I unearthed a random memory the other day. I was in third grade. We had been learning about recycling. I am not particularly into environmental activism but I saw a gap in the market. I decided to start a grassroots school based organization.
I made posters. I solicited members. I named the club Recycling And Pitching In Now.
I did not understand why the teachers shut down R.A.P.I.N. immediately. At the time it felt like oppression. Looking back it was probably a public relations necessity.
I sat back and thought about the roads that led me here. People assume social work grad school radicalizes you. It doesn’t. I was already like this.
April 5 1994. Kurt Cobain died. While the rest of the ninth grade cried I got angry. I wrote a one page flyer explaining how the posers and trendies caused his death. I distributed it anonymously in the hallways. It was a massive hit.
High school was the Clinton years. I spent my senior year in the principal’s office for staging a walkout. I ran a zine called Jacque’s Bedsheets because my boyfriend’s mom had a photocopier and I had opinions.
Then came college. The first time.
It was 1998. I was an eighteen year old white girl at a private women’s college. I lived at home. I just hung out in the dorms looking for friends and people like me. It wasn’t easy but the LGBT club was the closest thing I had.
I hosted a radio show featuring goth and punk music. It was only broadcast on the college TV channel. Nobody listened. I was just screaming Bauhaus into the void.
I failed out. I left that school in 1999 with three credits in freshman English and a trail of incompletes.
Then the plot twist happened. March 2000. I had my oldest child and moved back in with my parents. Or rather I just stayed there.
My future husband went to basic training. He was on lockdown during 9/11. It was the worst possible timing. While the world was falling apart I was working for local government as a receptionist.
I spent my days tethered to a twenty line phone system. I watched the caseworkers flit in and out of the office. I envied them. Looking back they probably weren’t doing anything radical. They were probably just going to lunch. But from my desk it looked like freedom.
I didn’t get that freedom. On January 4 2002 I got married.
I went straight from my parents’ house to an apartment with a husband and a two year old. I never really got to be an adult on my own. I skipped the era of bad roommates and eating cereal for dinner alone. I went directly from being a daughter to being a wife and a mother.
By 2005 the War on Terror was in full swing. My husband was deployed six thousand miles away. I was a mother of two trying to connect with the world. I started a blog. I ranted about the war online and meticulously wrote anti administration sentiments on the windows of my minivan with a glass marker.
I look at where I am now. I am finally the caseworker flitting in and out. I am the outspoken advocate for everything I see wrong with the world. I am the squeaky wheel in the agency.
Honestly baby I was born this way. I just have better acronyms now.