Kevin, summer of 1984.

Enter spring–let's say April–1984, West Street, Wilmington, Delaware.

Birds are singing. The tulips and pansies in our raised beds are starting to bloom. Recent March winds have deposited the remnants of chaos, muddied papers, dead leaves and tree limbs, in the alleyway. The winds lifted deck chairs against back fences, turned over plastic flower pots, battered pedestrians. They blew Kevin the poet-carpenter, intellectual powerhouse and gin guzzler, in down the street, saluted him with a flurry of cherry blossoms.

My mother invites the new neighbor over for dinner. He seems strange, a little awkward in his old-fashioned glasses, his blue eyes intense and clear through Coke bottle lenses. Kevin speaks with a touch of New Jersey nasal and renovates and flips houses for a living. He arrives lean and tanned, armed with words of sharpened steel and a large bottle of Gordon’s, his old blue merle collie Barney by his side.

What could I do? I was fourteen. The last guy in our house didn’t even speak when I was at the table.

Here’s what I didn’t do: talk. Smile. Instead I just sat and shoveled in the food, exuded resentment, made infrequent eye contact. Maybe I smirked. And Kevin, a man I had just met, called me on it.

“What’s your problem? You’re just sitting there, sucking all the air out of the room.”

I have no memory of my response.

It wasn’t until yesterday, as I was attempting to capture this pivotal moment yet again, looking over what I’d written almost a year ago on that same dinner, that I realized: I blame myself. Reading over my early attempts is somewhat painful. I was straining to describe that night, to explain Kevin’s poetic rockstar persona and my mother’s deadly attraction to him, to explain my role in my own rejection. The end of parenting, my premature emancipation, the series of adult situations I got into before my time? Culpa. Mea culpa. I should have put on the charm, talked, given a little bit that night. I should have been someone else.

If I had won Kevin over that evening, maybe my mother would have stayed engaged in my life. She might never have started bringing dinner to him, eating in his dusty dining room every night while I ate alone. I wouldn’t have begun wandering the Wilmington streets after dark, wobbly with purloined gin, smoking unfiltered cloves and blasting the Dead Kennedys from my Walkman. The Little House would have stayed empty. The end of innocence could have been put off for another couple of years. If I were a better person, a different person, no one would have told me that I was evil, the root cause of family turmoil.

I know. I know. My brain tells my heart that it would have made absolutely no difference in the outcome if I had smiled or curtseyed or made insightful conversation about Nietzsche and Wordsworth. To be honest, until yesterday, I didn't know I felt this way. I blame myself.

Why do children take responsibility for things over which they have no control? Why do adults shift the blame to the helpless? And why, when we molt and grow and leave our child forms behind, does this sense of responsibility for our own small fates, this idea of being the masters of our abuse (if only I were nicer or less shy or stronger ...) carry on into our adult life?

The child decides that she is the cause of her mistreatment. The adult lets those early experiences dictate her behavior. We find ourselves recreating situations again and again, little kids in the guise of adulthood, sifting our lives through the rusty emotional sieve of the formerly helpless. We choose partners who fit into old scenarios, make decisions based on faulty data, try to get it right this time. With our motives hidden and our reasons obscured, the do-overs usually fail. Then? Familiar pain and reinforcement of our feelings of worthlessness.

Or maybe it's just me who's felt this way. Yes, I've done this, set up the scene, chosen guys who reject who I am, who blame me for their own shortcomings. I've blundered my way through friendships, the sullen fourteen year old in a thirty-year-old's clothing. And although I have stopped replaying the same scenes over and over again, I still have an overarching sense of responsibility for the trajectory of my childhood. My invisible scars feel completely self-imposed, my exposure of them a shameful confession. I feel rotten from the inside, capable of destroying entire worlds. Run from me before I drag you into the muck!

But I'm not that way. I'm not.

So I'm writing my path to self-acceptance, still trying to forgive myself and my family, to look at the world through clean eyes. I don't want to shift blame. I want to let go of the entire concept of it. After all, I'm here, alive, doing so much better than I ever thought I would be. It's time to let go, to untie my hands and live fully.

I figure I'm about 20% there. Maybe more. And if I can do it, you can too.

Coming up: February's blog, a return to the Maureen story (we'll skip over the guess who's coming to dinner segment), and some awards. Not necessarily in that order.

Tags: Kevin, guilt, forgiveness, child neglect

Tammy glanced over at Julie’s hair, wrinkled her face in disgust: was that a louse crawling around? Yes! Using thumb and forefinger, she plucked the imaginary bug and tossed it into the tiny invisible skillet in her opposite hand. Sizzzzzzle. Sizzzzzzle. Flip. Sizzzzzzzle. Tammy hurled the fresh-cooked louse into her mouth with lip-smacking relish. Maureen and I, however, preferred to let our fantasy lice live in peace. We wanted them to intermingle. So we built a bridge, connected her lank hair to a frizzy extension of mine with rubber bands. Sixth grade was an unironic time. I’m not sure if anyone knew we were joking.

Maureen, hanging from a tree, 1982

We stayed after school that day, dismantled the lice bridge and went to the playground, squished our Docksiders against spring-rain damp turf. The middling March air was cool against our faces as we ran to the swingset. In warmer weather the game was to fling off our shoes to see who could kick them the farthest. Today we passed a hairbrush back and forth, hurtling through the air on wooden seats, trying to make the other person drop it or chicken out.

“Want to play Space Invaders? Let’s go down to the Hole in the Wall.”

Maureen’s grandfather owned a bar by the canal, a basement space in a building from the late 1700s. In the afternoons it was quiet and we were allowed to play pool or a video game while her father got the bar ready for business. The walk from Chesapeake City Elementary School to the bar took us past the funeral home, white and windowless, past boarded up storefronts and ramshackle houses tumbled against the sidewalk. The Eastern Shore town was not yet thriving, was a decade away from becoming a boutique village. We decided against stopping at Pyle’s, a small convenience store that sold things like Push Pops and sticky Bubble Yum and Dixie cup ice cream that came with a wooden spoon. There was plenty of non-nutritious crap awaiting at the Hole in the Wall, cheese curls and barbecue-flavored potato chips and candy bars. I’d get to mix the drinks, sugary combinations of Coke, 7-Up, and orange soda over ice. We called them “Suicides.”

The tendency – or my tendency, at least – in writing about childhood is to make it sound either impossibly idyllic or like a living hell. So here is a list of the good stuff: Hanging out on Maureen’s porch swing after Canal Day, holding a 20-inch sparkler in full glimmer as we watched a line of cars heading for Route 213. Playing Atari games – Asteroids, Adventure – while eating junk food. Dancing around to “Flying Purple People Eater.” Eating an entire meal without using our hands, “like cats.” Annoying her sister by making Three Stoogesesque snoring noises as she was trying to get to sleep. Organizing slumber parties with shrieking and séances and morning-after pancakes a la James Beard.

Behind the idyll? Turmoil. Children are the unwitting passengers in the lives of others. Best friends only offer so much protection. I felt like a freak, too smart and too quiet and odd, living in an increasingly uncomfortable situation with my mother, grandfather, and soon-to-be stepfather. This was the year I actively threatened suicide, when I kept track of my thyroid and asthma medications in preparation for an overdose. The year I carried around an Ouija board, desperate to get in contact with my dead grandmother, the year when the girl wars were beginning and teasing about one’s physical development or lack thereof was common (“We must, we must, we must increase our bust!” was the recess refrain.)

Anyone who thinks that childhood is all carefree is delusional. Or an amnesiac.

But I didn’t kill myself and our friendship survived my seventh grade move back to Wilmington. Outside of the machiavellian middle school environment , Maureen and I became closer, with frequent overnight visits and some very funny correspondence. She wrote me weekly. I was so proud of her letters, of her sense of humor, that I would bring them into school, my address carefully blacked out so that no one would discover that I lived outside of the school district.

The weekend my mother told my stepfather to pack up his things and leave, I had plans to visit Maureen. I still went, though I was not in the mood. Yes, Tim was an asshole (since reformed, apparently), but he had been a part of our lives for eight years. We spent holidays with his family. We needed his income. And I hadn't seen the break coming. What was going to happen to us?

DEATH at moment of reading! Envelope from February 1983 letter.

I sludged through that October 1983 weekend, trapped in a quicksand of worry. On Sunday, I was surprised to see Tim waiting for me at the usual rendezvous point, the Newark Howard Johnson's. Maureen and I hugged, I waved at her mother, and slipped into the Cutlass. Tim and I were unaccustomed to making small talk and there wasn't much to say. He was staying with his parents, had hopes of repairing the marriage, though I doubt we talked about that. He didn't linger in front of our inner city rowhouse and I didn't look back as I unlocked the door.

Inside, Mom was sitting in the living room reading with Frank the cat on her lap. She looked up when I came in, glanced around the room and asked "Notice anything different?"

"Sunlight."

One of the first things she had done upon Tim's departure was to open the living room shutters. They had been closed since our move to the house, a bizarre cost-saving measure. The room seemed unnaturally bright. Light bounced off of the white walls, pooled in the corners. Our other cat, Liz, was basking in a patch of it. She held our a paw and trilled. Could you get more symbolic than this, darkness transformed by light, a closed off room now open? A little foreshadowing, a portent of good things to come?

House in Wilmington during the Tim era.

Don't be so gullible, so easily blinded by the sun. Sometimes a patch of sunlight is just that and nothing more. An open shutter can be closed again.

The end of the Tim era did turn out to be free and glorious, five months of mother-daughter bonding. We enjoyed the sunlight. Bought 100% orange juice and name-brand yogurt. Mom acquired a moped and zipped around town picking up freelance writing work and groceries. I arranged rides to and from games, kept up with my studying, memorized lists of German words, puzzled over teutonic grammar. Maureen and I continued as best friends. For Mom's 34th birthday I got her a card with a guy in drag made up to look like Elizabeth Taylor: "Birthdays are like husbands – after a while you stop counting!" Ha Ha.

Adolescence, the process of pulling yourself into burgeoning adulthood, shakes the seemingly solid foundations of identity. The sweet boy, lover of plaid shirts and belted khakis, suddenly starts dressing in black, from hair dye to nail polish to skirt and shoes. The athlete takes up drugs and loses motivation. Best friends drift apart. I started ninth grade in pastels, a nondrinker, a German-studying, Duran Duran-listening cheerleader. I finished the year close to that, too, though internal changes were taking place in preparation for my metamorphosis.

The shift may have happened anyway, it might have been destiny, but I can't deny that there was a catalyst. He moved in down the street that spring. Kevin the poet-carpenter. Kevin with his plumb lines and his radial saws, with his collie and his poetry books. My mother met him and dropped everything.

By May I was essentially on my own.

Next installments: The Little House, demon rum, Dirk, and a friendship that doesn't survive.

Tags: family, friendship, sixth grade, step-father, suicide, ouija boards, alcohol, Dirk

All of this optimism, hope, and change in the air is getting in the way of my writing!!

It's absolutely wonderful. But I can't concentrate.

So as a little motivation, here's a teaser for my next post, the story of a childhood friendship that disintegrated in the Little House. It involves Space Invaders and sparklers, cigarettes and fluorescent eye shadow, vinegary jug wine and Budweiser. There's a kidnapped car and a bit of blame-shifting. For many years there was silence. But, as my old friend reminded me recently in an e-mail, "There was a lot of good, too. Don't forget that."

She was a prolific letter writer and I've kept most of her correspondence, mainly for the very funny envelopes. Like this one, from a 1984 letter:

And in between the writing and the reading and the card-dropping and the commenting, let's try to "pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America." At least those of us who live here. It's going to take a bit of work, but we are up to the challenge.

Tags: friendship, Barack Obama, writing

DATE: May 1981

OCCASION: My mother's second wedding.

LOCATION: Eastern Shore, MD.

PERSONNEL (from left to right):

Mom: Barely 31 years old. Obscuring new husband's mother.

Grandfather: Looking pleased. The bridegroom had a reputation as a good guy. Even though he had spent the year before the wedding happily unemployed, lifting weights in the Little House, and waiting for my mother to come home from work and make dinner (though perhaps this view is a little one-sided).

Me: Eleven. And a half. Wearing my mother's dress

Best friend (from ages 8 - 14): Total support. Very funny. We went from childhood to rebellious adolescence together, from dancing around her living room listening to "Goofy Gold" to sneaking cigarettes and chugging 7-oz Budweisers. I miss her.

Cousin: Seven years old. Now an Episcopal minister. I haven't seen or spoken with her since my first wedding in late 1995. Our mothers don't speak either.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Here's a better look at ...

The car: Then-stepfather's 1968 (?) Oldsmobile Cutlass, permanently awaiting a paint job. I hated that #%*& thing, though it did get us from Point A to Point B.

Yeah, I've been going through my boxes of life detritus, old photos, letters, embarrassingly boy-crazy journals. The process has has brought up thoughts about friendship, loss, and connection. This picture stuck out, less for the time and situation (which, wonderfully, have lost their power for me) but for the strange posed/not posed quality of it, and for the relationships that have slipped away.

There's the next post, though I'm not sure where I'm going with it. And hopefully fiction will be returning when my writing class starts up again next month, or even sooner if I can pull it off.

Tags: family, grandfather, friendship

Image from Hope4Survivors

You want instant writer's block?

Try to write about your own shame.

That's not how today started. I wanted to write a story about a boyfriend I had in college, the tale of my second long term relationship. Our innocent beginnings. He was a teller in my bank, we shared smiles and pleasantries. Then one evening, when I was leaving the local watering hole with one of my male floozies, J approached me and said “I know you’re leaving with this guy, but can I call you sometime?” I gave him my number.

There was the little detail of my real boyfriend and our slowly dying couplehood. I had to put that out of its misery. It wasn’t a clean death. And when J went on a white water rafting trip with his family a month into our serious dating, I might have had a bar hookup or two. In between his return and our demise, we shared a period of sweet intense love. I loved him. I really did.

I was kind of crazy then. Angry. Pathologically needy. J was sarcastic and cruel, bitingly funny with a mean streak brought on by his quietly twisted childhood. After six months of total absorption, our relationship stalled and then limped along for another two years, with sporadic weekend visits (the margarita-inspired sex in a sprawling azalea near the Capitol grounds; the drunken knock on my door after a Redskins Super Bowl victory; my leap into the pool with the band, fully clothed, after I secretly followed J and Frieda back to his bedroom). I had a few mini-boyfriends on the sly, including one fellow philosophy major who totally trampled my heart and a graduate student who was a Jew posing as an Italian-American. Nervous about how he would be perceived in a Catholic-tinged philosophy program, the graduate student exploited his olive-toned skin and love of opera to go undercover, lived an odd temporary lie.

Still, J and I continued in our half-love without discussing the side relationships. The week I headed for graduate school, he left me a message, sang “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane,” to my answering machine, funny and bittersweet as ever. In November of that year, 1992, I found out that he’d gotten a new, serious girlfriend. After a tearful, confessional conversation, I mailed him a copy of the credit card receipt for my abortion. I’d been holding on to it for five months, waiting for the right moment to tell him.

Shame.

Ashamed of who I was and what I did. Ashamed of the abortion – the abortion. You think you can wash away shame or pain by showing it to the world, or to a limited subset of the sympathetic. Sorry, my good religious friends, my lovers of life. I let one baby happen by accident and took care of the next by violence.

By the end of my first semester in library school, I was in crisis, totally falling apart. Enter my first real attempt at therapy and my future first husband, the slow process of life rebuilding. If you are reading this, thank you future first husband, future ex-husband, for being so totally solid. I don't think I've given you enough credit for that. There is absolution in unconditional love.

I am starting to sift through the decade after the stillbirth, shining light on a dark time, preparing myself to come clean. I have wondered if the blog, my self-made public confessional, is the best way to expurgate shame. Wouldn't it be simpler to say nothing at all? Maybe finally get around to locating another trusted therapist, go the traditional recovery route? Or, if I must expose the ugliness, couldn't I just make it quick, compile a list, invite brief flagellation or accolades for my honesty and then move quickly on to self-forgiveness?

No, no, I have to transform the shame into a narrative, examine it inside and out. I need to dust if off, shine it up, put it in the shop window. Later, I'll pass it along to my fictional characters. They are waiting backstage, eager to take on the burden, ready to be set into motion. But before all that, before I can pass the torch in good conscience, I'll occasionally be picking apart my mistakes here, aiming for tricky self-forgiveness.

I hope you can stay with me for the ride, can keep an open mind and an empathetic heart. Oh, the places we’ll go!

Tags: shame, guilt, the stillbirth, secrets, College, boyfriends, love, emotional striptease

You think you know me.

Let’s look at the facts as revealed here: I’m a stay-at-home mom with a preschool-aged son. A former librarian, I went to culinary school and from there decided to be a writer. My family is relatively new to Northern California, having moved from the East Coast almost two years ago. I’ve told you my name. Given my birthday (oh, those worries about aging, forcing me to seek comfort on the web).

And if you’ve been here for a while, you know about the defining story of my life, the lifeless premature baby I gave birth to at home when I was sixteen.

But what do you really know?

Jennifer recovering from a late night, 1988? Or another photo to continue the ruse?

How would you feel if I was actually a 25-year-old male advertising copywriter from Peoria? What if I really lived in Buffalo, NY? Or if I was pushing 70, mother to a multitude of now middle aged children, grandmother to teenagers, a Brit using the blog to flesh out a character? This "Jennifer" person you think you've been reading could be someone I’ve been keeping in my back pocket for years. writing to survive might be some kind of grand fictional experiment, an attempt to create a flesh and bones person out of ethereal imagination.

And my stories? What if these were figments, scraps from my mind, absolute fiction masquerading as angst-ridden past? It could be that you've been reading full-blown literary lies à la Margaret B. Jones, the wannabe memoirist who made up a gangland childhood. Turns out my parents have been married for forever, I waited until marriage (or at least love) to have sex, and I’ve never touched a drop of alcohol. Oh, and that isn’t my son, he’s a nephew (never mind that I have no nephew).

Would you feel betrayed?

Don't worry. I don’t have it in me to lie like that, though you'll mainly have to take my word for it and trust your gut. There were times in high school and college when I was a serial liar, self-serving and hidden. My mother believed the stories about my solo nights, even when my boyfriend's car was parked right outside the Little House ("Oh, the car? Dirk leaves it there when he goes to the Cassady's. Sometimes he's had too much to drink, so he stays at their place for the night." "That's exactly what I thought, Jenna.") Later, I hid my unfaithfulness from my college boyfriends, created a protective distance by pursuing empty hopes with relative strangers.

Living a life of lies is a dirty business. I was becoming unrecognizable, murky, untrustworthy, a bad friend. So I stopped lying and regained a hold on fidelity. And while those old kinds of lies are no longer tempting, I still struggle with my tendency to exaggerate minor facts or to deny my feelings. Attempting to be good is a life-long process.

There is a difference between making things up to avoid punishment and creating stories to entertain. Stories aren't lies (and sometimes the lies we tell in our life stories aren't fibs either). If the blog tale is well-told, the characters believable, the created world tangible, so real you can taste it, does it matter if it actually happened? How would you know if it did?

We’re taking it all on faith in this blogging world, want to believe that everyone is who they present themselves to be. For the most part, I think people are genuine. Yes, we have plenty of time to shape our online selves, but we’re generally real. Still …

There must be bloggers, perhaps ones you read every day, who have created fiction under the guise of truth. Their blogs are ostensibly about their day to day existence, may even include some pieces of fiction or poetry or personal essay, but some of the facts have been turned inside out.

Maybe the writer doesn’t want to be identified, or is playing, having fun being someone else. The character that demanded life is finally born in a blog, fully realized, solid, interactive (the fresh-eyed college graduate moving back to her hometown; the landlocked fly fisherman reminiscing about his days of streams and trout; the tech-savvy doting grandma with an herbal tea obsession, a minor character in a SAHM's life). Or they add a totally fictional detail, erase a husband, gain a Weimaraner, make a virtual move from Asheville to Albany.

And what of it? Readers are entertained, the writer has an enthusiastic, satisfied audience. These are tenuous connections we have, the lengths of spider's silk stretching across the ether from blogger to blogger. Many of us have never even spoken. In these circumstances, does the truth matter?

I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Tags: blogging, truth, lies, fiction, faction, facts, fictional characters, trust, memoir, openness, storytelling

(Let's call this faction.)

The year was marked by the scent of patchouli. It roped and twisted its way into my room, coated the curtains, soaked into my skin. Some pseudo-hippy incense-burning chick with Camarillo brillo hair lived in the room next door and I put up with a lot of unwelcome odors. Pot smoke, sweat masked by scented oils, cigarettes and sandalwood. My least-favorite scent is an amalgam: Fall Term 1987.

Fall Term 1987 wasn’t limited to the waftings of pseudo-hippy chick. There were hints of puke (my own, my friends:  we drank a lot), late night clothes exuding flat beer fumes and the remnants of cigarette smoke, the sticky 18th birthday remains of Coco Lopez and rum. That fall I comforted myself with baked potatoes clotted with butter and sour cream, used their earthy scent as an antidote to the disinfectant-sharp dining hall air.

Then there were the freshly opened condom packets; musty sheets left to go grey on the bed; my roommate’s apple shampoo; and the dangerous pull of Carl’s room across the hall. His walls were bare. In fact, the room was practically empty, save for a dead rose propped up in the empty whiskey bottle on his college-issue desk. I remember the smell of alcohol on his breath, sweet as molasses, as he unlocked the door.

He introduced me to the band Joy Division and to the previously unknown pleasures of the grownup crush, revealed the depths of my ability to obsess about certain kinds of men -- rebellious, prone to dressing in black, ready-made blanks for my projected fantasies. I wrote a short story about him for a freshman composition class that began "Carl is tall, dark, and handsome. Not classically good-looking ...." It was true. He had a Jeff Goldblum look, the dark-haired, smart, slightly nerdy ectomorph with his thick orange turtleneck, heavy boots and thrift store coat. He smelled like whiskey and cloves. The pull to Carl was obsessive. Single-minded. And pointless: I had a boyfriend and Carl was almost completely uninterested in me.

The real danger was Alonzo. Twenty-six, a senior from South America attending our small college on a sports scholarship, Alonzo was friends with Carl, but seemed to prefer the company of freshman girls. Rangy and tall, with hair like the young Kafka, Alonzo hung out in the dorm, crashed our parties, insinuated himself into our budding social lives. “Come on! What’s the problem?” he’d ask, eyes bulging, hand outstretched for my roommate Martha, making an offer we couldn’t refuse.

By the spring semester Martha had dropped out of college to get treatment for her eating disorder. I was unmoored, lost without my fellow drunk from a dysfunctional family. One snow-fresh February night Alonzo offered to take me out for a Procolino’s pizza. Afterwards (his intensity, his forcefulness) I reluctantly went back to his place, a windowless room in a Spanish professor's basement.

Shadowplay II (Gordana & Marko Zivkovic)

The professor wasn't home. Alonzo switched on a desk light, turned on the clock radio and reached for me. I could smell his cologne in the air. Polo. Not a good sign.

You know where this is going, right? It’s an old and very common story. I hesitate to call it rape, rape with its violence and violations and death threats and nightmares. This was more like coaxed coercion. Alonzo, all exploring tongue and crawling hands, used his knee to push me onto his thin camping mattress. I protested. He insisted, did what he brought me there to do. (I recently found out that Alonzo had been inducted into the college’s athletic hall of fame. The entry noted that he was so eager to get a U.S. education that he was willing to sleep on the floor. Yeah. That's right.)

Afterwards, the room damp with forced intimacy, I focused on the radio. George Michael was singing Faith. Martha loved George Michael. She also had a crush on Alonzo, similar in intensity to my crush on Carl. Now there was something between us. Another lie. I already had a moat of lies between me and my boyfriend, a series of flirtations and one night stands that I excused by thinking of his early treatment of me, as payback for the 1 a.m. visits, the nights he lost to bong hits and Elephant beer. It was getting uglier and uglier, wasn’t it? What was I becoming?

Alonzo the conqueror drove me back to the dorms in the professor's car. I headed for the showers. The coed bathroom was empty, no need to shout all-clear. Little blue toiletries bucket in one hand, towel tossed over the curtain, I turned the hot water on full-force.

I couldn’t wash the smell of him off me fast enough.

Tags: writing prompt, College, roommates, alcohol, smells, faction, date rape, Joy Division, guilt, lies, secrets

In the beginning, there was Anonmomous.

Then it was simply Jennifer. But there were slip-ups. The PublicLiterature.Org stories with my full name. The e-mails I sent to others from my personal gmail account. The few blogging awards that went to Jennifer Fullname instead of to just Jennifer.

My father found the blog. I accidentally sent an e-mail to my ex-husband from the writing to survive account and I'm pretty sure he's been here. I have a sneaking suspicion that my brother-in-law has visited at least once. A friend from elementary school found me here. For a while the first hit on a Google search of my name (yeah, I google my own name. I'm not the only one, right?) was the blog, for reasons that are somewhat mysterious. Until today, the two weren't directly connected.

It's one thing to write to complete strangers. It's quite another to realize that people who may be a part of my story are reading. Or that casual friends might come upon this and find out more than they ever wanted to know about me. But as I kept on leaving the door ajar, I realized that I want to be open, needed it. What's there to hide? Just me.

So.



Here I am.

Jennifer Trinkle.

All other names have been changed to protect the innocent. In most cases.

Tags: openness, anonymity, secrets