Dear Former Neighbor:
It’s been years since we were neighbors. Our children are grown up and are making their own ways in the world, yet you came to mind when I recently read the poem, “I am the Rage” by Dr. Martina McGowan.
One evening you called me, “Valerie, I wanted to talk to you. I’m not sure if you’re aware of what happened between Hailey and John?”
Grief is weird. Many of us know about the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), so I will save you the details of what that entails and how we move through each of them, sometimes without even realizing it. Sometimes even years later. But what happens after these stages? What happens years later when you look up at the sky?
For me, wrestling history is a guidepost for some of my more nebulous memories, as well as a link to some simpler life moments. I always remember wrestling playing some role in those memories, mainly the issues of WWF magazine I was reading. They’re like anchors that make the memories more authentic, and they help validate the trauma that was to come later on in my life.
I just added the word “disabled” to my author’s bio. Before that, I was using “neurodivergent” or “AuDHD” (the amalgamation of Autism and ADHD) as the first descriptors after my name, but thanks to receiving an autism diagnosis around my 35th birthday, I began toying with the idea of typing out “disabled” in describing myself to literary magazines.
BA, Theatre, Small Liberal Arts College, 2017
I graduated in the spring of 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in theatre (spelled with an RE to show this was a deeply academic and artistic liberal arts theater program). I moved to Chicago from the small village in Ohio where I studied with dreams of “making it” as an improviser and comedy writer.
The origins of my villainy begin in early February 2020 when I drove to the other side of the state to stay with my parents for my mother’s birthday. This was a trip I did regularly, often alone. It felt like something of an escape, a place I could go and not feel the weight of everyday responsibilities.
“I made dal last night” might be the most unremarkable thing anyone can say because probably so did half a billion people in India alone. I made dal last night in Los Angeles because it rained as much in a day as the whole of last year, and I wanted more than comfort food.
My mom was a vivacious person. She had bright blue eyes that matched her personality, a roar of a laugh that could make an entire theater laugh in response, and compassion that spread to every person with whom she came in contact. She was only fifty-one when she died, but she lived a life full of love and laughter, sharing it with those she worked with.
The Singulartarian Mind-Uploaders might be onto something. Their name says it all: We will defy death by uploading our thought patterns, memories, and whatever else makes up the mind onto a computer, enabling us to live…virtually. But I’m picky and demanding it seems. I want to live IRL.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s, the term “creative nonfiction” hadn’t yet assembled itself into a term, or at least I hadn’t come across it. In middle school, we studied autobiographies and essays by Anne Frank, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ben Franklin. To my young self, these writers came with a stamp of authority because they could say, “I actually lived this.”
The first book I remember enjoying was Nose Is Not Toes by Glenn Doman. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was designed not just to teach you how to read, but as an aid in developing cognitive and intellectual ability.
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