I have no idea why, but a few new people have started following my little blog lately. Thank you so much! It’s a good reminder to keep writing, especially since I’ve been obsessed with a creative project my husband and I are working on together, which is a podcast called “I Never Saw That.” Yes, I know, everyone and their uncle has a podcast. But I don’t care, because I love podcasts and I’m super excited about ours.
Unless you know me very well, you do not know that when I was 16 years old I was sent away from home. I was a mess at the time–LOTS of drugs, dropping out of school, and had run away from home. When I ran away from home I lived with a group of other young people–all had dropped out of high school and also enjoyed drugs–and I found a sense of belonging there. I got very close to some of those people (and others were abusive assholes who can eat a bag of dicks). One of my close friends from there, Nicole, committed suicide a few days before my 16th birthday. She was 17. I will write about the details of that experience at some point in the future, but for now I’m sure you can imagine how devastating and traumatizing that was. And that was also when my parents started legitimately freaking out about my safety and state of mind.
I agreed to go to a 6-week wilderness and therapy program in Bend, OR in June of 1994. I wanted to get better. And at the end of those 6 weeks, my family showed up and I found out that the counselors of the program had been planning with my parents that I would go straight from Bend to a “therapeutic boarding school” (those quotation marks MATTER) in Montana. And not like Missoula, Montana. Like, the literal middle of nowhere. I was 16. I was completely blindsided. I had no idea I wasn’t going home. I didn’t get to say goodbye to anyone or go home and pack anything. Nothing. And so, we drove to Montana, and that’s where I stayed for two years.
This experience is something I will always be processing and working through. I will continue writing about it, and our podcast is another way of processing and working through this experience, but with a focus of the pop culture I missed from 1994-1996. We are going back to those years to watch, listen to, and talk about some of the things I missed.
We haven’t officially launched yet, but plan to this week, so if this is a concept that sounds interesting to you, please stay tuned! And if you are on Facebook you can join the group we just made or like/follow our page (both called “I Never Saw That”).
Thanks for the support. I am so happy to be part of creative communities that support each other.