In 1978, none of the later chaos had happened yet.
No picket fence dreams.
No men.
No mother in Florida.
I was born in Portland, Oregon, into a life that was already unraveling.
That’s where the ashes began.
As a baby, I was left alone for three days. In a crib. The police eventually found me wrapped in a baby blanket.
I kept that blanket until I was twenty-one.
For a long time, I forgot about the ashes. My blanket protected me from them the way Superman’s cape protects him from everything else. It was small and simple, but to me it was armor.
Then one day the cape disappeared.
And with it went my confidence. My fight. My sense of who I was.
Growing up, my adopted mother forced a certain mask onto me. A sweet, grateful, angelic child who never questioned anything. It was expected, like it was the most normal thing in the world.
But when that blanket was gone, the mask fell away too.
Suddenly I didn’t know who I was.
Everything in my life had been dictated to me. I was told what to do, what to think, how to behave. Like a robot following instructions. And when those instructions stopped, I was left standing in the middle of life with no map.
If I struggled, the answer was always the same:
“You’re wrong. Figure it out.”
No guidance.
No help.
Just the expectation that I would somehow fix things I had never been taught how to understand.
That’s when the ashes really began to fall.
One after another, they drifted down around me like rain.
I never asked to be abandoned.
I never asked for any of this.
But the one thing I did learn was how to survive alone.
For twenty-six years, that’s exactly what I did.
And then… things started to change.
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