Category: Author Experience

Not fitting in with the crowd had been my normal for so long that I thought it was permanent.

John—my adopted stepdad—helped me realize something that changed everything: I could change if I wanted to. So I did.

With his encouragement, and with the help of my best friend Colleen Taylor, I began working on myself. I practiced being more likable, more social. Over time, I learned not to value what other people thought of me so much—well, not too much anyway. The day I truly decided I didn’t care what my classmates thought of me was the day I felt free. Confident. Empowered.

Something shifted.

I remember being okay, for the first time, with my mom kissing me on the lips in front of my classmates. Before, I would have been mortified. But once I accepted my mom’s way of showing love, something funny happened—she stopped doing it. It was no longer a problem. When I stopped fighting myself, life became easier.

I became more accepting of living. Less harsh on myself. Less judgmental of others. . I didn’t feel so raw all the time. I was learning how to live instead of just survive.

Then came my first high school dance.

I was so excited. I sat on the bleachers and prayed to be asked to dance. When someone finally asked me, I stopped fretting and went out onto the floor. I hadn’t even been dancing three minutes when I noticed people laughing. Soon, it felt like everyone at the dance was laughing at me.

I kept dancing—until I realized everyone had stopped dancing just to laugh at me dance.

I stopped.

They didn’t.

I turned red with embarrassment and ran out of the gym.

But something was different this time.

I knew I could change.

I was determined to go back knowing how to dance. I didn’t know about dance classes. I didn’t even know how one learned to dance. But I wanted to understand why they were laughing. I wanted to see what they saw.

So I taught myself.

I began dancing in front of a mirror—watching how I moved, to music that made me happy, noticing what felt good, what didn’t, what looked right to me. It wasn’t about performance. It was about curiosity. About learning who I was in my body.

That simple practice taught me something profound: you can learn whatever your heart desires if you’re willing to try, observe, and keep going.

And so I kept going.

I’ve been changing ever since.

It seems that every five or six years, I become a different person, while my fundamentals remain intact. The core of who I am stays steady, but the way I move through the world evolves. I grow. I shed. I adjust.

I am forever moving forward, changing, refining.

At least, I hope it’s for the better.

Crossing that threshold wasn’t loud or dramatic. There was no single moment where everything suddenly made sense. It was quieter than that. More human.

But once I stepped across, there was no going back.

I had learned something essential:

I was not stuck.
I never had been.

 

Guidance arrived quietly and from an unexpected place.

My mother had a new live-in boyfriend, John Georges. He became my mentor—not through lectures or grand speeches, but through practical instruction and explanations. John helped me understand that I was developing into a woman and that there was strength, dignity, and confidence in that transition. I remember coming home one day from the beach in tears, convinced something was wrong with me—that I was becoming deformed. I had hips. Real hips. I was terrified.

 

John laughed so hard he nearly fell over. He told me to show him this “deformity,” and when I did, he smiled and explained that nothing was wrong with me at all. I wasn’t broken. I was growing into my body. Into myself. Into a woman.

He believed in women. Truly believed in them. He believed women could be strong, poised, and self-assured without losing their femininity. I only wish his influence in my life had lasted longer. It was brief—about four years—but it mattered deeply.

 

John taught me how to value men and how to relate to them with ease and respect. He encouraged admiration rather than fear or confusion. He also protected me in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time. At work, he made sure men didn’t sexually harass me—something I didn’t even realize was happening or could happen. Looking back, I see how much he was watching out for me when I couldn’t yet watch out for myself

 

One of his lessons was unforgettable. He placed a book on my head and made me walk from room to room until I could do it smoothly, with balance and grace. Over and over again. It transformed me—from a full-on tomboy into a more feminine young woman. I learned posture, presence, and how to carry myself in the world. That simple exercise changed how I moved—and how I was seen.

 

At the same time, I found guidance in unexpected places. Cosmopolitan magazine helped me build self-esteem and taught me how to dress in a way that attracted men’s attention. Later, I read Fascinating Womanhood, which offered moral and spiritual support as I tried to understand relationships, femininity, and my place in the world.

 

This guidance helped me talk to men more easily. It helped me feel more comfortable growing up and becoming a lady. What it didn’t teach me was how to choose a man—or how to truly be with one. I was still naive. Very naive.

 

Much later in life, in my fifties, I learned that I am autistic. That knowledge finally explained why social graces had always felt like a foreign language to me, especially in groups. It explained why I struggled to read cues that seemed effortless for others.

 

Once I understood this, I began paying closer attention to how people interacted with one another—how they spoke, how they stood, how they connected in groups. I was still learning. Still studying. Still trying to understand the invisible rules everyone else seemed to know.

 

John didn’t give me everything I needed. No mentor ever does.

 

But he gave me something essential: permission to become a woman with confidence, dignity, and presence.

 

And for where I was at that moment in my life, that guidance changed everything.

Well—not everything.

To my surprise, I was told I was mean.

I didn’t understand.

Mean?

Even as my world began to open, fear still ran the show.

My biggest fear wasn’t speaking anymore—it was being liked, especially in groups. I doubted that people truly liked me. I believed they tolerated me only because of Colleen and Janice, because they were kind and generous and made space for me. Without them, I was convinced I would disappear again.

That belief cost me deeply.

I lost good friendships because I was certain I wasn’t enough—didn’t have enough, wasn’t cool enough, didn’t measure up. I missed out on meaningful connections and even a relationship with a boy I cared about, Joe Ontiveros. Looking back, I can see how fear convinced me to walk away before anyone else could.

I also learned something unsettling: people, as a collective, often struggle to see others change—especially for the better. Growth can feel threatening. I sensed resistance from classmates as I improved, and I couldn’t understand why. I wasn’t trying to outshine anyone. I was just trying to survive.

For so long, I had been picked on that safety felt precious. It was a relief not to be teased anymore, not to be the punchline. Slowly, people began to accept me. And then—almost unexpectedly—I started having fun. Real fun. I worried less. I laughed more.

And one day, something in me snapped into clarity.

Fuck it.

I decided I didn’t care what anyone else thought of me anymore—within reason. I started doing my own thing. Not because I was brave, but because I was tired. Tired of shrinking. Tired of guessing. Tired of living my life through other people’s approval.

Still, my peers clung to old versions of me. To them, I was the “dumb girl”—the one with D’s and F’s, lucky to scrape by with a C. What they couldn’t reconcile was this: my test scores were higher than most of theirs. That fact confused them. Eventually, they had to accept it.

I wasn’t stupid.
I never had been.

Once that truth settled, something shifted. They began treating me like one of the group. It felt amazing. It felt earned. It felt safe.

What never occurred to me was that I could actually change my life.

I was becoming successful in school, but when I entered the workforce at fifteen and a half, a new struggle appeared. I did well—department store managers noticed me and offered guidance. I learned quickly. I succeeded.

But leading others? That terrified me.

I was dysfunctional as a leader. I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust my voice. I ended up bargaining for cooperation instead of commanding it. Fear still had a say.

I didn’t know it yet, but this resistance—this hesitation to fully step into my power—was the last place fear could hide.

And that’s when my mentors appeared

 

Something stirred in the summer of 1968, though I didn’t recognize it as change at the time. Earlier in that year I learned why I struggle in school to read.  I was dyslexic.

 

My father enrolled me in a communication class through the Church of Scientology. It was hard. Distressing. Emotionally confronting in ways I didn’t yet have language for. My confidence was fragile, my sense of right and wrong felt skewed, and I didn’t trust myself in the world. Still, that class became the event that quietly changed my life. That and how to read as a dyslexic.

I had to pay for half of it myself. My father paid the other half.

I was worth every penny.

At the time, I didn’t see it that way. I only knew it pushed me beyond my comfort zone. It forced me to speak. To listen. To remain present instead of disappearing. What I couldn’t know then was that this was my salvation—the first real interruption of the belief that I was meant to stay silent.

That class taught me how to communicate. More than that, it taught me how profound it is simply to exist comfortably while speaking. The value of that lesson wouldn’t fully register until much later in my life, but its impact was immediate.

For the first time, I began to talk to the kids in my class.

These were the same kids I had gone to school with since third grade. The same kids who had tormented me for years. They didn’t know how to respond to this version of me. Honestly, neither did I. But I didn’t back down. I kept showing up. I kept talking.

And somehow, it worked.

My new communication skills were already working for me before I understood what they were. I began watching other kids closely—studying how they acted, how they responded, how they fit together. I had been made aware that my own behavior had often been awkward, even off-putting, and I wanted to learn. I was educating myself in how to exist among my classmates.

I wasn’t very successful at first.

Real progress didn’t come until high school, when I became best friends with Colleen Taylor. She helped me tremendously. Through her, I learned how to be more social, how to read situations, and how to soften without disappearing. As I improved, I began making more friends—but only one-on-one.

Groups were still terrifying.

In group situations, I froze. I turned red. I felt painfully self-conscious. I believe this came from being teased almost exclusively by groups, not individuals. One-on-one felt manageable. Groups felt unsafe.

With Colleen by my side, I could socialize. Without her, I felt abandoned and scared. Kids would still pick at me in subtle ways, and the old fear rushed back in. I avoided social situations unless I had Colleen—or another close friend, Janice Pando—with me.

It felt good to finally be part of a group, even if I couldn’t yet stand there alone.

I made progress. Real progress. I did almost everything with Colleen—together and in groups. She was my bridge. My safety. My proof that I could belong.

I wasn’t fully free yet.
But I was no longer silent.
And for the first time, my voice had a place to land.

The Girl Who Learned to Disappear

Before I learned how to take up space, I learned how to vanish.

I was a scared, wallflower child—careful, quiet, and watchful. Somewhere early on, I absorbed the lesson that it was safer to be unheard. Speaking up felt dangerous. Standing out felt unbearable. And yet, no matter how hard I tried to blend in, I seemed to stick out anyway.

Children noticed. They always do. I was teased, made fun of, singled out for something—sometimes obvious, sometimes not. I carried that embarrassment with me everywhere, like a second skin. I walked through my days hoping no one would notice me, while secretly aching to be noticed, chosen, included.

What I wanted most was simple: to belong.

I wanted to be part of the crowd, the clique, the group that seemed to move through life with ease and permission. I didn’t feel like I had a purpose of my own—only the hope that if I could help, maybe I could earn my place. That’s why, even as a child, I gravitated toward helping others.

In 1968, at Goleta Union Grade School in Goleta, California, I found a small pocket where I felt useful. I helped children from the special needs classroom transition back into their regular classes. There, I succeeded. There, I mattered—at least in action, if not yet in feeling. I didn’t recognize it then, but even in my fear, compassion was already guiding me.

Still, inside, the story I told myself was harsh and unrelenting.

I believed I was unworthy of attention. No matter where I went, I felt like an outsider looking in. I was relentlessly critical of myself, convinced everyone else was better, more deserving, more lovable. I longed to be part of a community, a group, something bigger than myself—but I couldn’t imagine that I truly belonged anywhere.

People cared about me. I know that now. But back then, I couldn’t feel it. Love didn’t land. It didn’t register. I didn’t understand that I was loved until I was well into my sixties.

When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see a child. I saw flaws. I saw a skinny, awkward, big-nosed girl who believed no one cared and no one ever would. My communication felt broken. Words got stuck. My voice felt unsafe. Talking felt risky.

Existing felt risky.

So I learned to shrink. To stay quiet. To observe instead of participate. To survive by staying small.

What I didn’t know then—what I couldn’t possibly know—was that this frightened, unseen child was not weak. She was enduring. She was learning. And she was carrying within her the seeds of empathy, service, and depth that would one day become her strength.

This is who I was before I transformed.
Not broken—just unseen.
Not unlovable—just unaware.
Not empty—just waiting.