Te Aviso
This is entirely a work in progress; none of which is being written by AI.
If you've got any suggestions for what you'd like to hear more about, lmk via instagram please.
Welcome to the Guide
In the following paragraphs and pages I will attempt to explain who I am and why ...
So without any further ado ... let's begin ...
A soul with no home
Years later a therapist would tell me that my spirit was severed at birth, and part of it stayed with my mother ...
I was adopted as an infant from a country in the Global South, by fair-skinned, farm-raised Protestant-turned-Evangelical Christians who eventually voted for the Tangerine Terror ...
I was adopted into the Western Suburbs of a Midwestern city-state known as Minneapolis-St. Paul.
At the age of five I began learning to play the piano, and started performing for old folks in nursing homes; as well as singing, and acting, in musicals for the church.
The highlight of this career being the opportunity to perform with the Christian-Barney, known as Psalty the Singing Songbook ... for the Billy Graham Kidz Gig.
By the age of 21, I'd been married/divorced, fathered a kid, and was on my fourth government name.
Yee-haw ...
By the age of 35, I finally met my biological family ... am now using my first and second government names for identification purposes; though have yet to reconcile them all into my sixth, and perhaps final, government name.
Next year I'll be 40; and hopefully finally have my undergraduate degree as well.
I'll turn 42 to this year, by the grace of our creator; and I'm happy to say that I have my undergraduate degree!
And that's the long and short of my then-to-now story.
So now into the details ...
Academically Speaking
Born to outsiders, raised by insiders.
I was educated by the Orono School system, introduced to molecular biology at the age of 12, and the rest of the social sciences by 14; I can't remember if I was in AP Physics, but I was in AP Calc.
Either way ... I had liberal teachers in relatively small classes pushing challenging material.
I've been negotiating the awareness ever since; to paraphrase Fredrick Douglas, the education was a double-edged sword, as I'm also now acutely aware of my position in this world.
Though it is from such an outlier, outsider perspective that perhaps a truly compassionate and constructive conversation can be created.
Being transracial, I was raised with the psychological context and experiences of a white male, who simply happened to be in brown skin; though since I didn't see myself everyday, I didn't realize the implications of this, and so did not consciously think about them, until the middle of my adolescence.
Which is to say that ... I didn't like when Rufio said at the end of Hook, "I wish I had a dad like you."
I didn't feel that line, and didn't care for it; Short-round was absolutely my dude!
Mogli felt like me in my natural state of being; and even within the realm of Christian music, I always gravitated to non-white artists; and if their music wasn't to my taste, I at least sought them out, and acknowledged them first.
Though I remained looking for messages that I was specifically able to grasp and with which I could connect.
An individual once lamented that there weren't more studies done on white men about the psychological consequences of patriarchy.
Which ... ok, I guess in retrospect I better comprehend the aspiration; though maintain that nearly all of Western Literature is a study of the while male psychology in one way or another.
It was the Harold Bloom who first introduced me to the conversation that gave birth to the idea; Shakespeare was an incredible psychologist, and Freude was a wonderful storyteller.
Though the lessons are their for anyone who wants to connected the dots, and put the pieces together for themselves.