July 22, 2012
Logar, Afghanistan 01:00

As I walk past him I contemplate whispering “fuck you,” because he got to lie on the hill while we trudged on. I think about that near whisper a lot, and question whether I in fact did utter those words, the implication being that my last words to him were sarcastic and somewhat antagonizing. Being chosen to do the main part of the mission was hip, and even though I wouldn’t mind lying on that hill to only pull security, my heart raced with the prospect of my first raid. Those seconds I walked passed him have been replayed in my mind  thousands of times, of which I scream at myself to tell him to move. The next day, after all  the horror embedded itself into us, the bomb squad showed us all the IED’s we walked past, footsteps inches from the pressure plates. I’ve tried to come up with some sort of fate as to who was chosen would die that night, but all I can come up with is bad luck and chance.

The sweat from walking would collect salt piles on our shirts after multiple klicks, even in the dead of the night where that unforgiving Afghan sun wasn’t present. In the blackness, all you see is a circle of muddled green. It’s like an old television from the 90’s, whose screen flickers white and black, thousands of Dalmatians scrambling across the surface, yet here the white is green. Objects are blobs of smeared green and black. Twisting the lens changes your depth perception, and you must become proficient in knowing the right twists to avoid falling into deep dried riverbeds called wadis. We had only been in this country for a few days, and were doing missions of which we’d been advised should have been toned down, so as  to become more familiar with combat and war.

It couldn’t have been more than 50 paces past that almost whisper when the sky lit up. Outside my circular green vision I see a flash, and second later a peal of false thunder, and immediately we all fall to the ground thinking it to be a mortar. The flash in the sky was like the  sun unveiling its face for a moment, only to hide back into the curtains of the night. There was only one flash, the sound, and silence. In that silence the dawn of comprehension falls so heavily and swiftly, that you begin to feel sick and dread the idea of someone being hurt. I remember begging to myself, “please no,” hoping everything was alright, but the suspicion of the truth creeping its way up. After those intense moments of silence, the radio breaks the stillness and we hear the cry, “we’re hit.” We break composure for a moment in our race back up that hill. My friend lost 40 pounds in that run, not immediately of course, but in the months to come of which he thought if he’d only run faster, they would still be alive.

At the top of the hill our medic is beside the person who moments ago I almost whisper jokingly to. I see him as a blob of green, hard to decipher through that crackling green television, and notice that this blob is missing shapes which normal blobs have. I hear a forceful plead, “stay with me Horsley,” and then my leader says, “keep going, he has no chance and there’s more.” In these moments truth is nonexistent. In my mind he was completely fine and we were going to save everyone. Minutes later there were more flashes, and more screams, and once the calm settled, a voice whispers in my ear the names. My salt soaked shirt comes into my consciousness and I am shivering, reflecting the names, their faces, and those last days with them. My eyes well and he says we’ll cry about it later, but for now we have to get home. There are coyotes circling around a new blob which enters into my television.

We’re on that hill for over 10 hours, and they tell us not to look, but it’s impossible not to, and there’s evidence splayed across the sand everywhere. They shoot at us and I want to give up, to sink into that sand in sorrow, but the fear that comes into existence, and which takes a few months to control, pushes us to take cover behind what little rocks we can.

A few weeks before, we’re in Vicenza, Italy, and it’s the 4th of July. One of the deceased asks me what true love is, and says he’s going to learn Italian over the deployment. In the tiny wooden cots we’re stuffed in while stationed in Afghanistan, we pack up his How To Learn Italian for Dummies book and ship it to his mother.  The empty beds silently yell at us, as we recall the day before in which we sprayed shaving cream everywhere. It’s under the fireworks that we’re both drunk and he comes to be, being one of the oldest of the group, sincerely wondering what true love felt like. He is normally shy, quiet, but when socializes explodes into this mousy, smiling, sporadic tiny kid who laughs and runs around everywhere. I don’t know if I answered his question satisfactorily, but it sorrows me to know he never got the chance.

A few months after this day, when some of us got over the fear, and some of us remained on the base, I’d began reading a poetry book by Cummings which was mailed to me. In those dingy rooms where sand pervaded everything, I’d found a truth lurking in poetry which I believe was only possible through being in such an alienated environment, stifled with the constant threat of death and terror. You think before you deploy that there is a force watching over you, and when you arrive there, you realize all you have are the people you’ve gotten drunk with, cried with, and traveled with for the past years.  There’s no closure in watching your friends die, and in poetry I found an expression of feeling which normal literature couldn’t purvey.  I wrote a poem called bodies, and whenever I read it those days come flashing back, and I know I’d never have been able to write such a thing without that particular experience. It’s in this reflection that I’m aware the worlds of experience lurking behind people’s words, and that with a little scrutiny, you can uncover a moment in time encapsulated by what a writer chooses to say.

bodies

i watched two children
cut up worms
on a hilltop
their knees are covered with dirt
performing a surgery
on wriggly creatures
who never knew better
just lying there
until the scalpel peels them apart

after the kids walk away
i cover the intestines up
with a blanket (the image never leaves)
and i feel the bitterness
as streaks of mud
spreads across my face
and i whisper, i loved you

a day later
i saw the same children
with a pistol and a smile
blowing a slug
into the brains of a puppy
just one quick pop
i watched them laugh
at the wriggling creature
yelping and yelping and yelping
(i can still hear the yelping to this day)
for a whole minute
until they ended its misery
with another blast
and left the body
in a ditch
for me to cover up
with my last blanket
whispering, i loved you

At the age of fifteen I was stuck between wanting profound individuality and longing for a community to be involved in. The friends that I did have were not at all close to me and I would never hang out with them outside of school. It was as if we were with each other just to make the unsettling loneliness we all felt a bit more bearable. I had signed up for a drama class that year and was looking forward to being able to give directing a try, it hadn’t occurred to me before I registered for the class that I would be acting, not directing. Directing had interested me at that time due to my obsession with Tarentino films, and watching the Independent Film Channel. The Independent Film Channel had movies and shows that acted outside of conventionality, either in the way it was written, shot or the fact that these movies were made on such a low budget. This channel offered something that made me feel different, unique, distinct and intellectual, it was something that no one else could grasp and something that only I could understand. That fascination for film wouldn’t translate into the stage that, would soon, envelope my whole teenage existence.
The first day of drama class there was a woman who dramatically entered from stage left, she was small and pretty, thin and sassy. She began with a brief acting exercise that required us to walk across the stage. In retrospect it sounds simple, but at the time that was beyond my capabilities, the whole class was whispering wildly behind the curtain fighting over whom would go first. There was this general fear to walk across the stage and be evaluated by an audience of one, that intimidating drama teacher. After some heated whispers and laughable name calling I emerged victorious and was the last person to run across the stage. That was the beginning, the first time I had ever stepped foot on the stage that would become my place of refuge for the next three years of my life. I had no interest in acting before I arrived in the first day of class, yet it was in that class that acting gave me recognition, where my emotions were validated and respected. I believed that I had found the place where I was allowed to belong. As the months progressed I began to shed the shy skin that had been suffocating me and was born anew.
The thin and sassy drama teacher had in many ways over the course of that class become a maternal mentor and confidante. It was in her that I placed all trust, and her opinion which I held the highest. I registered for the musical theater class that she would be directing and teaching. This class was what the sole purpose of my existence became; I was obsessed with musicals even though I found the material in most of them to be of very little interest to me. My friends at the time were all very interested in the musicals whose music seemed to haunt my thoughts and whose themes seemed trite. Identifying with the musical we were performing wasn’t the point of the class though; I had joined to further create myself, to allow my identity to evolve.
The theater became a symbol, it was my mother and I was its child. We were close friends yet distant enemies; the stage had this allure and mystique. It had this strange power over me and threw me into a wild addiction. There was a strong craving for applause, for seeing the teary faces of my parents and to be loved by everyone in the room for a complete moment. I was created on that stage; the old person that used to inhabit my body was gone. I feared what the future would hold when I would have to leave the stage. The community that I had longed to find supported my individuality and fostered self-growth. Most of all I emerged believing in myself and my ability to understand the world as a human being; I overcame the struggles of shyness and had a genuine excitement to meet new people and understand them. As I’ve grown older many of these personality traits have changed and I’ve most certainly become more reserved, there is no way that I could ever forget what that drama class had done for me though. That first walk across the stage was the experience I had been longing for. It’s exactly like jumping into water, at first it’s cold, but after a while you adjust.

The self is a fluid and mischievous concept for me, for my self is mischievous. A grin, a smirk, a playful look, an aspect of myself that tinges my moods, humor, and even my appearance. Ever since I was a child I’ve been told that through no actual fault of my own, I would appear to others as though I might be up to something. Even though this assessment paints me in a less then agreeable light, it’s an aspect of self so ingrained, so intrinsic to me, that it’s with grinning demeanor and pride that I lay claim to this aspect of self.

But once, long ago, in a time already worn and tinged by the haze of memory, there dwelled a self, a shade. A Wyatt whose mind, body and spirit are as familiar as they are alien. This me in the shadows, this me of years far gone. Though I consider this past self to be my lesser, this me is resilient, this me survives, this me weathers the storm, facing it head on, uncompromising. How does this child, this pale specter have such tenacity? Luckily I know the secret of this Wyatt, though he is now gone leaving not but  pictures to mark his passing, this wyatt held onto an unshakeable belief in the self, through strength of will, and unwavering conviction to the desire to exist as I was. From stubborn determination, a persona was born. This personas identity was Wyatt, and that’s all it took. A name. That’s all that was needed.

Seasons roll from one to another as the years pass, the small unfamiliar child of the past grows and shifts but still stubbornly held its identity. Sad to say but times had been hard even for the strong Wyatt, the Wyatt who endures. The self is battered, the mind is tired, the spirit is all but broken, and yet Wyatt still stands, Wyatt survives, uncompromising the truth of himself. It is now in this remembrance of this brave soul, the defiant survivor of the past, which I weep for his ignoble passing. The sad truth is that with the fading away of this guardian self, the spiritual death of this little warrior was a major turning point in life for the creation of my current self. Without a strictly held schema of what constituted Wyatt Grodzins I was left free to forge myself anew, to make a new me. A better me.

My parents separated and subsequently divorced when I was 12. My father moved out of the house into a rental a few blocks away. When I went over to his new house, I could see the trees in the backyard of the home he and my mother built over a couple of roofs. When my father came to visit me, my mother would make dinner for us before she left. It was a complex transition time, where they were both angry and grieving for the loss of their marriage. It was also one of the best decisions they ever made. But it was not the turning point.

My father began to suffer from mystery pains five years later. I was 17 and struggling through my senior year of high school with incredibly frequent and painful migraines. I spent more time with my dad so that someone was there when the pain started. I spent nights sleeping in the room below his, listening for cries of pain, trying to decide if they were bad enough to go upstairs and check on him. The worst part about this time was the fear my father experienced in the face of this mystery illness. I didn’t really sleep at his house to check on him; I slept there to quell the panic he felt when he woke, alone, with inexplicable pain. My mother and I both tried to help him but there was little we could do. His doctor couldn’t find anything.

On the eve of my last final for fall semester I was pulling an all-nighter. My mother was staying out late and I didn’t care until it started getting later and later and later. Finally I received a text. My mother had gotten a desperate call from dad and taken him into the hospital. They had found an abscess in his spine that was cutting off his spinal cord. To prevent paralysis, they had taken him into emergency surgery. And yet still, this was not the turning point.

My father did not recover easily. It turned out he had had a staphylococcus infection in his spine, which dissolved two of his vertebrae to create the abscess that pushed on his spinal cord. He had other injuries as well, like bruised ribs and a twisted knee. He suffered nerve damage, extreme weight loss, and, most of all, brain damage. He went through months of inpatient rehab. My mother and I visited almost every day, and family from all over the country came to help. Finally, my father was well enough to go home and had some of his closest friends stay with him.

My mother and I decided we had to get away from it all. We had spent two and a half months in and out of the hospital, working so hard to take care of my dad. It was time for a vacation. My mother bought ticket to Hawaii, with no exact plans. We wanted to go sit on a beach and relax.

The turning point came on the deck of our hotel room. We were sitting, eating fruit, drinking juice and iced tea as we looked out at the ocean. It was beautiful and, finally, we relaxed and began to talk. We talked about my parents divorce, about the extended family, and most of all about what would happen to dad now. The answer to that question wasn’t easy then and hasn’t gotten any easier. But what mattered most was my mother’s reminder of a promise she had made me many years before. In the midst of the divorce, I had asked her, “What will happen if something happens to one of you?”

“We are still a family,” she had told me, choking up. “We will always take care of each other, no matter what happens.”

In the years since she had said that, we hadn’t always acted like a family. But now, when the unthinkable had happened, we would stand together and be a family. That day, many miles from home, I knew that everything would be okay, that I was loved, and that life continues on. I knew that any problems I had with my mother were not all that important because she would always stand with me and I with her. I am still learning how to stand with her, but it’s the most important thing I can do.

Since that trip, I have learned so much from both my parents and myself during the struggles that followed my dad’s treatment and I have a better sense now of what type of person I want to be. I know now that people are marked more by hardship than happiness. But I also know that the happy moments are what strength us to withstand hardships. I know that success can be stolen in an instant, but hope and long-term plans are vital. And most of all I know that worry and anger, emotions we feel every day, are incredibly pointless. As I work to let go of my worries and angers and simply live, I look to my parents and continue to learn.

I couldn’t get the  smell of burgers out of my t-shirts no matter how many times I washed them. Everyday I heard the screeching sound of the milkshake nozzle hitting the inside of the stainless steel cup. The grumble from my stomach from the smell of bacon as it hit the hot grill. Wiping ketchup bottles that burst from the steamy summer heat. Black aprons stained with ketchup, clam chowder, and thousand island dressing. My unfortunate decision to wear white sneakers. Washing unmeasurable amounts of red burger baskets and silverware. My first job.

“Can I get a knife?” A customer asked from the seating at the bar. He had a Smitty burger sitting in front of him. Two burger patties, three buns, lettuce, tomato, onion, cheese, bacon, and thousand island dressing, I can name it off the top of my head by now.

“I’ll tell you the way to eat a Smitty burger: take it, smash it down with the palm of your hand, then hold it in both hands and don’t let go. When that doesn’t work, set it on the ground and give it a good stomp.” This was a common question asked when someone ordered the famous Smitty burger at Fat Smitty’s Restaurant in Discovery Bay and this was a typical response you’ll hear from any of the employees.

This was my first real experience working at a job. Fat Smitty’s is located just 12 miles from the hometown I grew up in.  This small area, family owned business gave me a waitressing job without having prior experience. They took a gamble with me but I expressed my dire need of money and my abundance of time that summer. I had just completed my first year of college and was financially dependent from my family. I didn’t know how to work for over four hours on my feet and still keep my head on straight. I ended up working over eight hours a day, usually four to five days a week.

I already had a relationship with the owners but I was also joining a team with the other waitresses. Luckily, they all could sympathize with my hectic first week, second week, third week, even my second month working. We all made mistakes, we just had to be able to bounce back and help each other. The food we served was ‘All-American’, burgers, milkshakes, fries, etc. The restaurant owners used to be in the Marine Corps so they support the military by including a donation box inside the restaurant; that goes towards paying for the military’s food if they stop by in uniform. Flags hang from the walls, military pictures, and signatures hang in the hallways. What also makes this restaurant a destination for tourists and locals is the money hanging from the ceilings. For thirty years it’s been a tradition (not a requirement) that people decorate a dollar and hang it on the walls. The money has only been taken down once in 2012 and amounted to $10,316 and was donated to the St. Jude’s Childrens Research Hospital and local boy scouts. This makes it an iconic destination for tourists visiting Discovery Bay, especially in the summer time.

By the end of my first day I had orange and purple splotches from permanent ketchup or blackberry syrup on my brand new black apron. My feet were aching because I wore red vans with absolutely no support. I messed up two orders that ended up backing up the kitchen. I spilled a tray on the ground. I got sprayed in the face from the milkshake machine. After my first day of work, I never wanted to go back. I was being a complete child about having to spend eight hours running around on my feet. I doubted myself and my ability to handle stressful situations and right then I realized I was holding myself back from finally being independent. So the next day, I went back.

Crouched behind the shelf of Baby-Sitters Club books in the Van Hise Elementary School library, I sped through line after line of Anne Franks Diary of a Young Girl. When lunch came to an end, I tucked the book below crumpled sheets of cursive practice in my backpack, tried to remove the emotion from my face, and headed  for class. Age 9 and aware that I should hide my “sensitivity”, I had some inkling that my parents might be less than pleased with my literary choices. I didn’t picture their reaction as worried so much as frustrated, frustrated like they had been at my reaction when I was told about the war. My tiny brows had scrunched up and tears had  leaked onto my cardigan at the thought of soldiers dying in some abstract place called “Iraq”. My sobs of “They can’t be dying! How can I help them? I can’t let them die!” were met by a familial consensus that I really shouldn’t have been told, as I clearly “couldn’t handle it.” Following this  experience and many similar ones, I had started closing off my intense emotion, and so kept my growing horror at the genocide of my people to myself.

Hiding my emotions became more difficult, though, as thanks to my insatiable curiosity I soon found other books about the holocaust which depicted  more graphic scenes. In one, emaciated men stood with their backs pressed to fences, their eyes as empty as their stomachs. In another, shoes, suitcases, and other belongings unwillingly left behind were piled atop one another in heaps of thousands. But the image most memorable to my young mind was that  of a girl with short brown hair, a quiet, pained face, and deep brown eyes that stared back at mine. Nearly the only perceptible difference between us was the golden star of david pinned to her shirt.

Two months later, my mother came home with news.

“I’ve gotten tickets for you, aunt Ann, Nana and I to go see the play of Anne Frank!”

I froze in my seat, filled with equal parts dread and fascination. Although my reading caused me pain I couldn’t stop, I was filled with a deep need to try and understand peoples suffering as if somehow this knowledge could save them, and I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to learn more. In the following weeks my anticipation grew as I tried to prepare myself to be stone faced in front of my family. When the day finally arrived I spent the car ride running my fingers up and down the soft hem of my nicest velvet dress, chanting to myself “You will not cry. You will not cry. You will not cry.”

Three hours later when the house lights came up my mother looked over to find me sobbing silently, my hand quivering and pressed to my lips. The entire walk to the japanese restaurant no one could get me to move that hand and no coaxing could make me utter a single word as sobs wracked my small frame and my face turned from its normal olive tone to red and then a worrying purple.

Finally, on the concrete stoop of “Sushi Takara” with only my baffled mother and a homeless man in a down coat bearing witness, the thought I’d been wrestling with since opening the diary months earlier burst from my lips.

“I wish I could have died instead of her”

Survivors guilt, at the age of 9, had overwhelmed me. I couldn’t be soothed  or reasoned with; my intense sense of empathy had made it impossible for me to face  my privileged life when confronted with so much suffering. Staring into my mother’s confused eyes, I understood for the first time the weight of my distinctive sensitivity. I constantly absorbed the emotions of the people around me, felt first hand the struggles of even fictional characters, and the abstract sufferings of people I would never know hurt me as deeply as if they were happening in my own life. I didn’t have the ability so many others seemed to possess to close myself off from the emotions of the world. I was not a drama queen. I was not over reacting. I was an empath.

Michael Chapman

Turning Point

In sixth grade I started attending McClure Middle School. McClure is a public middle school located in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle where I grew up. It is made up of an old red brick main building and old decaying portable classrooms scattered across the edges of the school. When I started school there I had friends from the previous elementary school I had attended that was also located in Queen Anne. The kids that I was friends with from that school had pretty much the same family background as me. They were upper middle class kids from stable two parent families that also lived in the neighborhood. McClure was different in the fact that it drew kids from all over the city. When I went there in the early to mid 2000’s it was very ethnically diverse for a school in a ninety percent white neighborhood (though recently they have stopped busing in students from South Seattle, so the racial makeup of the school has changed to more represent the neighborhood). Like other schools, McClure had honors classes for the perceived smart kids and what were termed “regular” classes for everyone else. This was tracking at its finest. Academics were never my strong suit even then and I was placed in the regular classes. The thing was, that the honors classes were filled with all of the upper middle class kids from the neighborhood that I had been friends with, while the regular classes were filled with kids from all over the city. When I went to class on the first day of sixth grade I realized I had been separated from all of my elementary school friends, who for the most part all ended up in the same homeroom class.  I remember at first that this was kind of devastating for me. I had thought that I would be in class with my friends but I quickly learned that we would be separated for the majority of the day. I remember feeling shocked, saddened and embarrassed over the fact that I was not in the honors classes. I remember going home that week and being mad at my parents asking why I wasn’t in honors?. But I got over it and over the course of that first year I made friends with the boys (because we would have been only twelve years old when we first met) who would become my best friends for the next 5 years. There names were Will, Andrew , Keiran and Zolton ( who for the record is the only one of any of these people that I have kept in touch with and I still consider one of my closest friends)  and we were all in Mr. Fielder’s home room class.   Mr. Fielder was a great teacher and just a fascinating human being. He loved music and would devote a lot of class time to teaching subjects that interested both him and his students. He was an older fellow I think he turned 62 the year that I had him. He also had tenure and was approaching retirement, so he really just taught us whatever he wanted, whether it was how to bet on horse racing to teach algebra or rock n’ roll history. That was a great year and how I met all of these guys that I would end up spending a considerable amount of time with. This was the first time that I was a part of a real adolescent male friendship group. The years between 12-18 are a particularly interesting time in that during these years the most important people in your life are your friends. For me the world stopped and ended with my group of friends. What they thought of me was how I based my identity during this time period. Shortly after this group emerged, Will found his place as the leader of the group. Will was a bully, probably the worst bully I have ever known in my whole life. He mercilessly bullied his friends and other classmates alike. He also controlled our group of friends like a fascist. If he was mad at you he would literally excommunicate you from the group for months or weeks. He had so much power that for the most part (excluding Zolton, who was too good hearted to ever follow any of Will’s malicious acts) the whole group would follow his lead and not talk to you (except talking shit of course).  It was weird because when I first met him in sixth grade he was nice enough. We really bonded over music and that we were both learning how to play guitar. Will progressed steadily over the next couple years into a really hateful mean person. By high school his actions had become totally out of control. But before high school another person that I need to mention is Maddie M.T. Maddie M.T. has two last names but I am going to leave them out because it doesn’t really matter and she always went by Maddie M.T. Madeline must have been extremely popular name to give your daughter in 1992 because there was like 5 or 6 Maddies in my grade and they all went by Maddie this and Maddie that. Will and I both met Maddie M.T. at the end of seventh grade and we both quickly became somewhat infatuated with her. She was a really cool, smart, beautiful girl who could hang out with the guys and she quickly became part of our group of friends. We had a lot of good times with Maddie M.T. stretching into freshman year of high school. I will say that I was totally in love with her as much as 13/14-year-old boy can be in love with a girl. Will, even in middle school was pretty aggressive towards girls and by high school he had gotten even worse. He was very charismatic and was always the king of manipulating girls to do what he wanted. He had this skill, he would make girls feel like shit but on some level they would actually respond to it. It was pretty twisted. I went to a different high school than most of my friends from McClure for freshman year but I still stayed in touch with all of them.  After freshman year I transferred to Ballard High School where most of my friends from McClure went. By this time Will had been rebuffed by Maddie so many times that he figured he was never going to get anything from her and that he might as well make her life into a living hell. By sophomore year Will was at his peak of being a bully. He would bully and harass anyone he could but a lot of the time it was either focused on Maddie and her friends or members of our own group of friends. This continued into junior year, which would be my last year at Ballard. By this time we were all experimenting with drugs and alcohol, so a lot of our time would be spent driving around Queen Anne in one of our parents cars drinking, smoking weed and just generally causing trouble. This was when Will started convincing us to start vandalizing Maddie’s house. Writing this sounds ridiculous because I can’t imagine ever doing something like this to someone I cared about but high school was a weird time for me. Will would get us all drunk and then convince us to go egg Maddie’s house or do something else super messed up. We would have literally followed Will off a cliff when we were all drinking, he was that charismatic and I think his charisma only increased when we were all inebriated. I would never participate in the actual vandalism and most times I would try to convince the others to not do it, but I was still there and so I guess I am just as guilty. One night we were all hanging out at the Seattle Center drinking and smoking clove cigarettes from what I remember. I remember us drinking for hours and then I left to walk home. Later that night I woke up to find my phone ringing and that I have a bunch of belligerent, furious messages from Maddie. I figured they must have done something awful but I didn’t know what. That next morning I found out that Will and a couple of other friends threw a brick through Maddie’s mom’s car window. I remember just thinking that this was so messed up and wrong that they had done this for literally no reason. This ignited a small firestorm in our neighborhood and Maddie’s parents got involved and it turned into an epic shit storm. Maddie told her parents how Will had been harassing her for years and that he was pretty much the only one that could have done this. Nobody got arrested but there were threats made and it was just a super unfortunate, totally unnecessary situation. I never talked to Maddie again. After this I decided I needed to break ties with Will and all of these other people. I started thinking about all of the bullying that I had been a part of just by default because I was friends with Will. I started to feel guilty. I realized I never again wanted to be part of a social group like the one I had been a part of for so long. I wanted to be independent and to make my own choices based on my own morals. I felt like in that group I had no control to be myself without being criticized.  I became conscious of how negative a group mentality could be. After junior year I enrolled in community college and never looked back. This was a turning point for me because I realized that I could be myself without being part of a group of people that defined me.

Pivotal Moment
Assignment 1
David Bazzano

My childhood is something I didn’t think would follow me for long after I first entered what is known as the real world. In fact, until recently the tacit culture of my upbringing was a relatively neglected aspect for my mind which resulted in a wistful longing for the escape to my memories by tasting my identity. Growing up Sicilian in America for any generation is a struggle because the history of our identity continues to largely be marginalized or exploited which has for centuries lead our customs to become sacred knowledge isolated within the family. Our natural distrust and fear for outsiders because of these mechanisms required both the history of families in this country and the old to protect what power we have by preserving without words but with magic in the form of cuisine.

Like the church or Molocchio, food in my family has always been the guardian and messenger, and listener for our lives. More than just subsistence, the culinary traditions familiar to us tell a story of who we are, and most importantly how we got here. This story however, is not written with ink but rather changes with time and history as members add to the pot. Like magic however, spells can be broken, altered from originality or even forgotten if taken for granted or dismissed which was a reality I faced when first living on my own.

Dishes which seemed ordinary growing up soon became exotic destinations unreachable as my own arrogance deceived me when placed in the solitude of unfamiliar landscapes. Having the inability to recreate the emotions which transported me away from the present, to a space and time impenetrable from the moving world or assimilation. I felt abandoned, and disconnected as if sitting at a train station waiting for my personality to arrive. What’s frustrating about de facto languages are the inabilities to translate particular emotions or state of beings inherited through tradition and the same can be said for the saudade I felt in my early years on my own. What became clairvoyant and clear to me was the center of my being involves continuing the legacy of conjuring and communicating through the experience created through cuisine. Swirls of tastes which bring colors and sensations to the mind, spices which represent so many forms of struggle and resistance, perhaps even anger or even the trance-like rhythm involved in so much of the process. Without access to these subtle feelings and ingredients, life was a very different dance I was out of step with.

If we aren’t careful our identity is extremely fragile. Who we are isn’t entirely a lengthened shadow of our environments or institutions and most certainly not on our own terms. The greatest gift is accepting where you need to go which became evident as I grew further away from my upbringing surrounded by a haven of extended family. As a society closely linked with the celestial worlds, memories and functions such as family feasts so notoriously known about our way of life are multifaceted ceremonies which help keep the spirits of those moved on, or in distant places with us through what we consume. Mangia.

I was a sophomore in high school. I had gotten out of my first relationship, with a baritone sax player I met and got to know at band camp. It had been the first time I felt like someone else was interested in me, and even though I wasn’t particularly attracted to this person, I jumped into a relationship with her. For years I had suffered from debilitating crushes, where the terror of unrequited love and the potential reality of rejection weighed down on me, preventing me from talking to my crushes or really displaying any amount of acknowledgement. Previously I’d spent a school year pining over a girl with whom I shared a couple of classes. I dreamed that she felt the same way I did, that she shared the same secret feelings too powerful to display openly, but in reality I must’ve barely been on her radar. I found out later she’d been dating a friend of mine most of that year. Things with the bari saxophonist fell apart–we could talk online, but in person things were awkward and forced–I developed a crush on another girl, who I used to loiter around with after school in the band room, but I was rejected, and she began dating my best friend. I couldn’t help but feel so betrayed.
Spring break came, and the concert band, jazz band and orchestra went on a trip to Orlando, Florida, to visit Disneyworld. These trips happen every 3 years, and I had worked over the summer to make enough money to go. I sang songs from Tarzan and Aladdin on the bus to SeaTac, where we took a plane across the country. Florida is flat and wet, and the green fields stretching out to the horizon lent to a sense of place far removed from home, further than the geographical distance. In Yakima, Washington, deep in the valley, every view is finite, penned in by rolling hills, covered with sagebrush, so to be able to see out to a vanishing point felt alien and unsettling. The trip was a whirlwind–taking buses all over the place, playing music, riding roller coasters, exploring the parks by day, staying up late watching Whose Line is it Anyway reruns and talking with the people in my hotel room–including my best friend. I told him about my feelings of betrayal, I don’t remember much of a response–I don’t think I expected one, I just wanted him to know.
On the plane ride back whatever energy had carried me through the eight days in Orlando began to fade. I could feel fatigue settling in, and something else, too, a frustration, an awful feeling I couldn’t express. I drew Disney characters, but through a tortured lens: a twisted, wizened Donald Duck, a withered-out Mickey. When the plane landed back at Seatac airport, something snapped, and all I could do was sit and sob for a few minutes while the band waited. Someone sat down with me, but my best friend didn’t do anything. I don’t think he knew what to do.
That breakdown was my first real experience with depression. After the Disney World trip, I really started to feel horrible about myself. I felt like no one would ever want me, that nobody had ever liked me, that no one would ever like me, that none of my friends wanted anything to do with me anymore. I couldn’t communicate these feelings to anyone, and I didn’t have the energy to do anything besides stay down in my room. I wanted to die. My mom noticed, and set me up with a counselor–I didn’t want to take medication, and even counseling took some convincing, as I’d had some unfulfilling experiences with it in middle school. Now I realize the value of having someone to talk to. By learning about what I was experiencing, that depression is something many people go through, I could remove myself from my feelings and deal with them. There have been ups and downs since then–even with pharmaceutical treatment, depression isn’t something that just goes away. It’s something I’ve lived through, and something I live with.

Terra Heatherly-Norton

4/4/15

Turning Point

I’ve had a fairly easy life; I generally get my way and don’t have to work very hard to do so. I always had a sense of control growing up my opinions were valid in family discussions and I knew how to handle conflict. I am always comfortable, creating a game plan of situations and easing myself into a cozy corner. But at the end of my freshman year I was un-enrolled from Ingraham high school and enrolled into Shorecrest in a completely different school district without any say in the matter. While I saw as the greatest injustice of the century at the time I now see it was being taken out of the comfort zone and not having the social buffers of my established friends that really upset me the most.

My dad had a nickname for me that is a running joke in my family, tall-dark-and-sullen. My face does not invite people in for conversation; no one stops me on the street and asks for a directions. By no fault of my own I have the resting face of a pessimistic old man so making friends especially in the uneasy setting of high school was a little difficult.  I had signed up for cheerleading my freshman year as a quick way to make a few friends but at Shorecrest there wasn’t time for a game plan. In the first two months of that year I watched my best friend move to Montana and my boyfriend at the time went to Turkey to travel abroad for the year, by October I was completely alone.

It sounds depressing, but the freedom I slowly found in this new solo existence was so freeing. I had always had two close girlfriends one guy friend and then a boyfriend of some sort, all through middle school and then my freshman year. I thought of these people as my safety net but really they were just restraints. Which so much time to myself I explored my interests, I discovered bands during long nights searching YouTube and went to a couple shows by myself starting wearing clothes I had always aspired to wear but convinced myself I would never pull off. There was no one around to judge me; the people at Shorecrest took me as I was like I had always been all leather jackets and angst.

While I was angry I began to understand why my mom had done this too me, after a particularly bad breakup the end of my freshman year and a few questionable friend choices my mom said she wanted to “create some space” and “give me some perspective”.

As I changed, I reflected back on what I had been doing in high school and it was all things I hated. The friends I had made the guys I had dated the activities I were involved in none of them made me happy. I came to the realization that I had been living for other people; while I didn’t realize it I forced myself constantly to suppress my wants for the sake of other people, making myself smaller to fit in a space they deemed acceptable. I took taking me out of my environment to truly understand what I had been doing. I found confidence I didn’t know I had been lacking and started to understand what it means to be self-aware.

Ultimately I returned to Ingraham for the junior and senior year of high school but I came back a different person. I dressed the way I wanted (which where a lot of short dresses and thigh highs at the time) with confidence and found that the acceptance came with the attitude. I didn’t feel the social pressures I did before and started openly stating I didn’t like to drink or particularly enjoy rap music. I didn’t feel obligated to compromise my happiness for the approval of others. In the small trashy world of north Seattle there is a social norm. Objectify women, smoke blunts, make money; I had always thought it was something to aspire to but I realized at Shorecrest that wasn’t what successful educated people who make a difference look like. That twenty years down the road they will be doing the same thing they were doing this week and I could be doing so much more.