It's Been a Year -a personal blog post

It’s been a while. Yes, I’m writing a personal blog post tonight. If you’ve been reading lately, you know I’ve been busy—very busy—diving deep into history and trying to create something good from it, something healing for the victims who felt they were never seen. That’s how I’ve been feeling for longer than I can remember.

This year has been one of revelations, too many at once, though most of them are truths I’ve been chasing for decades.

Let’s start with health. A few years ago I discovered I had Bertolotti’s Syndrome, and this year the diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome landed like a sledgehammer. It’s been crushing—not just because of the pain, but because of the decades of loss that came before anyone believed me. Doctors scratched their heads, even after surgeries. To the outside world I looked flexible, limber, healthy. No one could see the seronegative arthritis, the spinal defect, or connective tissue that tears like cotton candy. Fifty years of eye-rolls, judgments, and medical PTSD followed. It sounds pathetic, I know, but it happens to so many of us that we eventually stop going to doctors until we crash.

My crash started long before my marriage ended. I was spiraling—longer naps, shorter walks, pain that gnawed at me constantly, begging for massages just to get through the day. By the time people noticed I was falling apart, I’d been running on fumes for a decade. After having chicken pox at thirty, I never got my full strength back and I went downhill from there,picking up speed. Saying that out loud always felt risky: people assume you’re looking for sympathy, attention, or excuses. So you stay quiet, and the disbelief snowballs.

When I finally found the indicators for Bertolotti’s and then EDS in my own test results and brought them to my doctors, the diagnoses came—after irreversible damage had already been done to my spine and organs. A part of me burned with anger (and some of that fire is still there). I spend most of my time in bed now, even while writing this post, fingers screaming with every keystroke. I just turned fifty-eight. Fifty-eight.

There are “if onlys” that circle like vultures. If only someone had recognized it when I was young, maybe I wouldn’t be lying flat to type this tonight.

Layered on top of all that pain and grief, my ex-husband passed away this past September after falling down some stairs. I still can’t believe it, even with the police report and coroner’s report in my hands (old reporter instincts die hard). It’s sad on so many levels. I never hated him. Our marriage ended in domestic violence, but I tried to walk a balanced line with the kids—never demonizing him, yet refusing to pretend the violence didn’t happen. When I spoke about the attempted strangulations and the trauma, it wasn’t revenge; others urged me to share so people would understand how hard it is to leave. On average, a woman makes seven attempts before she escapes for good—because the dynamics are designed to trap you, because resources and family support are often nonexistent, because finances are weaponized, and because chronic illness makes the world outside look cold and impossible.

Then there was the death hoax someone played on me during that terrifying time of breaking free: a family member called to say my estranged husband killed himself and was hanging in a motel room. I vomited, called the police—only to learn it was a cruel lie cooked up by two drunk men at a picnic table, one of them the man who would soon be my ex. Those flashes have haunted me again since his real death this fall.

And then, in the middle of all this, came the gut-punch I never saw coming.

One late-night search for the neighbor from my childhood—the one with the black-painted walls, the guy on the bike who said he was a teacher, the two dogs—led me to ay photo of John David Norman and also a grainy one of Mike, his buddy. Suddenly everything clicked. The monster next door finally had a name. That discovery sent me down a rabbit hole of devastation: the lives he and men like him destroyed in the 1960s and ’70s, the domino effect still rippling through the Midwest, through Chicago, through my own childhood. I knew boys and young men back then—some I stayed in touch with as an adult—who I now realize were likely victims too. We didn’t understand what was sucking the life out of our generation. Now I do, and I can’t unsee it.

So here I am, the former journalist who once churned out articles for pennies, trying to get all of this out before it consumes me from the inside. The posts on Lior’s Eyes, Asha’s Beginnings, The Pigtail Monster, and the Midwest Child Exploitation Pipeline timeline series are my way of processing, of closing circles that have been open my entire life.

It’s a lot. Be patient with me. Some days the only glimmers of hope I can grab are the possibility that this work might help even one person feel less alone.

And yes, sometimes I use assistive technology, including AI, to help me get the words out and organized when my body won’t cooperate. I know that’s a controversial topic right now, but for me it has been healing. The frustration of having everything bottled up inside with no way to write creatively with pain induced brain fog on demand was stealing my voice—and losing my voice was killing me. Tonight I’m only using it for editing and maybe an image, but I’m grateful it exists.

It’s been a year.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for bearing witness. I’m still here, still trying.