How it All Began

Where does one’s story begin?  Is it at the point of birth when your brain receives the first signal.  Not the slap of the doctor’s palm, if indeed they still – or ever – did that seemingly barbaric action.  No, the point at which one emerges from the birth canal and the cold air of the operating room causes messages ‘Cold!’ ‘Cold!’ shrieking to the brain.  Is it then?

I won’t start there, because then the story will never be completed.  I’ll start at the time of the playing of the Community Lemonade Game.  Before that activity, which started in June, 2012, life had been pretty normal for me.  I.e. as normal as anyone’s life can be.  Get up, drop off kid.  Get onto freeway, go to work.  In Los Angeles that means a 1 hour drive, if you’re lucky.  Work, have lunch, work, go home.  Often dark when you leave, often dark when you return.  I’ll admit, I had it good. I’d had some good twists and turns and negotiated myself a nice work schedule.  It let me do important things like pick up a kid – my kid – and take him somewhere.  Perhaps it was soccer or baseball.  There’s always something.

I was on vacation at a timeshare resort near San Juan Capistrano when the call came.  My contract was ending.  I had two more weeks.  I’d been a long term contractor, and my time was up.  Every ten years, it seemed that I was looking for work.  My tenth anniversary had just passed.

I had a week to think about what I would do.  I was blogging at the time.  My friend N. was the editor of the Belmont Shore Patch.  She had to find folks who might want to blog, so I helped her out.  I’ve always liked writing essays, and loved the English Language.  That was my big introduction to social media.  Some might say blogging is not social media, but it is to me.  I talk to you as my friends, even if it is a one-way conversation.  I guess that’s the media part.

It’s scary with no job, no steady source of income.  It’s also liberating.  Can you imagine being able to define your work yourself?  What would you do?  I knew I wanted to make a change.  To find something meaningful to me that I could do.  But when you are a well paid – anything – giving that up to start from scratch could certainly be hard.  I’d been liberated, but then, what next was there?

More about that later.  I am finding as I write this that reconstruction of events as they happened is going to be less important than individual messages that I experience.  Hope that’s ok with you, my readers.

Trish Tsoiasue blogs on the Belmont Shore Patch, shares experiential videos on her YouTube channel Squigglemom, makes Makersville, and things for Makersville and celebrates the opportunities provided by life.  She also blogs on the Makersville Blog.