realized that everyone around me was guessing.



As we try to “solve racism”, as we race against the clock of “people wanting to change”, and science has presented us with a virus that has some of the smartest people making stupid choices.. I am watching people try to find absolutes, in a world where only fluid thinking will work.

I realized that my weirdly fractured childhood prepped me for being an adult. I was able to ride ponies, and go to Disney World, but nothing was ever a promise. That was a benefit. I am not shattering like these people who are “better” than me, because my world is not rigid.

The people who I don’t feel for are the ones who admit these are the things they are scared of, but proudly boast of their rigidness. They name call, mock, and are what is wrong with society. They are the problem, the hypocrites. They are acting from fear, while condemning others.

If they could be honest with themselves, and if they had an iota of empathy.. They wouldn’t be so hateful. These are the fragile people that will self destruct. Society can just let them self-destruct, as it progresses. They will break, and turn to dust it moves forward, dinosaurs to society’s more evolved animals that moved on in time from Pangaea.



