Same Old Trailer Trash in New Shoes

Because I just canNOT anymore

I am the poster child for the American dream.  I was born to an impoverished single woman on her 19th birthday.  We lived in a trailer park in Hot Springs, Arkansas, that had holes in the floor.  It would turn out to be the nicest place I lived until my mid-20s.  When I was a toddler, my birth mother (hereinafter referred to as “bm”) married an unstable man who would go on to abuse me in every imaginable way for years.  We bounced from place to place, living in squalid buildings that were not legally habitable, staying one step ahead of child protective services, until we finally landed in a small town in Kansas, where I attended high school.

Throughout my entire troubled childhood, I remained a firm believer in the power of an education and the capitalist system.  I believed that America was the best country in the world, that the Christian God was the one and only deity, and that all you needed to succeed was determination and hard work.  I also believed that women are inherently evil, that I personally had no intrinsic value, and that feminism is for crazy man-haters.  I had A LOT of emotional problems as a kid.

In spite of the limitations of my household, my so-called “parents” did manage to always find us a building with a legal address.  Sometimes the buildings were literally falling in around us, but we ALWAYS HAD AN ADDRESS.  An address is the first rung of the economic ladder.  No address, no enrolling in school.  The one good thing bm did for me was keep me enrolled in school, no matter what.  School was EVERYTHING to me.  And I was very, very, VERY good at it.  I’m pretty sure that’s why I was never actually taken from bm; because I was always at the top of my class, and even at an impossibly young age I had a firm plan for getting out.  I was going to go to college, and that would fix everything.

I succeeded in my goal, and in 2001, just a few weeks after my 18th birthday, I got on a plane to New Orleans with two suitcases, five twenty-dollar-bills, and a partial scholarship to Tulane University.  I would love to say everything was footloose and fancy free after that, but unfortunately my plan didn’t actually extend beyond getting INTO college.  Once I got there, it quickly became obvious that I had not been given the skills I needed to survive in a big city on my own.  But there was no way in hell I was going back, so I just…drifted for a bit.

Eventually I got my feet under me and re-enrolled in college, this time at the University of New Orleans.  My new plan was to get a BA in English Literature, try to get into grad school, hopefully get an MFA and maybe write a novel someday.  I figured I could bartend to keep a roof over my head, as writers often do.  The Goddess had other plans for me.

I wound up going to law school, almost by accident.  Fall of my senior year at UNO, I watched Fracture with this guy I was dating, and we started talking about how the double jeopardy clause in the constitution works.  He said something along the lines of “you’re pretty good at that stuff, you should go to law school” which began a ridiculous argument about whether or not I was even capable of passing the LSAT.  Because I am an incredibly contrary individual, I signed up for the next seating of the exam just to prove to him that I wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought.  I did not succeed in this goal.

I don’t remember what I scored on the LSAT.  I don’t even remember how the LSAT is scored.  I had taken enough standardized tests to know your percentile matters more than your actual score.  It’s not how you yourself do that schools care about, it’s how you score in comparison to others.  And I scored higher than 93% of the people who took the test at the same time I did.  At the last minute, without any preparation at all.

The next thing I know, my mailbox is being flooded with letters from law schools saying they will waive all application fees if I put them on my short list.  So, I made a deal with the universe (that’s how I thought of it in those days, because I was mad at the Christian God but not prepared to admit, even to myself, that I was actually polytheistic) that I would apply to ONE law school, and if I got in I would take that as a sign I was meant to go.

I didn’t just get in; I got a scholarship that covered 75% of tuition and fees.

So, I went to law school.  And it turned out I was really fucking good at it.  Don’t get me wrong, law school was challenging.  But I didn’t have to work at it nearly as hard as my classmates.  That might sound obnoxious, but it’s an objective fact.  I’ve had more than one classmate yell at me for not understanding how much easier school was for me than for everyone else.

When you spend your entire childhood listening to the people who are supposed to love you the most tell you that you are stupid, and worthless, and your very existence ruined multiple lives…well, that shit gets in your head.  Long story short, I’m just now starting to realize how incredibly intelligent I am.  Like, just absurdly smart.  My favorite things to do are to read things, to think about the things I read, and to write down some of the things I thought.  That’s law school in a nutshell, and I thrived there.

By the end of law school I had firmly concluded that the only kind of law I was actually willing to practice was criminal defense.  I spent three years in private practice at a small firm, before getting hired as a research and writing attorney for the Federal Public Defender’s Office.  Five years after graduating law school, I was an Assistant Federal Public Defender for the Middle and Western Districts of Louisiana, specializing in appellate and post-conviction work.  It’s a VERY specialized area of the law.  By the time I left Louisiana last summer, I would regularly get calls from private practice lawyers all over the state who would say “I hear you’re the person to call if I have a question about federal post-conviction issues.”  I was at the top of my field—well, technically Federal Public Defender is the top, but I had ZERO desire to deal with all that administrative bullshit, so for me, AFPD was the top—only ten years out of law school.

I had more than enough money, I owned my own home, I had a good, stable job with all but guaranteed regular raises, I had a retirement account and top-of-the-line health insurance.  And I was completely miserable.

Here’s the thing I learned while being a lawyer:  you can’t fix the system from within.  You can’t fix the system at all.  The system isn’t broken.  It is operating exactly as intended.  Capitalism is a grist mill.  The “American Dream” is a fantasy sold to us to keep us quiet in the hopper.  I’m not proof the system works; I’m proof that if you are just the right kind of neurodivergent you can game the system, climb out of the hopper, and take a seat on the handle with the rest of the “haves” in this great nation.

It is absolutely disgusting up here with the aristocracy.

I moved to the PNW because after 40 years in conservative states I wanted to live in a blue state.  I had intended to open up my own legal practice.  But shortly after we got here Roe v. Wade fell, and something inside of me shifted.

My faith in the judicial system—the last part of the nation I still believed in—was shattered that day.  Over the following six months I made half-hearted stabs at getting my law firm off the ground, but by Christmas I had lost all desire to be a lawyer any longer.  I’m jaded and burnt out, and I’m too fucking young to be this miserable in my career.

So I’ve decided to quit.  I’m going to quit climbing my way up the capitalist ladder.  I’m abandoning all pretense of conforming to patriarchal religions and have openly admitted what I have always believed quietly in the back of my mind:  Terry Pratchett was right, there’s a shit ton of gods, and I get to choose who and how I worship.  I’m polytheist, I’m pagan, I’m a witch and I follow the lunar and solar calendars over the Gregorian one.  Or I’m working on it, at any rate.

I’ve decided to leave the law, get an MFA and teach college-level English.  But it’s going to take a good three to five years to do that, and I don’t think I can wait that long.

This is the bit where it gets crazy:  I firmly believe we are in the Biblical end times.  I believe the Christian god and the Muslim god are the same guy, and he’s an ass, and he’s fighting a losing battle.

Humans have been on earth for millions of years.  The patriarchy has existed for just over 6,000.  And it’s already crumbling.

I have spent four decades trying to carve a place for myself in this androcentric world we live in, then mold myself into the hole I hacked.  From a disturbingly young age I consciously shied away from anything that could be considered soft or feminine.  I tried to be hard, to be ruthless, to be mean.  I thought this was what I needed to do to be successful, and I was right.

But the world has changed since I was a little girl, and today’s young women are being exposed to a different way of thinking.  A way of thinking that celebrates the power of women.  A way of thinking that could prove the salvation of this pathetic planet.

I believe the girls will save the world in this one.

I want to help them do it.

I’m tired of trying to persuade old white men that I have value.  They will never agree.  Instead, I am going to work on convincing young women that they have power, and I’m going to do it the only way I know how: by writing.

I have decided to retire from the field of battle, mark myself safe from capitalism and the patriarchy, and retire to academia.  I’m going to heal my wounds through writing and community.  I want to talk about books and music and art and philosophy and life the universe and everything.  And I want to talk about these things with feisty, brilliant young women who have a burning desire to take their own turn on the field of battle in the war on the patriarchy.

I’ve learned a thing or three over the years that I think could be useful to others.  I am a statistical anomaly, and several people have told me that makes my perspective valuable.  After years of therapy, I am finally ready to talk about the hard things and feel the hard feelings.

More than anything, I’m creating this blog as a method of shouting into the void to see who shouts back.  I’ve spent decades trying to crush my feminine spirit, and I want to create a place where it can finally be true to itself, find kinship, and speak freely.  More than anything, I want to create a community.  I want unity.  I want to feel like I’m not in this fight alone.

I hope you will join me.

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