There was one ranking system. Rankings weren’t based on SEO, keywords, or anything like that, but strictly on how many people read your blog.

Blogging was new. The first blog post was written in 1997–seven years before I began mine.

“The Facebook” began in 2004 but was only open to college students in selected colleges. Twitter was a twinkle in Jack Dorsey’s eye. Social media didn’t exist in its present form when I an “older” blogger began. I’m proud I had the nerve to do something so different.

Blogging was exciting. Blogging was like writing while walking on a high wire without a net. If you know me you know that’s impossible. Yet…..

Courting Destiny was #2,540 out of 55 million or 60 million. Ok it was a long time ago but damn that was exciting. My “A” rating lasted a long time.

Learning About NLD

I had no idea that I was about to set off on the journey of my lifetime, as I hadn’t yet learned about nonverbal learning disorder/disability (NLD, NVLD.

A friend who was writing a book about learning disorders called that June, to say that he had spoken to somebody about NLD, and she sounded a lot like me. He gave me her number…..

I spoke to her. Then I went to the psychiatrist who had refused me to give me an Asperger’s diagnosis in the 1990s though I thought I begged nicely. He had said that it didn’t fit me at all.

I asked why he never told me about NLD though it was so obviously The Diagnosis.

He told me there were several reasons that he never told me though I definitely had NLD; my verbal scores were much higher than my nonverbal scores to put it simply.

But I was doing so well!

Very little seemed to be known about NLD. I don’t have the socialization problems often associated with NLD, (though I can be socially anxious there’s a difference, he said.)

My psychiatrist thought that I was insightful, could easily see the big picture but seem to love to become mired in details. There were many other reasons why I had NLD and why he thought it shouldn’t make a difference in my life. I wish he had told me about NLD as knowing about it should have been my choice.

Wrongly Revisiting My Life

I read the little I could find on NLD. My parents were dead but I remembered my childhood–and had family and friends who knew me through every life stage. My childhood friends claimed that I was a leader–I did make up all the games my then best friend and I played. They either involved Nancy Drew or the Kennedy family–we loved them passionately.

Much of Courting is about my life in my 20s and 30s. I loved that stage of my life as I loved my childhood and my late teens. Actually I passionately love life. Even when I hate it I know there’s no place I would rather be than on earth.

I knew what I had accomplished with my life and vehemently disagreed with “the experts” who talked about adults with undiagnosed NLD.

We were supposed to be suicidal (either have “big” suicidal ideations, try it or die by suicide–I knew that was the last thing I was,) or we were supposed to “end up institutionalized.” And we weren’t supposed to have achieved success in life. Really? Then what was this blog?

Why did I get several managerial promotions when people with NLD weren’t supposed to read people well enough to be a manager? I was known at both computerized litigation companies that I worked at for being exceptionally good at managing. Was my life a lie? Had I only imagined the good?

Instead of staying in Manhattan and learning all I could about NLD I ran. But I looked and looked for help in the city. NLD help didn’t exist. Later I realized that my friends and family were valuable resources. Some of my best friends ever were my former supervisors and/or managers. They could tell me truth.

I should have gone to every hospital, every graduate school of psychology, and social work and asked for help in establishing a program for adult NLD. We’re not supposed to have life regrets. I don’t believe that.

Leaving New York

In 2008, I bought a house in a place that hadn’t ever been on my radar. But friends I originally knew from NY had a townhouse in North Myrtle Beach and it looked so darn pretty. Still is, but growing faster than a weed between my pavers.

I knew I was a spatial and physical organizational zilch. Strangely I made the house work. Though the original renovation oh god the original renovation. I didn’t even know that you’re supposed to level land prior to putting something on it or that when you’re putting tile where once was carpet you’re not supposed to put insulation under the tile. Little big things like that. Slowly I learned.

Ten Years Later

I spent much of 2019 renovating. Some renovating was left for “next year.” The work begins Monday. The worst of the old renovation was redone two years ago and this years work shouldn’t take six months or more. (I’ve blocked it out.) The 2019 renovation allowed me to process something that changed my life.

I very accidentally found my birth father in September, 2018 as we were waiting to evacuate for Hurricane Florence,. My birth mother’s name was Florence, and I always thought of her as a hurricane so it was fitting.

I am writing a book about my new reality as everything I had thought was real about my birth father was wrong. My birth mother became more complex to me and consequently more interesting.

I found out I have great DNA. Instead of wondering if I will die in my 70s, I have to prepare for a possibly long and healthy life! I am unduly excited about that.

I was getting everything together. Then 2020, the year all of us will remember forever, happened.

I live alone and took Covid more seriously than many in the South. It was an interesting year. I didn’t get that much done. My house and I survived, better for the wear, I think. That’s enough. Facebook became a great place to complain on!

A Very Quick Primer On How Blogging Has Changed

Creativity and quirkiness are no longer encouraged in blogging. That’s sad.

It’s easier to monetize a blog if you write about one subject. People, often, find a subject they think will sell. Then they expect to make much money. Some do.

Everyone’s an expert on their subject whether or not they have a background in it. People give advice and others take that advice.

So I Should Be An Advice Blogger

I have a degree, work and life experience, that makes me qualified to give advice; but my inner “something’s not right about this,” comes out, and I hesitate to put my expertise out there.

I wrote about NLD from the perspective of someone who is living with it–because I am. I comment on NLD groups, and answer from that perspective. I believe that everyone is an expert–even if they don’t yet realize it–on themselves.

I should be an expert on older age as that’s what I studied in grad school and worked in. People say that when we retire, for example, we’re supposed to put ourselves out there, be with as many people as possible, do as many in person activities as we can, or we will wither, become demented and die. Probably not quickly.

We now know that it helps to have many solitary activities–counter advice to all the advice we were always given. The NY Times is filled with articles on always living a less pressured life.

I always admired the woman in the nursing home who sat in the doorframe of her room, refused to take part in activities that were at a Kindergarten level, and do other things the nursing home admin thought she should. Instead she observed people and would tell me fascinating stories about staff, residents and visitors. I was supposed to write her up harshly. I refused.

Retirement bloggers found ways to get around their original advice so they didn’t look like idiots. No two people live the same exact life, with the same dreams and goals. We are learning what works for us, and hopefully will work for us in the future.

I wrote about NLD from the perspective of someone who is living with it–because I am. I comment on NLD groups, and answer from the perspective as I truly believe that everyone is an expert–even if they don’t yet realize it–on themselves.

Rena McDaniel, blogging wizard and friend,sent an email or Facebook message with ways to see old posts as they were then (old blog templates, yeah!) I looked up my blog. Suddenly I remembered that once I thought my blog was something special. Sometimes I still do.

Thanks Rena for making me remember!

The post Life Lessons From Technorati, Blogging And NLD appeared first on Courting Destiny.

My birth mother drove me past a number of bucolic streets to an alley filled with broken glass and other detritus. She said it had been cleaner the night in October, 1949, she and her boyfriend parked there, and I was conceived.

I have no idea whether she really told me that story or not. For a long time after the horrible vacuous weekend I spent mostly stuck in her four room house, I didn’t want to remember the details of our meeting. 

When people asked about it, and everyone that I ever met seemed to ask, I only said: “I was conceived in an alley.” That’s not true; that’s what I wanted to say. I mumbled something about how I was still digesting the weekend; actually, I mumbled that for the next ten years.

Though I’m a truthful person, sometimes an overly honest one, and an excellent observer, I’m not the most reliable narrator when it comes to that horrible weekend. How can I be?

I knew that going to her house was wrong but she refused to meet me at a motel halfway from my apartment across from The Central Park Zoo to her house in a small town in Columbia County, NY, before it became “in.” I explained to her that though my apartment had a plush address it was a rent stabilized studio with good bones, and many problems the new landlord refused to fix.

She thought I was lying. I know that now.

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Obviously this wasn’t written by me

The difference between me and a lot of my Democratic friends…..You see Trump’s arrogance, I see Trump’s confidence. You see Trump’s nationalism, I see Trump’s patriotism. You hear Trump’s unsophisticated words, I hear Trump’s honesty. You see Trump’s racism, I see Trump’s words being misconstrued and twisted by the media daily to fit their narrative. You see Trump as a Republican, I see Trump as a Patriot. You see Trump as a dictator, I see Trump as a leader. You see Trump as an Authoritarian, I see Trump as the only one willing to fight for our freedoms. You see Trump as childish, I see Trump as a fighter, unwilling to cave in to the lies. You see Trump as an unpolished politician, I see Trump as a breath of fresh air. You think Trump hates immigrants, I know Trump is married to an immigrant. You see Trump putting an end to immigration in America, I see Trump welcoming immigrants to America LEGALLY. You see Trump’s cages at the border, I see Obama’s cages at the border. You see Trump with a struggling economy, I see Trump with an amazing economy until the Democrats shut it down. You see the violence in the streets and call it “Trump’s America”, I see the violence in the streets of Democratic run cities who are refusing Trump’s help and call it “Liberal America.” You want someone more Presidential, I’m happy we have someone who finally doesn’t just talk the talk but actually walks the walk. You and I? We see things very differently.

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(Laugh! It was funny, and got me exactly nothing monetarily. It was, however, a cover story in a large Long Island weekly. I was quoted in national newspapers.)

I had a blog for Psychology Today, thousands of well-written, thought-out blog posts are in drafts, and I was a writer for a national newspaper. Many people told me that I was going to be the next big thing.

Yet I can’t get a damn book together.

If it makes others impatient think about how I feel? I’m trying not to be ashamed that I’m still trying when I know so many people who wrote popular books in three, six, twelve months.

I remember how I felt when the accolades stopped coming in droves. A lot of people hated me but that went with the territory.

I had never expected to be a blogger or to be a “well-known” one. A friend asked if I wanted to begin a blog like she was doing. After I asked what a blog was…almost kidding…I started writing stories on a blogging platform so that I could see my unedited never-intended-for-others words in print.

One Sunday, I wrote a political post, turned off my computer and went out to dinner. The next morning I woke up to almost 500 requests for link exchanges and other things. Little big problem: I had no idea what a link exchange was. I knew nothing. Nor did I realize that almost 500 requests then was 2004’s equivalent of going viral.

I never stopped working. People would email me. For some reason, they would get angry if I didn’t answer immediately. One young woman decided that I was going to be her best friend and emailed me every half hour. I knew she really wanted to know a male friend of mine and wasn’t interested in me as a friend. But, damn, that girl must have really hated her job because her emails were nonstop.

Another woman found out my phone number and address and was going to come to visit me. She was going to stay over. But I had never invited her and when I told her that she couldn’t stay in my apartment she took to dissing me all over blogland. There were other horror stories. But for every horror story there were three great ones.

It’s just that so many people contacted me, and were so insistent on me answering immediately that I could only get work done after 5 p.m.. And on weekends, holidays and the vacations my friends took to calling “changes of scenery,” as I worked my way through all of them. Never making a cent.

I realized how wrong this was. Others had no problems communicating. Most people would only email (this was before messaging and texting was in its infancy) for an hour or so a day. I told people that I would only answer one email a day, at a time that worked for me. Some people listened. I knew this was my problem. Others were only taking advantage of me because I let them. But why was I?

I had never had problems communicating with people, and suddenly I felt like I couldn’t communicate at all. When you have always been known as an excellent communicator — had careers built around communication — this was insane.

The only possible explanation was that I was going through early dementia. But I’m a geriatric social worker who was a walking thesaurus, making good decisions about other things, and if this was dementia it was unlike any I had ever heard about, and I knew them all.

It was one of the worst times of my life. I begged for help but couldn’t find anybody who understood what I was going through or what my problems were other than a sick need to please, and some computer problems. I knew that was the least of it. The psychiatrist I had been seeing on and off forever coined the term “internet addiction disorder” as a joke. It was taken seriously. Instead of thinking that I was horrible at computer-related issues he was impressed with how much I had taught myself. I knew he was wrong.

Once he had been a great diagnostician. I think he met too many people like me as now he specialized in bipolar which he told me I definitely wasn’t. Actually, he thought I wouldn’t have even been considered neurotic if it wasn’t for my previously undiagnosed problems. Now I had a blog that was as “successful” as his website. (Google gave rankings then. We were both “6’s” which was like hitting the blogging lottery. Or would have been had I been able to take it further.)

Blogging platforms in the Oughts weren’t as easy or as sophisticated then as they are today. There was no cloud. Though I saved everything, there were days, entire weeks, when I would cry because I would lose posts, sometimes the whole blog, and the blogging hosts I had then wouldn’t even give a phone number. They would fix things when they were ready. I have never permanently lost a post but I have lost many pictures, all my categories (don’t ask) and more.

It was confusing. I felt like the most successful failure ever or maybe the biggest failure who had achieved a level of success.

Finally, at almost 57, in 2007, I found out that I have nonverbal learning disorder (NLD,) a very confusing neurological problem. Yes, I spent almost 57 years wondering why I was slightly off. Why couldn’t I be organized? Why did I feel the need to apologize to everyone on the street for bumping into them — even when I didn’t?

Why couldn’t I be the success I was supposed to be? I had done well in all my careers. I was a career hopper. I left before I could be fired though nobody was planning on firing me. I knew that, yet I couldn’t help feeling that I was playing with fire. It would be just a matter of time before all my mistakes were discovered. I was convinced of that though I probably made fewer mistakes than many. No amount of therapy including cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) which worked for so many other problems could help solve this one.

If you ever want your mistakes pointed out to you, and told you’re horrible, become a “well-known” blogger who delves into issues. Maybe I wanted to be criticized. Maybe in my heart of hearts, I thought that I deserved to be told I wasn’t any good. More people told me that I was great but it’s easy to ignore compliments.

Learning about NLD was a big relief. For the first month. Then my problems seemed worse than they ever had been before.

The very limited information I found about adults said that I should have at least tried to kill myself — and if I didn’t succeed at that — I should have been institutionalized for life. Thanks, Byron Rourke for your absurd, sad, scary beliefs about NLD. You led the way for many to think that all people with NLD were the biggest of life’s losers.

I am finally ready to discuss the life behind the life I have led for the past two decades. It’s not at all gloom and doom.

I loved blogging about the life I had led in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Social skills had never been a problem. Or had they been and I just always met the world’s nicest people — in Manhattan! (After learning about NLD, I became unsure of just about everything.)

I loved telling stories about my parents — two people I miss every day. We had always had a deep connection and once I moved back from Boston when I was 25, I forged individual friendships with both my parents. That wasn’t “popular” in the 1970s and ’80s, and until my friends had children of their own, they made fun of me. Then they wanted to know all about my upbringing, and other things that showed me their making fun of me might have been a defense. When I say “making fun of,” I’m talking about normal kidding. At least it was in New York.

Writing stories about my parents was my way of staying connected with the dead. I had been adopted. When I was a child all my problems were blamed on “the trauma of adoption.” Though people talk about that now more than ever before, I had always known that I was adopted. My parents were matter-of-fact about it and told me that I was adopted, along with my name, and that they loved me. Adoption wasn’t traumatic for me, and if there was one thing that I knew for sure it was that. ADD and other problems that are often comorbid with NLD were considered to be “problems of adoption.” This added a lot of confusion to the mix.

But this book isn’t going to be about my childhood, fascinating as it might be to me. It’s about an adult who received a very disturbing diagnosis at a time in her life when everything seemed off. My mother had died very suddenly the month after 9/11. I lived in Manhattan and was expected to mourn the victims of 9/11. My mother? She was just an old lady. It was her time. But she was my mother, and my friend, and I swear I felt the umbilical cord fall off after her death.

There were no support groups for people who had family and friends die around the time of the attacks but not in the attacks. Organization after organization told me that they had to allocate all their resources including rooms to family and friends of victims. It amazed me that I could have gone to Kindergarten with somebody who died and gotten more support than I did.

For the first time, I wasn’t resilient. Blogging about my mother’s death from all angles, and the reactions of other bloggers, saved me. I will always be grateful to the large community of bloggers who supported me. Many have become lifelong friends.

But NLD? They couldn’t understand that. The communication problems that I was having weren’t with them. I realized that the better a writer and thinker a person was the more nuanced their blogging was. I understood nuanced blogging and communication.

Still, once I got the NLD diagnosis I was convinced that I couldn’t really comprehend the written word. Wasn’t that a big symptom of NLD? I told myself that not everyone had every symptom and if we had a symptom we had different levels of severity. I wrote about that. Yet I didn’t really believe it! I do now, but it took me forever to reach that place of understanding.

I have spent the past almost-thirteen years trying to work my way back to confidence. Welcome to my story!

Crossposted at Medium

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Eighteen years. Eighteen short/long years.

To Jews the number eighteen is special. “Chai” equals 18. That means “life.”

L’ Chaim is a toast you’ve probably heard on TV, in a movie or a show. It means: “to life.”

Today is a day to celebrate life. Today is a day to remember watching, in much disbelief, two beloved buildings fall down.

Today is the day we remember every moment of 9/11/2001 with sadness and some awe.

For members of my generation, the baby boomers, it must be like December 7th, 1941 was to our parents — but that day had closure; we won.

Maybe it is more like the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, a day I remember with clarity. It was the day Camelot ended. We weren’t to know it then, but it was the day postwar euphoria, prosperity, and faith in the future was going to begin to erode.

This isn’t meant to be about meaningless wars. I can’t help but think of all the people who have left parts of their selves or their lives in faraway countries. “Thank you for your service,” doesn’t begin to suffice.

Many younger people don’t understand the importance of 9/11. My instinct is to say that’s OK. It’s not OK. America changed that day in ways we don’t really understand yet.

As all my friends and relatives know, a month later my mother fell and died fifteen minutes later.

I’m not a crier but I lived near three fire stations. One lost eleven, the second thirteen and the third seventeen. That’s 41 firemen, just from my part of the Upper West Side, who died. I would walk past the fire stations, look at the memorials and begin to cry.

I had to go to Long Island often, and at the Long Island Rail Road, I would look at letters from kids all over the world and begin to cry. That was a cry of hope.

When I went downtown I was lost. The Towers had always been there to guide me to my many jobs, and other places. It didn’t seem right. Nothing seemed right. Since The Towers were no longer there to guide me, my balance seemed less sure. I felt unmoored.

When I wanted to bawl from sadness I would go down to Union Square and look at the missing posters. There were times that I didn’t know if I was crying for buildings or for my mother. It was difficult. So difficult my love for New York began to erode just a bit.

Seven years after 9/11 almost to the month I sold my apartment and moved to South Carolina to begin a new life. I have lived here for over a decade now and have a new life. A good life.

Yet there are many moments I yearn for New York. Then I remember how many of my friends have left.

I remember that 9/11 brought new blood into the city; people with more money than I, and New York is damn unaffordable.

Once in the late 1980s, my best friend’s father came to New York from California. We drove through Manhattan to show him 1980s, New York. He saw the New York we lived in, and the New York he had lived in, in the 1920s through ‘70s, at once. I marveled at that. Now I’m older (not nearly as old as he was) and I’m beginning to understand for when I go to New York I see many New Yorks mixed together.

EB White, the author, said many things best. He said that New York was ever-changing; that the best New Yorker’s weren’t us natives but the people who came to the city hungry to make it.

I took umbrage at that and in some ways still, do. Yet many of my friends were immigrants, and I always thought that they belonged in New York as much as I do. (White was, I believe, talking about people from other states.)

I feel sorry for the newcomers as they will never know the New York that I knew. But my father felt sorry for me as I never knew the New York he knew though I heard his stories, and feel as if I know East Harlem when he grew up so long ago.

I understand what EB White meant much better now. New York has always belonged to the young, to the dreamers, to the people who have a strong desire to make it.

Understand this: I and everyone I know who left didn’t leave because of 9/11. We left for a variety of reasons mostly having to do with money and quality of life. I wanted to know what it was like to live in more than 630 square feet; to have outdoor space; to have a washer/dryer and dishwasher. (Material girl, I am.)

But I miss the magic of New York City streets.

New York will always be the place my grandparents and great grandparents came to on a boat and never left. It will always be the place that afforded their children opportunities to be educated; to have careers; to move freely among others without fearing that they would be physically attacked. They could vote in New York; own land — so many things that had been denied them in Belarus.

Until recently I took all this for granted. Not anymore.

New York is a sanctuary city. It has always welcomed immigrants for we knew and know how much they have to offer. They add color, vibrancy, great food from many lands, skills oh so many skills, and yes they do the jobs that none of us deem to be fitting.

I had promised myself that I would never politicize 9/11. Now I think a bit differently. We live in uncertain, startling times. To not speak out would be a cowardly act. In my parents and grandparents memory, I will always speak out. It is my way of honoring them. It’s also a New York thing.

I have hope. Eighteen means luck and I have faith that we, the American people, will rise up. For not to rise up means the terrorists really did win. And we can never let that happen.

The cartoon above is by R. O. Blechman, a client, and a friend of my father’s. It’s always been my favorite 9/11 image as it expresses exactly what I feel.

Blechman spent 25 years building an incredible studio on West 47th Street, The Ink Tank. His home was on the Upper West Side and Madonna bought the apartment next door. To me, he epitomizes the wonders of Manhattan. Like so many of us, he left. In his case for his summer home upstate.

The post Remembering 9/11: Live And Resist appeared first on Courting Destiny.

No, I wasn’t expecting this name. Actually, I had never heard of the name before. It sounded WASPY.

I don’t know what I had been expecting. But the last thing I expected was to find my birth father. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that I might find him, and everything possible crosses this mind.

When I clicked on my DNA matches I stared at the first result for the longest/shortest moment of my life.

Less than a month before I had spat into a tube and sent it to Ancestry as I thought Ancestry would catch the widest net.

But I had let three tubes expire because as much as I wanted to do this, something had been holding me back. Let me be real. I was scared.

Yet I immediately did what any person with the internet would do. I googled the last name, and my birth father’s first initial. Within a few seconds, I was reading his recent obit. Recent: as in several months prior to my clicking on the matches.

Understand this.

My birth mother, the very bitter and nasty-to-me Florence (she tried to be nice but uh…), hadn’t told anyone about me.

Yet somehow she let people assume my birth father was a dissolute abusive alcoholic who had died at 33 of some kind of cancer.

It was good that he died as his children hated him–I spoke to one; and his very Catholic wife was going to divorce him–the year before the Ecumenical Council.

I’m not Catholic but I know that Catholics didn’t get divorced in 1963. It was against all cannon laws. (I think I have that straight).

The man who I thought was my half older birth brother (yes I would have been the product of an affair) had sounded crass, and not like somebody I wanted to know. He told me that he couldn’t wait to visit me so that he and his siblings could go hunting.

Though I live in South Carolina, I despise guns. How could I be related to a family that loves to hunt?

I didn’t know if my real birth family loved to hunt or not. Suddenly I didn’t care. They seemed like people with great interests and values. They seemed like people I would want to know. (All this from an obituary. It was very long and detailed.)

What should I do? It didn’t seem right to get in touch with the people I knew were my half birth siblings so soon after their father died. He was 90 when he died, and from the obit, I could tell how much his family loved him.

My birth father sounded like a truly good man.

I thought and hoped and almost prayed.

I didn’t realize that I would care so much. When I thought the first man was my birth father knowing his family was so unimportant to my life. Yet I had spoken to one child, and maybe that was all I needed. Or maybe I needed more. I had no idea.

How do you measure a man who died at 33, yet his family welcomed the death, against a man who died at 90, yet his family thought that was too soon?

Why was I measuring? I had to put the wrong one out of my mind. But for five or six years I had thought he was the one.

My adoptive father died at 77 and my adoptive mother at 86. I thought they were way too young to die.

From now on my adoptive parents will be referred to as “my mom” and “my dad” because they were, and always will be, my real parents.

In my mind and memories, my dad was the best man I knew: eccentric, funny, brilliant at many things, not so great at some other things. He was the person who had encouraged me to search for my birth mother from the time I was fourteen.

The day I clicked on my DNA results I thought about my parents. My dad would have been over the moon. He thought that anybody related to me had to be incredible. He also couldn’t understand people who didn’t want to know their own life story.

My mom would have been more reticent. She was wiser in some ways and very protective. Though maybe she would have felt different about a birth father than a birth mother. That’s something I wish I knew.

I had to get in touch with my birth family. But I know what it’s like to lose parents. Their mother had died a few years earlier. Probably their father’s fresh death had made their mother’s death new again to them. I had to give them time to grieve.

And let myself remember that just because somebody is your blood relative it doesn’t mean that you’re going to want to know each other. I had to remember that so that I could develop a shield of armor. And figure out what I wanted. Or didn’t want.

Was I just curious? Would this be important to my life? But first would they speak to me? And maybe I should contact Flo’s nephew to see if he knew this family. If he did I might have a way into the family.

This is the beginning of a book and a revised Courting Destiny

The post Hurricane Florence: The DNA Conundrum appeared first on Courting Destiny.

I began Courting Destiny in August, 2004. For three or four years it was the technorati ranked #1 baby boomer blog, and was in the top one percent of all 60 million blogs then.

I have no idea how I did it. I remember thinking that I was very good at PR, and should have realized that I excelled at this decades before. Being me I wouldn’t have believed it in earlier decades.

Yes I’m reviving my blog while I write a book that’s more about searching than anything else. Searching for birth parents (not every day or every month or even every year. It wasn’t high on my priority list.)

After I found my birth father, very accidentally, I realized that my whole life has been a search for one thing or another. I don’t think that’s a bad way to live.

Even the blog’s name Courting Destiny is about searching for the impossible.

I was searching for the name of the problems that had plagued me all my life. Help would have been incredible, also.

My life was fuller than most people’s despite these problems. I continually challenged myself, and didn’t think “poor me, let me wait until later in life to achieve or even live.”

So thankful that my independent streak won over fear. Do have to say that fear played a huge part in my life. Sometimes it still does. But fear of not living was my first and biggest fear.

After Charlottesville, I read a blog post by a popular local blogger. It talked about how nothing was ever solved by peaceful protest. Mother Teresa herself had said that she wouldn’t go to an anti-war protest but a pro-peace rally.

Stupid me. I thought protests were for something, and I wrote this blog post in response to the blogger’s post.

I lost some friends over that post. I think they thought I was attacking a wonderful blogger. I wasn’t, but was trying to explain why I believe in protesting. I know they thought I was attacking their religion–Christian.

Never. I was trying to explain how a Jew would automatically be, would be sickened by a president talking about “fine neo-Nazis.” But they didn’t want to listen.

I blamed myself for being “nasty,” when I wasn’t. I’m not into the whole “nasty woman” thing. I would rather act than label; rather explain than stay silent. Apparently the only good Jews, to some people here, are the ones who remain silent. How could I?

Charlottesville, and the reaction to my blog post changed me. Charlottesville made me realize that I had been living in a glass dome. One where I thought people didn’t hate others because of their beliefs whether they be political, social, or religious.

Charlottesville was a seminal event in my life. Sadly it was as life-changing as 9/11 was. Yes, it was.

The realization that I’m really a minority group member–how could that not affect my thinking?

For the past two years, I have reflected more and more about what it means to be Jewish, and why it is incredibly important that we who are Jewish speak out.

But I seemed to have lost any ability to write something more than a Facebook post or comment on another one.

I’m in a constant state of minor depression because for the first time in my life I understand why my parents insisted on living in Jewish semi-gilded ghettos.

My maternal grandmother, Bubbe Ceila, was my favorite person. I talk about how she taught me to fight for freedom–everyone’s freedom because if one person or group isn’t free in America, none of us are.

There is something I don’t talk about. When Bubbe Ceila lived in Belarus, she was separated from her family. Drunken Cossak soldiers found her. I don’t know what they did to her. Somehow a family of “friendly Christians” found and saved her. They couldn’t get word to her family for a week. Bubbe Ceila was eleven then.

I carry her legacy in my heart always. It is a wonderful legacy that’s better than money, diamonds, anything material. It’s a legacy of caring and acting.

She taught me that all people are worthy. It’s because of Bubbe Ceila that after high school and my first college, I sought out people from very different backgrounds than mine.

I don’t care what a person believes as long as they’re willing to listen to me, too.

I have been told that I hate Christians.

That’s far far from the truth.

Even if I wanted to I couldn’t hate a whole group of people simply because they worship differently than my family. Then I would be my own enemy and that’s too complicated a concept for a simple mind like mine to grasp.

Differences are good. Differences are what makes the United States a unique country that I love very much. Though right now I’m more than a bit angry at the president. I was brought up to dislike and distrust liars and our president lies every time he opens his damn mouth.

I can’t go into the events of this weekend, August 3rd and 4th. My heart is broken, and I’m too angry.

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