Friday. Trying to get back into writing again. Ugh. What a nightmare. It’s like… what the hell am I even doing right now? My brain is a MESS. Like I said yesterday, the mushrooms are helping a surprising amount. Still… writing is hard. I just need to fix my brain, go somewhere else, get some more new content, and then the new travel blog will finally manifest.

I’m changing the name from Paris in South Dakota though. That’s a dumb name. Also, I don’t want to be affiliated with anything South Dakota. It’s bad enough that I managed to step into a tar pit and get stuck in it for 15 years. Let’s not drag this misery out any longer than we have to. Idk about you guys, but I’m ready to set fire to everything I’ve ever written about this place, move to the other side of the world, and pretend it was all a dream. A terrible, horrible, never-ending nightmare that I am finally waking up from.

I’ll probably keep the “Hallmark Channel Original Movie Small Town Guide” I made though. That’s an incredibly useful document. I just know it’s going to come in handy later…

In case you don’t know what is, it’s a list of about 500 people with little notes next to it about their characters. It’s totally random. Most of them are random people I met over the years. Bloody Mary’s was just the beginning.

That document is also the reason I don’t go out anymore or try to socialize with anyone in this community anymore. I don’t need to! I got what I needed, and now I’m gonna go. There’s no point in doing anything else.

Okay, so I’m cool with the whole town thing. This experience happened to me. And you know what? It could have been a lot worse, so… whatever. A seed was planted here and it grew, and grew, and grew, and grew, until no one, including myself, could control the wild weed it became. Now I’m trying to trim it down so I can identify what species of plant it is and how I can use it to benefit society. Yeah, so, insert farming metaphors here, and they all lived happily ever after, The End.

Check that off the list of things we can make peace with. Okay. What else we got?

Well, we took care of the “hating men” thing, I guess? I don’t actually hate all men. I just hate rapists, predators, and the patriarchy. Why is that so wrong? Like, actually no, it’s not okay for you to get girls too drunk to say no. It’s not okay to grab women’s body parts without their consent. It’s not okay to treat women like subservient slaves to tend to your every whim. If you think any of this stuff is okay, then YOU are the problem. YOU. Not me, YOU. I’m “not listening” to you because what you’re saying is harmful, gross, and dumb. Stop defending these jerks and leave me the fuck alone already. My opinion is not going to change on this subject. Get over it. The End.

It’s actually crazy how much of the anger was stemming from just these two subjects when the real underlying problems have been hiding in the darkness for years. Did you ever see me sitting at the bar on a bad day, just taking shot after shot after shot like I have nothing to live for? It’s not because of some stupid guy or because living in a small town in the middle of nowhere sucks. That’s just what’s on the surface. What’s deep down underneath? Even I didn’t know… until fairly recently.

So we know for a fact that my family is definitely a problem. As it turns out, there is significant amounts of alcoholism and mental illness on both sides, but they manifest in two very different ways. The genetic roll of the dice was not in my favor, let’s just put it that way.

I also made some interesting discoveries in my family tree that suggest my family has been hiding some indigenous heritage for a couple hundred years, so that is also a factor. We are the OG Pretendians. And by that I mean, they were pretending to be white Christian people. We were dying from a smallpox epidemic that was killing everyone on the island, so my family started intermarrying with the white settlers on the island and converting to Christianity. Guess who those early settlers were? The Horton Family.

I traced the movements of that family and noticed they were moving to areas in and around reservations during various resettlement campaigns. Unfortunately, a lot of records were destroyed in a massive fire, and a lot of natives lied about being white Christians to survive, so it’s hard to know for sure. This is all true, but no one in my family believes me, nor does anyone else. If I try to talk about this with anyone, it immediately turns into a “So you’re saying your great-great-great-great grandmother was a Cherokee Princess?” conversation. No, actually, she was Montaukett, Shinnecock, Narragansett. Do you even know where that is, Mr. I Know Everything? I didn’t think so. And she wasn’t a “princess,” she was one of the last survivors of a smallpox epidemic that killed her entire tribe. She did what she had to do to survive. She’s never had the ability to tell her story. Her voice was lost to time and space. It wasn’t until I started driving around the Rez in the middle of the night that she found a relative she could finally speak to.

Oh yeah, it’s all starting to come together now.

So that’s a real thing I discovered after Sun Dance. Crazy, right? Everyone was asking me what my connection was. I knew it was there but I didn’t know how. That’s when I started digging. I was shocked by what I found. I still am. No one ever thought to look into this side of the story before, and when I bring it up it’s VERY controversial. But I know I was meant to make that discovery. I was led right to it, and when I found it, I felt that connection in my heart. It was pure, it was genuine, it was true. I knew the story was real. It definitely explains some things, but not all the things.

That’s the mystery of my grandfather’s family. I went back and looked at old pictures of him and realized… he’s nowhere near as white as I remember, especially sitting next to my grandmother, who is full Irish Catholic and about as pasty white as you can get. Her family came here after the famine. Yeah, so you can pretty much guess what’s on that side of the family as far as health concerns go.

So, that’s all on my dad’s side. Meanwhile, my mom’s side are the OG Puritans who came to this country so they could found a nation full of people who hate fun. No singing, no dancing, no crop tops, no bare ankles, no joy, no drinking in public (only in secret), nothing. They are also very proud of their colonizer history. So proud that they think Natives should “just get over the mascot thing.” Yeah. Ick.

That side of the family is also pretty close. As in… “Are my grandparents actually distant cousins?” close. Yeah. They just might be! We know they have pretty strong beliefs about marrying outside of their own kind, so, yeahhhhh. Guess that explains the other half of this genetic mess that came together to create me.

Like I said, the odds were not in my favor on that roll of the dice. Thank god I thought to factor in generational trauma into my treatment plan, or I would never have made it this far.

Okay, so I did all of that, but there was still some darkness there I couldn’t get to. I made some lifestyle changes, cut off problematic family members, went to India, got married/arranged to be married, became a yoga teacher, did the TEFL, and got a job in Hong Kong. Self-esteem boosted. But there is still so much anger, so much pain, so much suffering. Something inside of me is screaming to be acknowledged. What could it be?

Last night, I finally found it. It was so obvious all along. But here’s the thing… it was not obvious to me because I have been on a mission to destroy it with alcohol for as long as I can remember.

Can you guess what it is based on my long history of struggle with mental health issues?

I’ll give you a minute.

…

….

…..

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If you guessed “Negative childhood experiences with Child Psychologists, Big Pharma, and the Troubled Teen Industry,” DING DING DING! You guessed it! You are right.

Can you believe I have never ONCE googled any of the doctors I went to, meds I was prescribed, or programs I participated in? That’s how much I wanted to bury it. The only research I’ve done is on the frequency of misdiagnoses for children under 18. Turns out there’s quite a bit of new information coming out of the woodwork about all of this now. It’s pretty ugly. That’s probably why I never wanted to deal with it.

I realized this last night when something told me to watch the Ruby Franke documentary on Hulu. Some of the stuff they were talking about with the oldest boy child sounded familiar. A little too familiar. Luckily, I’ve been taking the mushrooms, so when the memories started surfacing, it didn’t feel like I was back there in the moment, actually living it and feeling it. THAT IS HUGE PROGRESS FOR ME. That moment right there, where I had enough emotional distance from the memory to observe it instead of relive it, was the big break through for me. Now more of the pieces are starting to click into place.

So right now I basically have Pandora’s Box sitting right in front of me on the table. I’m about to open up something ugly. Very ugly. I don’t even want to know. I don’t want to look at it. But I have to. I am a survivor, I have a gift, and it’s my responsibility to do this work so other people who had similar experiences know they aren’t alone. This is what is giving me the courage to face this head-on. I know that whatever it is I am about to discover, I am not alone. There are so many others out there like me. Many have had significantly worse experiences than I did. But I knew them. Their story is mine. Paris Hilton could have been any one of my classmates, my roommates, my friends. We are all in this together. And we are going to fight back and we are going to make real change.

But first I have to open Pandora’s Box. What’s in the box? What’s in the box?

What’s in the boxxxxxxxxxx?!

Only time will tell.

Off to teach yoga now. I definitely need it more than my students do today, that’s for sure.