family – Muddled Soma

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Decimal Down in Front – Day 39

February 2, 2026February 7, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A time you betrayed or hurt a friend.

I went off to Oklahoma Christian University in the fall of 1992. At the time, I did not yet know how to name what I was running from, only that leaving felt necessary, even to a shitstorm like OC. My first year unraveled quickly. I drank too much, stayed numb on purpose, and called that suspension “figuring things out.” When the year ended, my GPA arrived like a small, undeniable truth…a decimal lead the way, as if even the numbers were hesitant to claim me other than the zero.

So, I went home for the summer and worked at Pepsi, driving a forklift. They were long days that left my body tired and my thoughts loose. My house felt quieter than I remembered, as though something had already begun to close. I did not linger there. Most nights, I met old high school friends after work. We went to Applebee’s because no one questioned our age. We drank and talked and tried to decide who we were becoming by comparing ourselves to who we had already been.

Steve appeared in those quiet spaces at my house, a friend from before I had figured out how to be me. Back when I still rode the bus to school! Steve had learning disabilities and parents who seemed permanently absent in all the ways that count. He was kind, earnest, and always a little behind the moment, though never behind in heart. When he asked what I was doing, I told him about college in Oklahoma, about going back in the fall, and about my plans to figure things out.

Later that summer, he told me he had applied to Oklahoma Christian University and had been accepted. He said it with a kind of hopeful certainty, as though being near to my opportunity might offer him a door of his own. I remember feeling surprised, then unsettled, then quietly embarrassed by that reaction. I told myself a story about standards and readiness and merit, though what I was really protecting was distance.

When fall came, we were on the same campus. Steve arrived unprepared for the weight of it. The rules, the expectations, the rituals of belief that asked for performance more than understanding. Chapel, bible classes, the careful obedience that hung in the air all about. I recognized his confusion because it mirrored my own when I first arrived. I understood his shock because I had already absorbed it once. And still, I stepped back.

I told myself I was busy. I told myself he needed to figure things out on his own. I told myself I was trying to survive. All of those things were partly true. None of them were generous. I spoke to him when we crossed paths. I was kind enough to avoid guilt. But I did not offer help. I did not walk beside him. I did not lend him language when he had none.

The truth is simpler and hell of a lot more harsh. Steve reminded me of who I had been. Staying close to him felt like risking my fragile reinvention. So I chose distance. I chose silence. I chose myself. That is how I betrayed him. Not with cruelty, but with absence.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Borrowed Fire- Day 37

January 31, 2026January 31, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A friend who pulled you toward trouble.

I have never had a true friend who pulled me toward trouble, but I did have a lot of trouble that pulled me toward people I called friends. In Plattsburgh, there was a kid who was more of a friend of a friend, or a friend of the group, a kid that drifted in and out of our orbit when he wanted. His name was Mike. He was short, quick to anger, and always looking for an edge to push. His dad was frequently gone on temporary assignments, and I never knew what his father’s job actually was. I only knew his absence hung in the air and created a lot of strain for Mike.

Mike’s height may have been part of his meanness, but the larger truth was that he lived inside a story that felt humiliating and painfully public. Even at thirteen, my group of friends knew what was happening at his house. Mike’s mother was finding her physical needs elsewhere when her husband was gone, and the worst part was not only that we knew, but that Mike knew we knew. That kind of knowledge does not sit quietly in a kid’s body. It turns into heat and rage. It turns into dare after dare. It turns into a need to control the narrative by burning it all down first.

Mike taught us all how to smoke. He taught us how to drink. We objectified women in magazines together in the South Side Trails. We were mean together. We keyed cars, put sugar in gas tanks, made prank calls, snuck into movies on base, shoplifted, and treated other people’s property like it was a joke we deserved to tell. When Mike was around, the meanness had a sharpness to it, like we were proving something. When he was not around, some of the same dumb choices still happened, but the cruelty did not have the same appetite. Mike did not just bring trouble with him. He brought a mood. He made all of us meaner than we were on our own.

The father situation was Mike’s issue, but it was also part of the wider tone on base. Plenty of fathers carried their own damage, and plenty of homes ran on alcohol, abuse, pornography, and the kind of quiet debauchery that never stayed as quiet as adults thought it did. Mike’s particular version of it was personal and specific. He believed someone else’s father was sleeping with his mother, and he believed everyone knew, and he lived inside that humiliation like it was a locked room he could not escape. So he pulled us down with him, and we went because we were young and because we were bored. We did not understand the difference between loyalty and participation. We were far too young to know how to pull someone up, and we were not yet brave enough to refuse the gravity.

Years later, I can see the shape of it more clearly. Trouble was never the point. Trouble was the language. Mike was trying to say, I am hurting, and I cannot stand being the only one who has to carry it. That does not excuse what we did, and it does not clean it up into something noble, but it does make the story more human.

What I hold now is this. I cannot go back and un-key the cars or un-make the cruelty, but I can tell the truth about how it happened. I can name the moment trouble stopped being thrilling and started being a warning. I can also be grateful that something in me eventually reached for a different kind of friend. Hope, I have learned, is not the denial of what I did or did not do. Hope is the decision to grow past it, and to recognize that pulling someone up sometimes starts with stepping out of the dark first.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

There Is a Light That Never Goes Out – Day 36

January 30, 2026January 31, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A friend who helped you see yourself more clearly.

Lots of firsts happen in high school. Some turn into great stories, while others stay quiet and make a person better without fanfare at all. Carol was one of those quiet firsts for me. She was a minor character in my storyline, but she helped me see myself more clearly and understand that I was a process inside a process.

We found each other in Ms. Peregrine’s art class, and then we kept finding each other outside of it. We went to coffee shops and talked the way early 90s kids talked when we thought the world might be ending and might also be remade in the same week. Our conversations had that grunge, almost avant garde seriousness that made everything feel both ridiculous and sacred. Music was always part of it because music was how we translated ourselves back then. The Smiths, The Psychedelic Furs, Nirvana, it all gave us language when we did not have enough of our own.

Carol drove an old Saab, and we would head out to Derry, New Hampshire, to a small coffee shop where time slowed down. For a while, life really did seem simple: coffee, cigarettes in the cold air outside, art talk, future talk, and the illusion that we could choose our next chapter without the past reaching up to claim us.

Right before graduation, we went for coffee the way we usually did, and I told her about the next move, the one that was supposed to mean freedom. College. It was another fresh start with another address, but this one would be mine. It was still another version of me being packed up and carried forward, but it was going to be away from them. Carol listened, then reached down and handed me a gift. It was a vase she had made.

It still sits in my house. Like me, it is not smooth. It is textured, marked by the touch of others, and it does not pretend to be untouched. Its surface is made of rings, each one visible, each one earned. I can see where the clay was pressed thinner, where it was pulled upward, where it almost failed and did not. The shape narrows, widens, and narrows again, and nothing about it feels accidental. It looks like a thing that has been worked. It looks like a thing that has been tested. It looks honest.

When Carol handed it to me, she did not talk about the beauty of the object. She talked about the process. She told me that each move, each experience, each hurt, each whatever, reduces us. The wheel pulls the clay down even as it spins it forward. Loss compresses and change thins because living costs something. But then, she said, another hand builds us back up. Another layer with another pass, and another choice. She spoke like she was offering a map, and I remember realizing she was not just talking about clay. She was talking about me, and she was doing it in a way that did not feel like pity. It felt like recognition.

What stays with me is the part that sounded almost too simple to be true. The height is not predetermined. The clay does not decide that. The wheel does not decide that. The hands do. I do.

That sentence landed in a place in me that had always assumed the opposite. I had lived as if the moves and endings and misunderstandings were the authors, as if the next chapter was always something that happened to me rather than something I shaped. I had learned how to adapt, how to read rooms, how to disappear when necessary, and how to be grateful for whatever remained. I had not learned how to claim the idea that I could still choose. Not in the shiny motivational way, but in the real way, the slow way, the hands on the wheel way.

Experience is experience. It is not good or bad in the clean moral categories people love to use to make life feel organized. It is formative. It shapes. The vase does not judge the pressure that made it narrower. It holds it. It carries it forward. The narrow places make the wider ones possible. The evidence of strain becomes part of the strength, not an argument against it.

Carol helped me see myself more clearly. She gave me an image that could hold complexity without turning it into judgment. She handed me a physical reminder that being shaped is not the same thing as being broken.

The vase sits there, quiet and unimpressed, holding its own history without apology. It reminds me that I can honor what shaped me without letting it name my limits. The clay remembers everything. And still, it holds.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Letters from the Snow Fort – Day 32

January 26, 2026January 28, 2026 ljandkari2 Comments

Prompt – Your First Best Friend

Growing up in the military taught me an early lesson about attachment. Relationships are a double-edged sword. They matter, and they will not last. Best friends form naturally as proximity and instability accelerate intimacy, and then those relationships are quietly released when proximity receives orders. I learned to care deeply and prepare to walk away, or watch someone else do it first…bond quickly and leave cleanly. It is a strange education, equal parts tenderness and self-protection.

When we moved to Alaska at Elmendorf Air Force Base, the quiet was heavy. The stay at Temporary Living Quarters (TLQ) stretched on longer than it should have, with a tragic backstory for another post. I needed a friend in the way children do, urgently and without strategy. A kid named Jeremy answered that call once we finally moved into our “permanent” house.

Jeremy lived one street over. He was a military unicorn, the rare child who had never moved until Alaska. Born and raised on Randolph Air Force Base in Texas, his entire life had existed within a single zip code. I had never met anyone like that. He carried Texas with him like medieval primogeniture, a loud and unquestioned right I assumed was loyalty to home. Years later, living in Oklahoma, I learned it was simply Texas being Texas.

Jeremy and I did everything together. We were inseparable in the uncomplicated way only children can manage. We got into trouble. We kept secrets. He was the first person I ever told about the way I experienced spaces, how certain places released stored images and memories like film that did not belong to my own lived experiences. He did not flinch. He did not ask me to explain. He accepted it as information, not confession. That mattered more than he ever knew and I did not know myself what it meant for years.

Winters belonged to us. Every year the snowplows pushed massive walls of snow into the middle of our court, and every year we hollowed them out. Two stories high, easily. We built tunnels and rooms and entrances that collapsed if you breathed wrong. Looking back, it was reckless, but it felt like ownership. The world was dangerous, but it was ours.

Spring and the awakening of life brought a different kind of stupidity. One afternoon we strung fishing line between two light poles, hid in the bushes, and waited. A passing car caught the line, snapping the antenna clean off. We laughed until a large Black woman stepped out of the car and locked eyes with us. She chased us the full distance home. I still remember the panic and the way fear made me feel.

We did everything together until we did not.

Jeremy left for Texas. That was how it went. I wrote him every week for a long time. Letters folded carefully, addressed with hope. None ever came back. I eventually stopped writing, not because it hurt too much, but because that was the lesson. Letting go was part of the training.

About ten years ago, he found me on social media. He apologized immediately. He told me he had carried the guilt of not writing back all those years. Life had moved fast, and the pain had felt endless. He had been a kid and did not know what to do with it, especially when each letter reopened what he was trying to survive.

That is the part that stays with me now. Not the leaving, but the fact that the connection was real enough to be carried quietly for decades by both of us. Some friendships do not survive proximity or time. Some survive as memory, intact and unspoiled. My first best friend taught me that presence does not require permanence, and that sometimes love arrives later, softened, and finally named.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory/Uncategorized

Husky Jean Calculus- Day 28

January 22, 2026January 28, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Trying to fit in.

Growing up, we never had enough money for the things everyone wanted. Back-to-school shopping was always tense because school supplies and clothes were expensive, and the margin was thin on a good month. My older siblings were teenagers, which meant shoes and clothes mattered in the unspoken social calculus of school. My mother, meanwhile, was running a different set of numbers, the kind tied to groceries, bills to be paid, and the quiet reality of coming up short and it all being her fault.

One afternoon in a store, my mother’s shoulders were tight as her attention was divided between price tags and possibility. She was doing the math in her head, calculations that did not resolve cleanly. I noticed, as I always noticed because I was old enough to see but I was far too young to understand what it actually was I was seeing.

So I erased myself. I said I would take whatever was cheapest. If it meant the not-cool clothes, that was fine or the cheaper Rose Art crayons, so be it. I said it lightly, as if it cost nothing, but I knew those words gave my mother a moment to breathe as I gasped for air. It was not that I wanted my siblings to have the best as I became a martyr, rather, I wanted peace in the house. Peace meant freedom from tension, freedom from eggshells. So I chose less and I told my eleven-year-old self that this is what being good looked like.

As I got older, I wanted to fit in everywhere. I wanted to fit in at home, at school, and inside my own skin. I wanted all of it without understanding that wanting everything at once comes with a cost. Somewhere along the way, I became exhausted, as my energy was limited. Survival required efficiency and a lot of energy.

I stopped caring about fitting in at school. Or at least I learned how to perform not caring about fitting in at school. This was not bravery. It was conservation. I redirected what little I had toward staying upright, toward “reading the room”, and toward becoming agreeable and invisible in equal measure. Endurance became my defining trait. I mistook it for identity and called it a personality.

The truth arrived later, quietly, the way truth tends to. I wanted to fit in, but what I really wanted was to belong. Belonging did not ask for performance. It did not require erasure to keep others comfortable. It allowed me to stay. I never had that in my first family.

Fitting in changes a person to earn acceptance. Belonging offers acceptance without negotiation. Fitting in hides real opinions. Belonging makes room for honesty with care. Fitting in depletes. Belonging restores. Fitting in is about how things appear. Belonging is about how things hold throughout the years.

I did not know any of this then. I only knew how to choose peace over cool, quiet over attention, and survival over style. The meaning of those choices took years to surface. Looking back now I see my erasure was not tenderness…it was twisted. But now, I finally belong and there is finally room for me to remain.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory

Typecast – Day 24

January 18, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A teacher who misunderstood you.

Some misunderstandings arrive loudly. Others settle in quietly and take up residence for a year.

I have always hated sports, especially the kinds tethered to institutions that claim to build character while quietly reinforcing outdated power systems. Organized athletics, particularly in schools, often function as rehearsals for outdated hierarchal power structures where bodies are ranked, obedience is rewarded, and aggression is sanctified. It is an impressive trick, really, dressing control up as virtue and calling it tradition.

The move from Plattsburgh, New York to Lawton, Oklahoma happened without ceremony. My father retired and received his ceremony, but the rest of us got Lawton. Plattsburgh had been a place of friendships, small freedoms, and the early shaping of who I thought I might become. Lawton felt like the opposite of aspiration. It sat flat and exposed, surrounded by land that did not soften itself for anyone. The Wichita Mountains loomed nearby, ancient and tired, as if they were retires and had already delivered their lessons and were content to watch the rest unfold without comment.

Everything about Lawton felt temporary. Fort Sill, an Army installation, fed it and drained it in the same breath. People arrived. People left. The town understood itself as a stopover, and that knowledge seeped into its schools, its rhythms, its expectations.

I arrived at MacArthur High School for tenth grade already out of place. I came from upstate New York into a culture where teenagers watched CMT, drove lifted trucks, wore boots like uniforms, and treated football as a civic religion. The worship of the pigskin was not casual. It was culture and religion.

At orientation, I went to pick up my schedule and tour the school. A coach saw me before anyone else did. He did not ask my name. He did not ask what I liked, what I read, or what I had already learned to survive. He saw my size and filled in the rest of the story himself. In his mind, I was already useful.

He wanted me on the field, blocking for a quarterback whose future everyone already knew would peak early and flatten out into something like selling roofs. The coach spoke with certainty, the way people do when they believe their imagination outranks your agency. He framed it as opportunity. He framed it as belonging. What he meant was ownership.

Why would I not want this, he assumed. Why would a body like mine not belong to him.

For weeks, he pursued me in the hallways with passing comments and encouragement that felt far more like pressure. Compliments came preloaded with expectations. Interest came with conditions. When it finally became clear that I cared far more about books than drills, words than whistles, his attention shifted. Not away. Sideways.

He did not apologize for misreading me. He did not correct himself. He simply adjusted the narrative so that my refusal became a flaw instead of a choice.

He spoke to his team.

For the next year, I was punished for refusing a role I had never auditioned for. The same boys who sat in church pews on Sunday spent the week reminding me that difference was not tolerated and would be corrected through cruelty. They bullied with the confidence of the absolved. It was cruelty wrapped in ritual, consequence-free and self-righteous. Repentance on Sunday. Retribution on Monday. A very efficient system.

What hurt most was not the bullying itself. It was the loss of sanctuary. School had always been the place where I could breathe, where the chaos of my family receded into the background. That year, even school became unsafe. The teacher who misunderstood me did not see that he had taken more than a season from me. He took the one place where I had believed misunderstanding might be corrected through learning.

Years later, I understand that his failure was not personal. It was structural. He was trained to see bodies as tools, not stories. He mistook size for allegiance, silence for agreement, and refusal for betrayal. He never learned to ask who a student was before deciding what they were for.

I learned something else entirely. Refusing a script can cost comfort. Teachers, when they misunderstand, can leave marks as lasting as those left by the ones who see you clearly. And some confuse authority with insight and never notice the difference.

Some misunderstandings pass. Others teach you exactly how carefully you will guard your interior life from that day forward. Hut Hut Hike!

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory

Fear and the Motherfucker – Day 22

January 16, 2026January 20, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Your first day of school that you truly remember.

The first day of school that I truly remember was fourth grade, and the memory was all due to Mrs. Blue, my new teacher. I came into that year riding the high of third grade with Ms. Mullings, a teacher who made the classroom feel alive and safe at the same time. Learning had felt expansive. Mistakes were part of the process. Curiosity was welcomed. And I am sure she was a witch – both a real witch and a good witch. There were big shoes to fill, but Mrs. Blue arrived wearing none of them. She could not find the stride, the rhythm, or the balance required to lead a room full of children. What she brought instead was pain, grief, and an atmosphere so tight with fear that it pressed against my chest before the first recess of the year.

Her classroom had rules. Rules stacked on rules. Rules with no context and no grace. On the first morning, we were seated quickly and told to listen. This was not an invitation. It was a warning. She began listing expectations of the classroom as if reading a rap sheet of a lifetime criminal. Sit this way. Speak this way. Do not do this. Do not do that. The room grew smaller with every sentence.

Then she introduced the concept of “bad words.” Words we were never to say. She told us there would be zero tolerance for language that did not belong in her classroom. What counted as a bad word, however, was not left to interpretation. She turned to the board and began writing them out in chalk, one by one, with a precision that felt practiced. Fuck. Shit. Ass. Asshole. Bastard. Bitch. Damn. Piss. Dick. Cock. Motherfucker. Prick. Douchebag. Jackass. The list kept growing, long past the point of instruction and well into spectacle. Even sailors would have felt seen.

I sat there stunned. My house rarely swore. My father believed swearing disrespected the uniform, whatever the fuck that meant. Hearing those words written so boldly on a school chalkboard felt illicit and dangerous, like being handed contraband and told not to touch it.

When her imagination finally ran dry, she turned back to us and asked if anyone wanted to volunteer additional bad words she might have missed. She reminded us we were not supposed to say them, which meant no one moved. Fear had already done its work. Eventually, a few hands went up, tentative and shaking, offering words like they were confessions.

Then I raised my hand.

When she called on me, I volunteered “rat bastard.” Mrs. Blue wrote it on the board just as she had with the other words.

That was the first day of school I remember clearly.

Now, as an educator, I think back to what Ms. Blue taught me, even if she never meant to. She taught me how fear shuts down learning. She taught me how control masquerades as structure. She taught me that classrooms are laboratories, and what we model becomes the experiment. I did not learn fourth grade content that day. I learned how not to teach. And some lessons, once learned, never fucking leave.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

All the Ingredients, Yet No Meal – Day 21

January 15, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – What dinner time taught you about belonging.

Dinner was never about the table in my house. We rarely gathered around a full place setting of dishes spread around the table. By the time my siblings were gone and I had reached my formative years, the chairs stayed pushed in and unused, as if they were props from a different version of life. The table was not for meals, conversations, homework, or family meetings in my house. The table, like the house itself, was quiet, and quiet was something my family wore well.

The kitchen, however, told a different story.

Cooking was where my mother spoke, at least with me. She talked while her hands worked, as if movement unlocked language that stillness could not. She told stories while we rolled egg rolls together, her fingers moving with confidence and memory. While her chili simmered, she explained things that were never addressed directly, lessons tucked into technique and timing. She talked while I grated potatoes for breakfast, the raw metallic sound of the grater filling the room with a steady, unforgiving rhythm. That sound still lives in my memory, carrying both comfort and sadness in equal measure.

Those moments were where belonging happened because those moments were where actual communication briefly lived. I heard history while standing at the counter. She talked about Papa, her father, owning a restaurant and a bakery, and about growing up inside that world of work, responsibility, and food. She talked about my siblings when they were younger, sharing stories from before I arrived, memories I inherited without ever living. I learned who they were through her voice and through the rhythm of her hands as she cooked from memory. I learned where I might fit by listening carefully to places where I had not been.

I was allowed and encouraged to help. I added ingredients. I stirred pots. I rolled wrappers. I watched closely. Participation was welcomed in pieces, but the whole recipe of family was never quite assembled. We could gather parts and play our roles, but the finished pie never made it to the table.

That became the pattern.

Belonging, for me, was never about sitting down together. It was about proximity and presence. It was about standing nearby, being useful without being central, and being present without being required. Love arrived in fragments, measured in shared tasks and quiet moments in the kitchen. I learned that connection did not always look like unity. Sometimes it looked like parallel movement within the same small space.

Dinner taught me that families can function without ceremony and that care can exist without coordination. It taught me how to listen while working, how to receive stories instead of affection, and how to recognize that some people only know how to give when their hands are busy.

Even now, kitchens feel safer than tables. I trust the hum of preparation more than the stillness of unspoken expectation. And maybe that is not a flaw, but a beginning. Maybe belonging does not always ask us to sit down and face one another. Sometimes it simply asks us to stay close enough to hear the stories while something nourishing is still being made.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Head, Shoulders, Arms, & Toes – Day 19

January 13, 2026January 14, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – What is something you inherited that is invisible.

Meeting new people is routine for me as an educator. Conferences, professional development sessions, even the pedagogy aisle of a bookstore invite brief conversations with strangers. If the talk lasts long enough, the question of where I am from eventually appears. My answer lands in an awkward nowhere. There is no single city or state to name. I follow it with military brat, and more often than not, the response is me too.

That is usually all it takes. From that short exchange, I can place them – NCO kid or officer kid. The distinction is not always visible, but it is all too familiar. For those that do not speak military, NCO stands for noncommissioned officer, while officers hold formal commissions granting authority to lead and command. In plain terms, NCOs resemble blue collar middle managers, while officers mirror executive leadership. The stereotypes of each military group carry over from the groups in civilian life all too well. I recognize the difference not because I am trying to sort people, but because I learned to read hierarchy long before I understood its cost.

As the conversation continues, my eyes drift where they always do. Look at the shoulders. Look at the arms. Look at the posture. I look for rank even when it is no longer stitched into fabric. Power announces itself quietly, through who stands at ease and who remains alert, through who speaks freely and who measures every word. Authority does not require a uniform. It lives in tone, in social standing, and in permission.

I carried that awareness out of childhood and into adulthood, from military structure to religious hierarchy to professional systems. Each one promised order. Each one insisted it was different. The symbols changed, but the sorting remained. Stripes became titles. Doctrine became policy. Obedience learned new language. What made each system dangerous was its invisibility. Power no longer lived on sleeves. It lived in access, approval, and exclusion.

I thought I was adapting. I thought I was growing. I did not realize I was just learning new ways to disappear to survive. By the time I saw it clearly, it had already shaped me. The reflex stayed. Even now, I scan for hierarchy, not because I want to participate in it, but because I know how quickly it hardens and who it leaves behind.

Throwing it off was not dramatic. It was an internal unlearning. A refusal to confuse structure with safety or authority with worth. I no longer measure myself by proximity to power. I measure myself by who I stand next to when belonging is being decided.

What I carry is invisible and indeed inherited from growing up in a military family, but it continues to show up whenever authority appears and decides who belongs and who does not. It keeps me honest. It keeps me watchful. It reminds me that seeing exclusion is already a kind of resistance. And now, I always make sure to stand with the other, if for no reason to make sure they do not feel alone – me as well!

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Asshole or Not – Day 18

January 12, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – The first time you realized your parents were human.

When I was twelve years old, I went with my father to his office in the evening, housed in the old hospital on the far side of Plattsburgh Air Force Base. The building had been retrofitted for administrative use, but it had not been emptied of its past. During World War II, wounded soldiers had been flown in from Europe and treated there, and whatever could not be healed had stayed behind. The hallways still held that weight, and the air carried its residue in ways that were difficult to ignore. I already knew some places remembered.

My father asked me to go along with him, so I grabbed my radio controlled car and ran it down the long corridor while he gathered paperwork. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, steady and indifferent, and the sound of my car rolling along the floor occasionally drowned them out before fading again. By then, I had lived with my way of feeling space for four years. I had learned not to talk about it after Alaska taught me that honesty could make adults uncomfortable and cruel. I stayed quiet, observant, and turned inward, practicing a kind of silence about my gift that felt safer than any explanation of it.

I did not see ghosts. What I felt was closer to a shift in temperature and color, like the cool rush that slips through an open door on a hot day and changes the room without asking. It was the aftermath of pain rather than the pain itself. I could feel sorrow pressed into the walls and sense fear lingering where it had once been experienced. Adults liked to say I had an imagination or that I was overly sensitive, but none of those explanations accounted for how a place could hold what happened there long after the people were gone. At twelve, I already understood that some spaces spoke and that not everyone was taught how to listen.

That night, the building responded. Lights turned on after being switched off, sounds traveled from empty rooms, and doors settled without hands. My father stopped moving, and I watched him listen as his shoulders tightened, as if his body understood before his mind caught up. It was the first time I had ever seen fear arrive without permission.

Until then, he had existed as certainty, military strong and commanding, the final word in every room he entered. Standing in that hallway, surrounded by something neither of us could control, he was no longer shielded by rank or routine. His fear did not make him weak. It made him ordinary and placed him back among other people, subject to the same unease that finds everyone eventually.

I did not feel triumphant or vindicated as I witnessed my father’s fear. I grew quiet as something inside me recalibrated, subtle but permanent. That night, I understood that my father was not immune or protected by authority or belief, and that military strength did not mean exemption from being afraid or human. Watching him stand there, facing something he could not explain and something I had already learned to live with, showed me who he was. In that recognition, I understood myself, and something I had trusted and known about him loosened. Asshole or not, he was human.

Tag: family