Status Report
Later
When I wrote my first Turtle entry, it was to explain myself, to leave some kind of record of who I was (and wasn’t) so that when my daughter found out I’d left, she’d have a clue or two about why.
Tom never left any such transcript, but then he was the Music in “Words and Music by Tom and Claudia,” i.e., Wambtac, so he figured his life spoke for himself. Besides, he was a local icon, a beloved figure in his cozy realm, and had already revealed to any and all within ear shot everything he wanted them to know, and nothing he wanted them to not. He was more gooder at living than me. Here I am, closing in on sixteen years of his exit, still irrevocably connected to him. I know he’s still here, yet he’s not here, if ya catch my meaning, if ya get my drift, as we used to say.
I stand here, alone, at what will likely be my last road fork.
My mother liked to use the phrase “poised on the brink of a precipice.” Musical, isn’t it? Yet having never herself been so poised, it merely hung in the air whenever she sent it forth, tinking now and then against “that’s just sour grapes” and “boys will be boys.” Honestly, doctor, I’ve no clue why I grew up so confused.
And I’m not really ♫ all by myself, don’t wanna be, all by myself anymore. ♫ I’m actually surrounded by people who love me, care for me, and would do anything to help me… if I’d only tell them what that is.
I was reflecting about that this morning as I lay in bed wishing I knew what it would feel like to not lay in bed wishing I could lie down, to not have to silently command my toes to stop clenching, to not need to argue myself away from my mattress, pillow, and Buffy® comforter. Who else has to promise themselves that if they’ll just get up and brush their teeth, they won’t have to eat anything or talk to anybody? Just get up. Get up. Get up, get up, get up. I promise it won’t hurt.
See? That wasn’t so bad. Just get past the door frame… past… okay, close enough for jazz. Oh, fuck, don’t trip on your own cane, for fuck’s sake! And shit, don’t drop it, either!
Okay, I lied, I do have to eat or I can’t take my supplements. A few spoonfuls will suffice. Coffee. Fresh water. Oughta wash that glass again one of these days.
I recite this crap not to glean sympathy for my patheticity but to reinforce my mantra, “Don’t be fragile. Never let yourself be fragile.”
I had a similar mantra when I was a kid: “Don’t be slow. Never let yourself be slow.”
But the thing is, I was slow. I knew that for a fact because my mother kept reassuring me I wasn’t, to wit: “You’re not slow. You’re just different. There’s nothing wrong with being different.” What she meant was that I wasn’t retarded, that term’s nasty connotation in those days. She might not have known what the hell it was that was wrong with me, but damnit, it wasn’t that. I was different… just not in the way she always wanted to be different. She wanted to be Veronica Lake or at least Rita Hayward, loved and admired, center stage, hot white spotlight. *sigh* Can’t ya just see it in all her glamour photos?
Non sequitur confession: I will probably never stop trying to suss out or rationalize my mother’s Trumpism. I still have trouble admitting I was abused. Admittedly, I haven’t yet figured out what else I could call it.… A friend once told me, “She loved you the only way she knew how.” Lovely thought but alas, no.
Mom had no idea what “different” really means. I was different; I was, in fact, slow. Forever a few beats behind, always a day late and a dollar short. Still am. Yet my mental challenge had nothing to do with my intelligence quotient, but rather my retention incapacity, which was probably due to either developmental amnesia or a dissociative disorder. No one ever told me which, likely because no one ever knew the problem existed. Nowadays, of course, my forgetfulness is routinely dismissed as age-related (or being overweight since I do, after all, present as a woman). Yet it’s been one of the guiding factors in my life since time out of mind. (Please excuse the repetition if I’ve already written about this and forgot).
I spent most of my formative years figuring out workarounds for getting through the days with reduced blood flow to my arms—later labeled ischemia and ascribed to scoliosis, congenital heart congestion and murmur, and Reynaud’s, which may or may not be the direct cause/result of it all. Murgatroyd bless modern medicine’s miracle scans for supplying all that terminology I get to toss around so cavalierly, but the net result remains the same: parts of me don’t work the way the average male-mesomorph’s parts typically do.
Why is any of that important? Because whether in spite of or due to my slowness, my physiological dysphoria, developmentally amnesic or dissociatively disordered mentalosity and blah blah yadda yadda to infinity and beyond… I’ve gotten to now, to that road fork, to facing either incredible triumph or utter failure. And since I wouldn’t know how to cope with utter failure, I have no choice but to trudge toward the triumph.
How did I get here? The glib rejoinder is, “Shit happened and I dumbasfucked it up.” A more measured beat might be, “I didn’t pivot fast enough after the education field collapsed during the pandemic.” The full story is both more pathetic and heroic. I tried to adjust. I did everything I understand to change. My team and I struggled to implement new modalities and build influence on an exploding number of platforms (none of which had to do with trains). I blew through my inheritance to keep WCLLC afloat, stockpiling assets during the good-revenue years and watching them dribble away when the first advisor’s advice didn’t work, then the second’s and third’s. I played bill checkers as tried-and-true solutions defaulted and put my faith in people who were smarter but, it turned out, had no more foresight than me. Hence, I mortgaged my future, my soul, and my integrity until there was no way out… no way out… no way out.
Only to arrive here, too broke to file bankruptcy, with (finally) the logical answer: forget academia. Forget trying to launch careers. Forget investing my time and energy in good people with the hopes they’ll take up the cause of ghostwriting quality books for authors who have wonderful stories and information and insights to share with all mankind. That centuries-long era is definitively over—but there it is again, I’m slow and—so it’s taken me this long to wrench my mindset to the new state of the world.
Goodbye Ghostwriting Professional Designation Program, you tortured yellow-brick-road metaphor, you. You were an intense, post-grad rigor, 7-module, 79-lesson, 14-month course of study for people who wanted to learn, grow, strive for excellence. I mean, how 2013 can you get, right?
Hello Ghostwriting... Whatever We’re Going to Name You. We’ve figured out that today’s digital workforce has no time for prolonged conspectuses. Conspecti? Whatever. Ain’t got the leisure, ain’t got the life configuration. So we’re streamlining, stacking, upgrading, block-chaining, leveling up and all those other ephemeral flavor-of-the-moment whatever-they-ares. I mean, we were already pushing GPDP to its limits, what with expanding Prism Thinking, adding the Ghostwriting Psych Schema and Lexicon archive, and developing the Title Positioning Formula.
Ya know what? I think I’m poised on the brink of a precipice!
