Barely Secondborn

1.0

On Jun 8, 1998 Sean Thornton emerged from the womb-cocoon a 10 lb, 2 week late homebirth in the suburbs of southern california.

I was peaceful. My name was picked from a movie; “The Quiet Man”

I was the youngest of 3 boys.

My Dad’s side of the family was Irish Catholic. My Grandma lived on the same street as us. I would clean her cat’s litter.

My favorite movie as a kid was kung fu panda. I remember watching it three times in the 24 hour rental period we had. The first theatre-play I saw was the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I also watched that 3 times in the one weekend it was showing at my school.

I remember throwing a pair of scissors at my older brother for terrorizing me one morning. He ducked and the scissors stuck point first into the wall behind him. shock and guilt.

1.5:

At a young age I started telling my family that my grandfather was from Pluto.

I said it regularly and consistently enough that I remember it. It was neither truth nor lie to me.

First lie:

Me and my brother shared a computer. He had a game, World of Warcraft. He was my older brother, he played the computer when he wanted and I played it when he wasn’t there. When he was gone one weekend I stayed up all night killing boars. I was grinding a lvl 27 troll shaman. My mom opened the door at 6 am, and yelled at me. My first lie was that I woke up at 5. I was in 2nd grade.

When I was in 3rd grade my dad got in a drunk driving accident. It was his fault. He went to jail for 6 months. He had injured a lady who claimed she was pregnant. She wasn’t. It was a felony.

I remember being told to lie about where he had gone.

In 4th grade I tried to volunteer him as coach for the basketball team. didn’t work.

2.0/2.5: The Boy-kid years

In 7th grade when warming up for a football game, a friend came behind and pantsed me. He yanked hard and grabbed everything. I was standing there, naked from the waist down in front of the whole team. The parents and the coach were unhappy. I got called in that week and pretended like everything was alright. The principle told me she was considering to expel the kid from our school. I said it wasn’t that bad. He didn’t get expelled.

My brother had a lot of friends. I had 2. When they would come over I would hang out with them. It was fun. It was nice to be part of a group. I liked having older friends. They were welcoming. They liked me. One day my brother sat me down. He told me I was not allowed to hang out with them. He said when they come over I needed to pretend like they are not there. He did not like me being liked by them.

In high school I got caught with a weed pipe in the bathroom. That was when I learned the word ‘Paraphernalia’. They started drug-testing me. I smoked salvia instead. It doesn’t show up. I didn’t have many friends. I ate lunch in the bathroom to avoid being seen.

I was a bad student. Smart, but no effort. I had the brain ability to get by without doing any of the work. I had the shimmer to feed. In high school I had a smartphone and at home a computer. I was addicted to my distractions.

3.0: College

I went to college in Santa Cruz. For the first time I was making lots of friends. Found a peer group. Found people who accepted me and were weird. People who valued the idiosyncratic. Started journaling. Realized I could grow if I learned things.

I went on an 8-day backpacking trip. When I came back went to the beach and ran into the water with my phone in pocket. It broke, and I didnt replace it. After a couple months I got a flip phone.

Started listening to Pink Floyd and sleeping outside. My roommate had sleep apnea pretty bad and I would rather be out in the redwoods. The campus had a lot of forest to go with it.

3.5 - Peter pan

I read a book called, “Sapiens”, told myself I could learn more on my own than I could in a classroom. Started doing a lot of things right for who I wanted to be. Started fasting, started reading regularly, meditated 20 min every day for a year.

I decided to drop out of college.

I had been living in the trailer park on the campus.

I found a spot in the redwoods nearby to setup a tent. Had access to the bathroom. There was regularly free food. I started living in a tent and listening to podcasts.

Learned how to juggle. Started to slackline. Spent my time doing god knows what. Lost my relationship to the structured learning that had pushed me into this. It was a wonderful time that I do not remember clearly. The days all blend together.

Winter came. I got rained out. My parents lent me a car. I lived in that car for 7 months. Found an opening in a community house. That was a 5 bedroom house with 14 to 15 people. My rent was 250$. I had 2 roomates and lived in the garage.

Started working the farmers market. Food service.

Fell in love with a housemate.

We watched ‘waking life’. We read philip k dick. We smoked cigarettes until dawn. Talking and being. Dancing and singing. We were in love.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

We got evicted. I bought a van to live in. Continued to fall deeper in love.

Years pass by. I’m working as a caregiver. Things are good between us. The baseline is loving. Had to deal with some community housing struggles. Still juggling everyday, started playing music. Taking some classes at a community college, not moving particularly swiftly towards anything. Not feeling connected to a goal. Good friends and fun. Lots of community.

4 years into that relationship I found Erick G. random chance. Entered the 3rdEyeDrops rabbithole. listened to every podcast they did together in a month.

Started writing the pages.

Started telling the truth.

I began to feel like something was dying.

Realized there were two things in my life I had avoided talking about with everyone I was close to:

1. My Dad was into Q-anon

2. He was paying for my tuition before I dropped out

I went on a walk with my partner and told her the first truth,

A couple days go by and the continued morning pages.

I have a dream about her:

We were on a date. In her room. In her bed. We had lit a candle and gone too sleep. While sleeping the candle had fallen over. When we woke up the edge of the sheet was on fire. The alarm clock said 3. We had slept in. I was late for work. It was the afternoon. It was dark out. The sun had yet to rise.

I started feeling physically bad when I was around her. I couldn't sleep next to her. Mentally I was confused and torn and still in love. In hindsight maybe I was never in love. I kept waking up with a horrible feeling. One night I pissed the bed, I didn't piss it a lot but I pissed a little. That doesn’t happen. I was confused and afraid.

I left town to visit a friend in Tahoe. When I came back I slept in my van. Prayed for a dream that night, prayed for some clarity. Inner dialogue like, “do I have to do this? I will do it, if I must.” I woke up with one of the worst physical pains. It was in my heart. I thought I might be having a heart attack. While sitting up in the state of confused-knowing, I heard a god awful sound. Right outside my van a bobcat was dying. Or giving birth. A mountain lion or a bobcat was in the throes of death-labor. I had a terrible nausea. I opened the door and sat up for 20 minutes feeling like I was about to throw up. The feeling that night was I know what I need to do and it hurts.

I broke her heart and mine. For a month I was completely destroyed and unable to function. I would have to stop at work, I was holding back tears. I couldn’t focus on the class I was in.

A couple months previous to this my mom had been having mental health struggles. She started to get paranoid and delusional. She thought the neighbors were gonna kill her. Woke up in the night thinking there was poison in the air. Starts behaving erratically (in her 60’s). Goes on a cruise and won’t return home. Thinks bad things regularly and has trouble sleeping.

I go backpacking for 22 days. I hiked the John Muir Trail.

When I got off the trail, my mom was in a mental hospital. She had stopped eating and drinking and they were keeping her for watch of suicide. My family had checked her in for dehydration. She had an episode because an advertisement played unexpectedly on her phone, she thought it was a cyber attack. The following week my father and brother could not get her to eat or drink. She thought they were trying to poison her. and she was feeling a current of electric shock run through her body.

At the mental ward once checked in, she was forced to stay. They did a bad job feeding her water. My 1st day back we went and picked her up. We were lucky to got a release. It was because we had an MRI scheduled that week and convinced the psychiatrist that her behavior was unusual to a concerning degree. To the point where she might have a brain tumor. She was middle-aged and sane *adjusted to the insanity of our collective world.

Here is a journal entry from that day:

I just returned from a backpacking trip; my mom is in the white hall of a mental hospital. She’s been here 5 days. There are other patients moaning and standing aimlessly around. We have to keep the door open while visiting. She is shaking uncontrollably and bordering hysterical. She is looking around. I don’t think she sees me. I can tell she is trying to figure out what the people in here want her to say. Her mind is broken, and my heart is crushed. The nurse comes in: “shes not leaving today” but the other male nurse just said she was. She was suppossed to be released at noon, its 5. The CEO is involved in this decision. It is a weird situation. It is unusual for a middle-aged woman to enter psychosis without a reason and to become bipolar of a sudden. Consequences of being an empty nestor? Brain Tumor? THe cumulative pain of living with a hole about something? i dont know.but she is in here and i am there too. I want to get her out of here. She is more dehydrated than when she got checked in and almost pisses herself in the lobby. The kidneys can do that when your urine gets too concentrated. The next two days are terrible. Im crying everytime i sit down beside her. She is a shell. What happened? How did she lose herself? Where did my mother go? How the fuck did this happen.

I’m here to learn how not to end up in my own version of that