I was born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1974, to a middle class couple. They were well meaning. But they weren't a particularly happy one. They would split up when I was 5. My father would ask me if I was happy he was leaving. I answered honestly. I said yes, because I knew the shouting matches that they would get into every few nights would stop...

My early years, at least according my mother, and some dim memories that I still hold from those times, apart from the friction between my parents, were reasonably happy. My mother has recounted that I was relatively easy going as a hatchling. Never complained unless there was something truly wrong. I was apparently very outgoing. Very focused on people. I seemed to be always trying to get them to smile. When we prepared to move to Alexandria, Virginia a year later, many of our neighbors, some who had acted as my sitters when my parents were working, made a point of saying goodbye to me specifically. I was apparently rather popular as hatchlings go...

My experiences at kindergarten were mostly positive. It was run by the Episcopal church my mother went to, after we moved into the DC area. I was diagnosed early with learning disabilities. Therapists that worked with the kindergarten, worked with me, explaining to me as best they could how I was different, and taught me ways to cope. They started physical therapy to help my brain learn to control the body it had a scrambled connection to. They taught me to make sense of the wall of noise, presented to me by my senses. My brain, having to do the hard work of processing the data that normally would have been handled by my malfunctioning brain-stem, became quite burley, as a neurologist would explain to me decades later.

I had an inquisitive mind. I was curious about everything, wanting to know how they worked. I was able to grasp complex concepts that often one needed to be much older to understand. At three years old, as my mother once recounted, I would exclaim the revelation that numbers could go on forever, without end. When I was in second grade, after my mother, at my insistence, read me a high school level book about how nuclear reactors worked, as a bedtime story, would start drawing up and then refining, schematics for a nuclear powered rocket, complete with two reactor cores, radiation shield, and RCS thrusters to spin the vessel to simulate gravity for it's occupants. My IQ would later be measured around 150.

I was understood in kindergarten. I had teachers well versed in learning disabilities, and patient and kind. And I had a mother who had once been an educator herself, who advocated for me passionately. I was happy.

My school career would be less happy.

I was still quite awkward. I would be receiving physical therapy for a further 5 years. When my mother took me to see what would be my first elementary school, I went running across the playground, and before she could catch me, would run straight into a metal link chain that would catch me at neck level, and throw me to the ground. I was unable to stop myself in time.

My first grade teacher would be a Ms. Stein who was every bit as unwilling to understand about my condition as the kindergarten teachers were kind to me. She would help make my first year of schooling an absolute hell.

This was the early years of understanding about learning disabilities. Many teachers, too set in their ways, were unwilling to make accommodation. The Americans With Disabilities Act, that would reserve the right of the federal government, to deny funding to a school that didn't make proper accommodations for disabled students, was still a decade away. Learning disabled students were picked up by smaller buses, on special routes. Some schools housed them in homerooms with students with a variety of disabilities, keeping them out of the general populations as much as possible.

I would have a spelling teacher in fourth grade, who would keep me after class every day, because I couldn't finish my work in time, largely due to the motor coordination issues I had with writing. While my classmates got to watch a mid day movie during the break before lunch, I would be forced to struggle through the rest of it, with the teacher breathing down my neck. I still remember her scowl. Her telling me that learning disabilities didn't exist. That I was just slacking.

The stigma was heavy, and the students noticed. For years I would spend nights cuddled up next to my mother wailing about how I had no friends. How everyone was mean to me. And I didn't understand why...

I began to withdraw. To dread school. To me it was all struggle. All judgment. All punishment for me being different.

It would not be the only horrible thing to happen to me.

When I was 7 I was sexually abused by a neighbor down the road. A mentally challenged teenager. He was 14 but with the mind of a 6 year old, and had no idea what he was doing. But the damage lives with me to this day.

My father had mental problems. He was violent towards me, when he had problems controlling his anger. While I would say that later on we got along well enough, he never really held the place a father would in my life. He tried, but he was too haunted by his own abusive past.

I developed severe OCD when I was 13. My early teen years was spent seeing psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists. I was put on a veritable cornucopia of various SSRIs and other medications, searching for the right medication or combination, to turn down the volume on the screaming thoughts in my head. The ones about how I was dirty, and needed to clean myself endlessly. It would get bad enough that, I would eventually spend 13 hours a day in the bathroom, doing horrible things to myself, trying to get clean. My hair turn blond, from all the hydrogen peroxide I was spraying everywhere, trying to sanitize my home around me. My mother would threaten to get me hospitalized, if I didn't seek help. Thankfully, I was eventually able to find a medication that turns that scream down to a dull roar.

When I was 17, I came to understand that I was Gay. My mother was extremely understanding. While she feared that I would experience further prejudice, she made clear that the only issue she had with it (and she made it clear this was HER issue, and NOT mine),was that she probably could expect no biological grandchildren. She was right about that, alas.

I also developed clinical depression. At one point I was sleeping 14 hours a day, and eating myself into oblivion, because I felt like I had no real future that wasn't filled with just more suffering.

Throughout my life, I would struggle. Find myself the strange one. The one looking in from the outside, not allowed to have a normal life. To be subjected to horrors that my mother could not completely shield me from. And worse, I was smart. I became increasingly aware of how dysfunctional the world was. How arbitrary.

Things have thankfully changed for the better, for me, lately.

I have friends that I have made over the years since I left school. I now have a bit of a social network. After two extremely dysfunctional relationships (after taking a break from such things), I found a partner that I am truly compatible with. Our interests compliment each other wonderfully. He is my best friend, my partner, and my collaborator in geeky projects aplenty. Even with the world ironically seeming to fall off a cliff, just as I'm finally finding my own equilibrium, I have new friends that helped me grow a community, that we found ourselves inheriting. It's a social circle that we all can lean on, for which I am very grateful. It took nearly 4 decades of life, but I feel like I finally have a future. Something to do. Something to look forward to.

I found that I am very unusual combination.

I am a nerd, with interests that until very recently, were considered fringe, and were generally derided in most cases. Not considered dangerous, but definitely childish and unmanly. Videogames, science fiction, fantasy, and being a science and tech geek, were all things that would get you looked at oddly, or dismissed as a dreamer, as if being a dreamer was a bad thing. My experiences have formed what I believe is probably either a unique or at least uncommon viewpoint on the world. I'm not a part of the rat race. I have no career due to my conditions. I have no children, and no plans to have any. I feel that I am too unstable. It would not be good for me to be having to take care of another life, that was entirely dependent on me, when I am not able to really look after myself on more than a very basic level physically. But I'm incredibly bright, which is both a blessing and a curse. I'm good with technology and science, and can grasp the concepts, if not consciously the math. I can make inferences that have proven to be reasonably accurate. And I have time to think. Time to wonder, and to learn. And I have what I hope is a decent writing ability.

And I've stumbled. Alot. I've made some doozies of mistakes in my life, that have humbled me, and hopefully given me some measure of understanding, if only simply "Okay, better not to do THAT again..."

So here I am. I may not be female, or a person of color, but I am still a minority in my own way. I'm gay, an abuse survivor both sexual and physical, a sufferer of mental illness, a person with disabilities, and a person with interests that for the majority of my life were looked down upon, and to this day still carry some stigma. A minority, of a minority, of a minority, of a minority, of a minority.

And I'm getting older. I'm thinking about mortality. About what I will leave behind when I pass off this mortal coil. There will be friends to remember me, but no children to carry on in my stead. Robin Williams once said the wonderful thing about having children is that they are both you, and not you. But that in some way, it's a ticket towards, if not immortality, towards having something of you live on, after you for at least a time. I don't have that...

I want to leave something behind. Something that hopefully can endure after I am gone.

As I said before, I have some decent writing ability, or at least I'm told that I do. It's not the first time I've considered doing this, but lately, with everything that's going on, I figured, what the hell. Best to just get on with it...

They say that nothing really ever disappears on the Internet. That it may become harder to find, but it's always still out there somewhere...

So, after much procrastination, I have decided to start writing. To create essays that give my point of view on what hopefully will be a variety of topics. Some will be on politics, some on philosophy, some on science and physics, some on more geeky topics like fandom and science fiction, videogames, etc.

I will try to post at least 1 thing a week on Facebook, Tumblr, and Furaffinity (yeah, I'm also one of them furries). Hopefully someone will read these and take away something of value. That maybe it will change an opinion, or give an insight or inspiration. Something that can survive me, even if my name and who I was is forgotten. Here's hoping.

And here goes nothing...