Sometimes these prompts call me out.

That’s rude af frankly, and I’m mad.

Anyway.

I was a confused and angry porcupine of a kid. Spikes everywhere, ready to strike at all times, at any provocation. The confused part, however, was that I was convinced I was a bear. Paws with claws and a great big maw, I had. I thought I had. I was huger than I was, and more powerful, more passionate. I could decimate an idea–a rare gift.

I was very small, and spikey, and I didn’t know those quills were my best weapons, yet.

If you’re at all wondering exactly how unlikable I truly was, I’ll tell you point-blank: I was bullied, mercilessly.

Aw, you think, so sad. No. Trust me. Looking back, I would’ve bullied me, too.

Why?

When cornered by one of my tormentors, my default response was to strike a dramatic pose and snap out, “It’s a good thing I know karate!”

Bad enough on its own. Made worse by the fact that I did not know karate, like, at all.

When this failed to work, I would instead attempt a verbal smackdown. With two social workers as parents, however, my smack downs were all themed around the root of what I believed was actually happening to them. Sometimes this was so ineffective it was downright humorous.

For instance: you only bully because of your own insecurities!

Sometimes it worked far too well to allow me to continue being the victim.

For instance: you’re just mad because your mom’s a drug addict and she loves drugs more than you.

All through childhood I existed like this. Poised to strike! Yet totally unaware of how to actually, accurately do so.

I was especially vicious to my mom, during that first block. The first block ranges from the beginning (my first memory is age two, a balloon being bopped away every time I get it close to my mouth, great shadows laughing, and I am furious) till 15. I was made of rage this whole time, petulant in my own tragic story. My story was both heinously unfair and also, not quite interesting enough. I wished often for something, anything: natural disaster, dead parents, a plague. Something like that. Something plot-worthy that would let me shine.

When I was fifteen my mom was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

The next four-ish years she spent dying I was only a numb, echoing regret.

Shame is more accurate, I suppose. I try not to waste time with semantics when I let this thought in, though. Whatever it was, I lived there, and my spikes were gone. My teeth were pulled, and my claws had never existed at all.

She lost her mind, and I tripped after her, desperate to put it back. It had fallen into my hands, after all. I needed to put it back.

She died mid-summer when I was nineteen and I remember thinking, “I am free,” and then feeling so, so much shame.

Enough to fuel a fucked up life for almost a decade. Enough to pay for my drugs no matter what the cost. Enough to devour, where it would sit, empty inside me.

Enough to stumble me into parenthood broken, thinking it would fix me. Enough to have my baby girl taken away. Send me to rehab. I spent her first birthday there.

So my sponsees are always confused when I say this part: I regret nothing.

I regret nothing. I don’t even wish it had gone another way–a get-around often used to not say regret, yet in the end, really mean it. Semantics again. Fuck that.

I had to do every ounce of that shit to become myself, and my recovery has, in the end, had shit-all to do with drugs of choice or using. That was how I treated what was actually wrong–the porcupine kid not knowing they weren’t a bear. The shame sucking on the edge of my life, my mom’s mind in my hands and me thinking I could put it back.

I spent baby girl’s first birthday in rehab. I haven’t missed another birthday since. These two things are not unrelated.

In two days, I’m attending the Philadelphia Writer’s Workshop. I’ve paid for two pitches with two agents I absolutely adore. I’ve been planning to pitch a book I love, a book that I’ve known from the get-go is good. A rare feeling for me–I tend to not think about whether my books are good, because that’s hard. I write because I have to, and then the book exists, and that’s what I have to work with.

This book is good.

It’s also woefully a week (at least) away from its final form. Editing–in my opinion, the absolute bulk of writing, the most important part, the part that takes a thing and makes it actually sing–is not finished.

I have excuses a’plenty for why. My husband was in the hospital unexpectedly, and I wasn’t able to work on it at all during that time because kids, and at work we are just about to open the new RTF and I’m needed there, and blah blah blah blah IT DOESN’T MATTER.

My mom used to say this all the time: Here we are.

It doesn’t matter how. Here we are.

I paid sixty dollars for these pitches. I paid more for the workshop itself. I gave myself a week long buffer, according to my own scheduling, to be finished with it all and have it ready for eyes beyond my own and my beta readers. This was not enough of a buffer.

It doesn’t matter. Here we are.

Sometimes these prompts call me out.

That’s rude af frankly, and I’m mad.

Anyway.

Here we are.