Bootprints On a Different Path: The Long Trail to Truth

It has taken me nearly five years to start this blog, not for lack of words, but because of fear, the fear of imperfection and of taking that first vulnerable step.  Putting my story into words feels less like writing and more like a giant leap, exposing pieces of myself that I have held close and guarded for so long.  

As I sit down to write this first post, I’m reminded of the infinite wisdom of someone unknown who once said, “We are the stories we tell ourselves, until the truth writes a new chapter.”  My truth, unraveled and completely shredded the threads of the story of my life.  As the pieces fell away, I found myself standing in unfamiliar territory. 

To understand how everything fell apart, I have to trace back to the earliest stories I told myself. 

In 2011, the New Yorker published  Stacey Mickelbart’s “Writing from Memory.” She explained how memory is not like a video recorder but deeply reconstructive.  Family conversations, photographs, and even imagination can shape how we recall or forget events in our lives.  Sometimes we blur the lines between what happened and what was reshaped over time.  Memory can be altered willingly or subconsciously.  

Memories are a curious thing, especially childhood memories.  As a young child I remember listening to adults around me who seemed disconnected to their pasts.  Their stories were incomplete and blurred almost as though the details of their lives slipped away.  Back then I was a little arrogant.  I promised myself that would never happen to me. I would always remember every little detail of my life by replaying my life like a favorite movie I could rewind and watch each day.

This strategy seemed to have worked, at least until my early 20s.  Then like the adults I judged as a young child, my memories began to fade.  Time softened the edges.  Life grew busier and got a little messier.  Some moments I don’t want to revisit, others have collapsed under the weight of too much information, 

As the adults who traveled the road before me, I learned memory is not a library where everything is neatly stored or a movie you can put on repeat.  Memory is a selective storyteller, some scenes are vivid and others fade away.  

Still there are a few memories, etched in my mind.  One rises above the rest,  it is the moment I can pinpoint when I realized I was different from my family. It didn’t come in a conversation or a discovery, but in a dream. In that dream, a voice, God, or maybe an alien, my child’s mind couldn’t decide, whispered that I was different, that I was special, that I had been placed in my family, on Earth, for a reason.

For years, when I was young and naïve, I clung to that dream. I told myself I had superpowers, that I could predict the future, that somehow my difference, my presence was a gift. As I grew older, that dream faded into the background, but the feeling it gave me never completely disappeared.  It was a quiet thread of “I am different” that was always woven through my life. I didn’t talk about it much, but deep down, I carried the sense that something set me apart. 

For years, I chalked my feeling of being different up to childhood imagination.  Just one of those strange, powerful dreams kids sometimes have. Life went on, and I tucked it away with other half-forgotten memories. Still, every now and then, that thought would return, like a whisper reminding me I was not exactly who I believed myself to be.

This space, this blog , is where I’ll begin piecing the fragments together.  Not to rebuild the old story, but to discover what comes next.

I invite you to walk with me through the unraveling, the searching, and the rewriting.  Sharing my stories and perhaps sharing yours.  

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