Parents and Childhood My parents met in line at a grocery store back around 1980. My mom Darla was 21 and buying diapers for my half sister Danelle. My dad Bob was the checkout clerk. Apparently he was too shy to say anything so my mom asked him out. In January, 1981 they were married. And a good thing too, otherwise I wouldn't be here today! My father was born in 1955 in Portland, Oregon, the youngest of 5 children. His mother was the daughter of a farmer, his father a laborer, the son of German immigrants. He left my grandmother when my dad was only 6 months old, and he has never known him. His mother remarried and they moved up to Alaska, where he grew up with his 4 siblings and 5 step-siblings. He was a bit of a drifter for awhile in his young adult life before settling back in Alaska. My mother was born in California in 1958. She lived with her parents and older sister until the age of about 8 when her parents divorced. She wound up in Alaska with her mom and sister and didn't have much contact with her father after that. She grew up working from the time she was a teen to help contribute to the monthly bills. When she was 18 she became pregnant with my older sister and continued to live at home with her family and work until meeting my dad. My life started out here in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1982. After I was born, my mom stopped working to look after my older sister and I. We didn't have much money back then while my dad worked and did what he could to save money and support us. After a couple years we got into a low income program and got a house of our own. It started out as just dirt mounds everywhere. But over time my parents fixed it up into an actual yard, where we spent many hours playing. My dad got a job with the state in the mid 1980's and things starting looking up after that. A couple years later, my brother Kyle was born. We all went to Badger Road Elementary School, and those were good times for the most part. I was a very quiet and shy child, but I always seemed to have friends. I was bright and got good grades. From 3rd grade on, I was put in gifted classes. At the time I didn't like being singled out from the other kids, because I was shy enough as it was, and I found it embarrassing. The other kids wanted to know why I had to leave class every day and I didn't want to explain. No child wants to be seen as different, even when it is different in a good way. I entered middle school in 6th grade. I adjusted well to the change. For some reason, in 7th grade, things just began to change. I was sick a lot, coming down with everything from colds and flus to mono and bronchitis and everything in between. I missed a lot of school and my grades went down dramatically. I became very depressed, perhaps because of the sickness, or maybe it was triggered by hormones or some unknown source. In any case, I started to become more withdrawn and isolated. I didn't want to go to school anymore and I would cry all the time and feel bad. By 8th grade I convinced my parents to let me do home school, or correspondence study. I stayed home the entire year and was a relative shut in. I didn't really have contact with anyone besides my family. But I think if I hadn't had that time to myself I never would have been able to get over my depression. The solitude gave me the ability to cope with it all in my own time. 
The Teen Age Years That year I turned 13, I finally got better and recovered from the depression and the multitude of sicknesses. I got straight A’s and my sister got married. I was a bridesmaid in the wedding. When the time came to either enroll for correspondence study for 9th grade, or enter public high school, I decided I was ready for public school again. Entering high school was both nerve wracking and exciting. I had to adjust to being around people again and not be a recluse. Things went very well though and I reconnected with my old best friend who I had known since 5th grade. I made a lot of other friends and I liked school again. As with most teens, school became more about socializing than actually learning. Time passed very quickly in those years when I was happy. I had 4 best friends, and we did everything together. I would spend days away from home at their houses and we would be out all the time having fun, shopping, talking about guys. Teenager stuff. We were carefree and had the world at our fingertips. At home I was going through my 'privacy' stage. I stayed in my room and didn't talk to my family much. I didn't think they understood me at all. I felt like my friends and I were the center of the world and nothing else mattered. Before 11th grade, things began to go downhill again. My friends and I had started to separate and go our own ways. It was devastating, because they had been like a family to me. No one knew me like they did. My relationship with my real family was tense and rocky. We constantly fought. I felt completely alone and sank into depression many, many times within the short time span of a year. I have never been the kind of person who yells or breaks things. I am more introverted, keeping everything inside. I had all these pent up feelings and didn’t know how to express them. I had no way to purge my frustrations and one day I found myself with a razor blade. I don’t know what possessed me, but I cut myself once, twice, three times. I guess I wanted to see if I had the guts to actually do it. I didn’t want to die, and it wasn’t a suicide attempt. It was just a way for me to deal with the way I felt inside. That was the beginning of a long battle with depression and cutting that continued sporadically for several years.
Love The summer I turned 16, I spent a lot of time online. I met a guy in a chat room named Jonathan and we became instant friends. I was reluctant to admit it but I was starting to fall for him. He was everything the guys I knew weren't. He was smart, funny, cute and caring too. I was hesitant because I was young, and didn't want to be in an online long distance relationship. I had never even been in a real relationship at all. I didn’t know what love was. I was at a very confusing point in my life. I kept my heart to myself, and I never let anyone get close to it. I figured nothing good would come of me saying anything, after all, he lived 2000 miles away in California. When would we ever meet? I didn’t think much of it until one day I had a fight with my family and been cutting myself again. I had no one to confide in but Jon, and I told him my secret. He made me feel safe. He told me he loved me and didn’t want me to hurt myself. I was in shock. I didn’t think I was capable of being loved by anyone. I became afraid and I distanced myself from him for awhile. I know a lot of people throw that word around without meaning it, and I didn’t want to be hurt. I didn’t even really believe him. But more time passed and he proved what he said was true. I felt he was the only person I could count on, the only one who cared for me. He managed to make me feel the way I always wanted to about myself. He was always there and after a year I knew he had meant what he said about loving me. By then I had fallen in love with him too, without ever even meeting. He gave me a reason to keep on going and have hope for something better. With time I started to heal inside and eventually I stopped cutting.
Meeting My Best Friend Graduation day came, and before I knew it high school was over. I had a crisis. I didn’t know what I should do…all my life I had been waiting for that moment. Now that it was upon me; I was frozen. People had been telling me all through high school to go to college. But I had never planned on doing that. How could I? I had no idea what to do with my life. I was still young and naïve, like most people on the brink of adulthood. Society expects you to have your life mapped out by that time, when the reality is, you will probably never have life mapped out, no matter what your age. My relationship with Jonathan had continued to grow for those last 2 years of high school. He was like the other half of me, the part that completed me and made me whole. A lot of people were skeptical of our relationship for awhile, including my parents. But with time, they grew to see how much Jon meant to me and they supported us. We were determined to do things our way and be together, no matter what. We had waited so long, it was time to meet. He came to Alaska and stayed with my family for a few weeks in the summer of 2000, after we had both graduated. When he came off the plane, it was like we had never been apart. We immediately connected. When Jon went home, I went down to stay with his family in California for several weeks. We had so much fun just spending time together that we hadn't been able to for so long. I was distraught when I came back to Alaska. The only thing I wanted in the world was to be with him, I didn’t care about anything else. Slowly, we made tentative plans for me to move to California and for us to live together. But the date kept getting pushed back farther and farther and I began to lose hope. I worked a few jobs, then always quit thinking I would be leaving. Finally I knew I couldn’t live my life that way. I decided to look for permanent work while waiting for everything to fall into place for my move. I ended up getting a job at a thrift store. I really liked it and I was saving up money. I had a new car, and everything seemed to be looking up.
Roller Coaster Life That summer, 2001, things still weren’t ready. I told Jon I had to see him. It was tearing me apart being away from him. He was on break from school and came to Alaska. We lived together for 3 months and even worked in the same store. That was one of the happiest times in my life. In September he went home, a week after the attack on NYC. Everything felt surreal and strange. I didn’t know what would happen in the future. Everything settled down though and in March I visited him again. I was going crazy by then. Every time we would see each other and then separate, it became harder and harder. I couldn’t continue that way. It was too much emotional trauma for me. I had to either be with him or end it. Amazingly, things finally fell into place for me to move in 2002. I was so excited, I quit my job and I sold my car. But then I felt odd, I had waited so many years for this it seemed unreal. When I got to Riverside, something felt wrong about it all. I missed my family terribly, and felt very isolated. It was a huge city but the only person I knew was Jon. He was gone till 9 PM working most days. And I knew when school started back up he’d be gone 7 days a week all day and night. Even though we were together it was like we only saw each other when we went to sleep at night. I knew the situation wasn’t working out and as hard as it was for both of us, we decided it would be best for me to go back home. It was extremely hard to say goodbye again and it hurt so much. But before I left, Jon asked me to marry him and I said yes. It was the moment I had been waiting for my whole life. We decided we would get married after he was done with school in 2 years and that next summer I would come back and we’d live together again. He told me to plan the wedding and that would give me something to do when I got home to keep me from being sad. He came and visited again for spring break, and in the summer of 2003, I went back to California. Jon and I settled into our routine of life together. By then, after nearly 5 years, we had gotten used to the life of travel and time together with long periods alone (or at least as much as a person can be.) At the end of the summer, I headed back home. But this time something had changed. Even though I was supposed to be happy that we were getting married the next summer, I felt sad and lonely inside. I basically broke down and had a life crisis. The many years of a long distance relationship had taken its toll on me. The longer Jon and I spent apart the more problems started to crop up and the harder it was to keep it all together, no matter how much we may have wanted it to work, no matter how much we cared for each other. I was tired, tired of being alone, tired of planning everything months and years in advance, arranging my life around it. I was tired of being the grown up responsible person everyone had always known. I had changed, and I felt like I was hiding in a shell and needed to break out. I realized I needed some big changes in my life. Telling all this to Jon was one of the most painful things I’ve ever done. I didn’t want to hurt him but I knew that was inevitable. I told him I needed to be on my own for awhile and that we should see other people. He was hurt but because he cared about me he agreed to let me do what I needed to do. Now here I am back home in Alaska, just living life one day at a time. Things have changed a lot but that’s all a part of life. Jon and I are still very close and talk a lot. He will always be a part of my life, no matter what. He knows me like no one else does, and is my best friend. He has done so much to make me who I am today and I am thankful to have a wonderful person like him in my life. As for the future…I’m not sure what it holds for me yet. But I suppose I’ll find out when I get there! ;) 
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