Tag: hope

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

Civilian Rules – Day 40

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Prompt: A time a friend betrayed you

As a child, I was raised inside a system that offered basic training on how to exist with people that have an expiration date. Military bases were full of kids like me, changing addresses like refugees with pink slips. We learned how to attach quickly and detach cleanly. Friendships were intense, immediate, and understood to be temporary. When orders came, and they always came, we did not fight the ending. We practiced kindness in the present and disappearance in the future. It was not cruelty. It was survival. We handled each other gently because most of us already knew what heavy felt like at home.

I was hurt by friends during those years, but the hurt was diffused and governed by an agreed-upon set of rules. It belonged to circumstance more than intention. No one was really betraying anyone. We were all obeying the same unwritten code. Stay light, do not burden each other, and leave cleanly. This code failed me the first year my family became civilian.

Lawton, Oklahoma broke something open that I did not yet have language or experience for. My father could not find work. My mother worked in another state. Home still felt temporary, but without the structure that once explained why everything was temporary. At MacArthur High School, the rules I knew did not apply. Belonging was transactional and visibility was dangerous.

I was bullied for opting out of football, for choosing books and observation instead of collision. That alone would have been survivable. What I was not prepared for was betrayal disguised as friendship.

Tracy was my first real civilian friend. She listened. She asked questions. She made space for the softer parts of me that had never needed armor before. I trusted her because trust had always been safe inside temporary worlds. I told her my fears. I told her my uncertainties. I told her where I felt small.

She took those truths and passed them along to the very people I spoke about. She did not confront me. She did not warn me. She turned my vulnerability into currency. When the laughter came back to me secondhand, something inside me collapsed. This was not the clean ending I had been trained for. This was exposure. This was humiliation. This was betrayal with witnesses.

For a long time, I believed the lesson was that openness was a mistake. I learned how to seal myself. I learned how to withhold. Betrayal does not only break trust in another person. It fractures trust in the self who chose to believe. I was not only angry at Tracy. I was ashamed of my own hope.

It took years to understand that what happened in Lawton was not proof that I was naïve or weak. It was proof that I had crossed from a world governed by impermanence into one governed by performance. The hope arrived later, quietly. I did not lose my capacity to trust. I learned how to place it with care. I still believe in connection. I just no longer hand it over to civilians.

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

Borrowed Fire- Day 37

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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

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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 2 - Family as First Universe

Calibrated Containment – Day 20

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Prompt – When you noticed adults whispering.

No one whispered in my house!

There were never any hushed conversations behind closed doors. I never heard urgent murmurs trail off when I entered a room. Nothing was whispered because everything was already hidden. Whispering would have required language, and language was not how things worked in my first family. What spoke instead were bodies, looks, pauses, and absences. Meaning traveled without words and landed hard.

I noticed it early. My mother and father communicated with eyes, arms, and shoulders. A look across the room could shut everything down. A kick under the table reminded everyone who was in charge. A tightened body carried far more information than a sentence ever could. A chair angled slightly away or a hand resting too long on a table meant something was about to happen, or had already happened, and no one was going to name it.

A sudden quiet did not mean peace. It meant pressure was building. Laughter that arrived too fast meant something was being smoothed over. Silence that lingered too long meant something had gone wrong and everyone was pretending it had not. The air itself felt instructional and stale. It taught me when to enter a room, when to disappear, and when not to come back. It taught me how and when to swallow words whole and pretend they never existed.

No one whispered in my house. Instead, we all performed containment in my first family. Feelings were managed, not spoken. Tension was absorbed, not released. I did not learn this because I was gifted or intuitive. I learned it because my nervous system depended on it. Survival required constant adjustment. That was the whispering. Not in words, but calibration. Read the room…soften your presence…do not add weight…and for all that is holy and righteous, do not be the reason something breaks.

It followed me everywhere!

When adults do not whisper, but instead communicate through omission, children learn that truth is dangerous. They learn that naming something risks collapse. They learn that harmony is maintained by not noticing what everyone already feels. I learned that survival lived in reading the room instead of living in my body. I learned to trust posture more than language and absence more than invitation.

Now, I am learning to translate posture back into language. I am learning to replace looks with words and silence with clarity. I am learning that healthy adults do not require children to become interpreters of tension. I say what I feel. I invite others to do the same. I name discomfort before it hardens into something heavier. I stay present when it would be easier to disappear. I refuse to let absence speak for me anymore.

No one whispered in my house, but much was being said.

And still, here is what I know to be true. Language can be learned, even later than it should have been. Silence can be interrupted without everything falling apart. The body can be taught that it no longer has to listen for danger in every room. I am building a life where words arrive gently and honestly, where meaning does not hide, and where nothing has to be carried alone. That feels like hope, not loud or dramatic, but a whisper at least!

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

Exit Through the Gift Shop – Day 13

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Prompt – What did conflict look like in your home?

In the museum that was my family, exhibits were arranged with great care, but no one ever explained how to walk through the space and appreciate it. There were rules, but they were invisible. There were expectations, but they were never spoken aloud. Reverence was required, though no one ever showed what reverence looked like. Conflict rose and settled, mostly silent, like high blood pressure. It was present and deadly.

I was expected to know how to move, how to speak, how to respond, without ever being taught. Love was supposed to be understood. Respect was supposed to be automatic. No questions. If something felt off, it was never the environment. It was me. If someone felt unseen, it became my responsibility to fix it, even when I did not know what was broken.

There was very little modeling and no learning together. There was quiet judgment when the performance did not match the script that existed inside someone else’s imagination. So I studied faces and read spaces the way visitors study paintings. I read silence the way curators study cracks in marble. I anticipated needs that were never spoken. Over time, I confused vigilance with care. I confused fear with respect. I confused self-erasure with love.

Having my own family, I know that healthy families teach. They model love for each other. They meet you where you are. They invite you into the room instead of scolding you for not knowing the path. They offer maps. They offer language. They practice connection in the open, not behind glass. They make mistakes out loud. They apologize out loud. They are noisy. They are alive.

I am still unlearning the rules of the gallery. I am still learning that I do not have to bow to every display or stop at every exhibit. I am allowed to ask questions. I am allowed to exist in the room without shrinking to fit someone else’s idea of beauty. I am allowed to walk past what harms me. Little by little, I choose different architecture for my own family. There are far fewer exhibits and a hell of a lot more living. I teach my children that conflict is not something to fear. It is something we move through together. I make space for mistakes. I say what I feel and let them say what they feel. We practice beginning again. We learn in the open.

Sometimes the old museum haunts me with its polished floors and quiet shame. Sometimes I still find myself whispering in rooms that no longer require my silence. But I notice it now. I pause and I breathe. I set down the old way.

As an adult, I am beginning to believe something I could not have imagined as a child: love is not earned through performance. Love is not proven through suffering. Love grows in rooms where people are allowed to exist as they are.

The museum will always be part of my story, but I am learning how to walk out of the gallery without carrying the blame as a souvenir.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 1 - Origins: Early Glimmers

On the Edge of After – Day 11

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Prompt – A time you wanted to be younger again.

The piano opened first with a simple and steady melody, like someone knocking softly on a door they were not sure was the correct one. It felt hesitant and determined at the same time, as if grief and hope agreed to share the same bench and the same keys. The singer did not arrive with rockstar swagger, but like a sinner entering a confessional. His voice carried a tremor that lived just behind the note, a thin crack that told the truth long before the lyrics did. There was a pleading quality there. Not begging. Just longing for a different outcome than the one that already felt written.

The drums slid in, not loud, not dramatic, simply present like a heartbeat that remembered it had work to do. The song continued to build without rushing. Each layer came in carefully, the guitar weaving around the piano like hands trying to help without making things worse. Nothing in the mix tried to show off. Everything served the ache.

How to Save a Life played on the radio on my way out of Japan as Holly drove me toward the airport in April of 2007. The world felt both too big and too small at the same time. With my bags packed and goodbyes said too quickly, it felt like a chapter was closing without the dignity of a final paragraph. I did not know then how much that song would follow me, like a ghost that refused to leave the room.

There was a part of me that wanted to be younger in that moment. Younger and untouched back in 1999. Younger and unaware back in 1999. I wanted the version of life where choices did not echo so loudly, where leaving did not feel like breaking something inside my own chest. That quiet piano line carried the weight of questions I did not have the courage to ask. What could have been different? What should have been done or not done? What part of myself was I leaving behind without realizing it? What I was carrying with me “home”?

The song did not offer comfort. It did not fix anything. It simply sat beside me, naming the ache I could not yet name. As the chorus rose, I realized that some moments mark a before and an after. In that moment, I wanted to be younger. I wanted to be back in 1999 when I arrived in Japan, when mistakes felt smaller and outcomes did not carry so much weight. I wanted to be less worn out by the world and more untouched by loss. It was not nostalgia. It was grief disguised as wishing.

When the chorus lifted, it felt like someone replaying a conversation in their mind, hoping that if the words repeated long enough, the past might loosen its grip. The music did not save anything. It stayed and witnessed the silence between notes to speak the parts that hurt the most. By the end, the repetition became prayer and punishment at once. If only. If only. If only. The piano never stopped. It kept moving forward, even when the voice sounded like it might not. That was the tender cruelty. Time kept going. The song kept going. The loss remained.

And still, something else lived there too. A quiet thread of hope, not loud, not heroic, not cinematic. Just the steady recognition that I was still here. That the ache did not erase the love of Japan and my time there had indeed been real. That leaving did not cancel the life that had been lived. Inside that ache, a stubborn spark refused to vanish. It was not redemption and not resolution. It was the fragile belief that naming the truth, even when it hurt, could keep me from turning numb.

Maybe growing older does not steal everything. Maybe it gives language to feelings that once lived unnamed in the dark, and maybe that language makes the weight lighter to carry. Not gone. Not fixed. Simply held with more honesty and a little more gentleness.

Where did I go wrong? I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

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