My Childhood:

Born and raised in Massachusetts in a bedroom town that wasn’t rich but was very comfortable. My parents had me when they were 32 and 33 years old, which was considered a bit old to be having kids back in 1965. My sister Tammy was 8 years older and my brother Larry was 12 years older.

The house we lived in when I was born was next to my maternal grandparents. We spent our summers in a small cottage at a Connecticut beach and moved to the older section of town when I was around 12.

My health issues consisted mainly of asthma, allergies, and a deformed ear in which my ear canal was also fused shut. Had surgery in Boston to build an outer ear through plastic surgery, but ended up with something that looked worse than what I started with.

My Teens:

Having an abusive mother with an enabling father who chose to look the other way, I developed emotional issues that left me insecure and eventually to attempt suicide.

As a child with ADHD, I didn’t always do well in school or get along well with others. I ended up in an adolescent psychiatric hospital in Vermont for 5 months which my mother promised me I would come out of as a “whole new person,” and then I attended an alternative school in the city.

In April of 1982, my parents gave me up to the state. I went through a couple of foster homes, one with a loving Italian couple and another with a neglectful black woman, before a quick trip to the state funny farm and then a private girls’ school for two years, which I hated. I did, however, become close with a few students and staffers which I’m in touch with today on Facebook.

My 20s:

Got my first apartment in the city the day before I turned 20 in 1985. At the time I was working as a housekeeper at a hotel just below the state line. I soon lost my job and went on disability.

I became a very liberal person who had both boyfriends and girlfriends. Nothing was a “sin” to me so long as the people were of age and consenting.

I had two apartments in Springfield, MA, one in South Deerfield, MA, and then I spent four months and the projects in Norwich, CT.

Had a nervous breakdown mostly due to the noise that put stress on me and prevented me from sleeping, then I finally gave up on the East altogether. I moved to Phoenix Arizona in 1992 where a longtime friend and gay guy lived that I’m no longer friends with.

For a while, I was an exotic dancer, and my husband Tom was my neighbor in one of the four apartments I would have in Phoenix before I moved into his house with him. We married in 1994. We lived in Phoenix from 1993-1999. We went through four different neighbors next door while we were there, each one progressively worse.

My 30s

In 1996 I had surgery to remove what was left of my outer left ear and to create an ear canal. I’ve had intermittent earaches because of it for the last 12 years, but surgery was necessary to rule out a tumor once I began to experience sensitivity within the ear.

In 1997 I quit smoking and in 1999 we bought a 10-acre ranch in rural Maricopa and lived there for five years.

We traded in Arizona for Oregon in 2004 after purchasing a 2.5-acre parcel of land. Our plans to build a dome house quickly fell through due to the expenses which added up fast, prompting us to rent first a duplex and then a small, old rundown house in the town of Klamath Falls.

I hated the cold and the snow, but my husband eventually got a good-paying job and we had a lot of fun shopping and winning things. I would enter tons of sweeps and contests and would win something every few days back then, from little prizes to big prizes, before the competition grew fierce with the onslaught of social media.

My 40s

We moved to NorCal in 2007. The recession damn near killed us. We spent the first eight months in motels, then rented a dumpy old trailer out in the country for five years. My husband was on unemployment for 2.5 years, and I’m not able to work mostly due to circadian rhythm disorder.

In the fall of 2011, he was finally given a good-paying job and it was all uphill from there. In the summer of 2013, we bought a two-bedroom house in a gated adult community. It’s a little noisier than I’d like, but we love having something that’s not so old and all the extra space.

In January 2014 we took a wonderful trip to Maui with travel credit I won right after I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease and told I had high cholesterol.

July 9th of that year and one day shy of our 1-year anniversary in this house, I called the paramedics in a panic because I thought I was having a heart attack and suspected my thyroid medication was connected to it somehow. It was absolutely terrifying and I believed I would die that day. It wasn’t a heart attack, however, just extreme anxiety unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.

My 50s

The incident with my thyroid medication traumatized me so deeply that I was compelled to switch medical groups (though we also switched for other reasons) and I began to see a therapist. I suffered on and off for a year and a half. Tachycardia, along with perimenopause, was a factor in what happened. They all fueled each other in a bad way.

In late January we flew from California to Fort Lauderdale, Florida and then went on a cruise to Cozumel, Mexico. The cruise ended up being a nightmare, but reuniting with the sister I hadn’t seen in 25 years back in Florida, along with seeing two of my nieces since they were babies, was a wonderful experience.