Before we start this podcast, I want to say that every project I have pretty much has
a village behind it, and this one is no exception.
I want to thank the patrons who stepped in on my Kickstarter to really make sure that
this got off the ground.
Denise Grady, Caden White-Wattam, Amanda Peake, Todd A. Davis, Jay Grant, and Corey Watson.
Without you guys, I wouldn't be sitting here talking with the awesome guest that I'm
about to talk to.
Thank you so much.
So full disclosure, it's our second time recording because the first time the audio just didn't
come through, but I'm thinking that we'll be able to pull a good recording out of this.
So thank you for, you know, sitting with me a second time.
No worries.
Yeah.
Welcome to It's Your Lost podcast, where raw stories of resilience and healing are told,
all while uncovering and destigmatizing the diverse symptoms of loss.
Welcome back to the podcast.
If you missed last month's episode, well, it's your loss.
I'm your host, Michael LeBlanc, and I have with me author extraordinaire, just an all-around
cool person.
I think she's done two books now.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Two books.
It's Cat Higgs.
Cool Thard.
Hello.
How are you?
I'm great.
So happy to be here.
Thanks, Michael.
Not a problem, but I'll go ahead and ask you the same thing that I ask everybody else.
Cat, what did you lose?
Well, I've lost so many things in my life, but the core memory that I still am in processing
is my house burned down when I was in fifth grade.
So in that moment, we lost everything except the people that were valuable in our lives.
We lost our home where we were living, all our possessions, and the sense of community
that I was living in that area when the house burned down.
We couldn't live there anymore.
So that was also a huge loss.
That is a huge loss.
That's a huge loss sandwich.
There's a lot of layers to that.
And one of the things that feel like that, that parallels is a big part of your book
called Junkyard Dogs where the main character's house burns down and you find out more about
it as the story goes on.
And I feel like it's interesting that you say this happened to you in fifth grade and
you're still processing it now.
And I'm sure they're like writing that was a point of catharsis and everything.
But before we jump all the way into the deep end with that, you mentioned on your sign
of sheet that you like two games.
One is Centipede, which I couldn't find a way to do a two player centipede over Zoom.
I scratched my head furiously for that one for like 15 minutes before I gave up and landed
on battleship.
And I don't know if you know this, but the actual idea of battleship is a very old game
originated in France.
And it was called Le Tac back then and the version of it anyway of just like people drawing
dots and trying to guess where the dots were and trying to sink ships and whatnot.
And so I was like, we can do that on paper.
We can go old school.
So no one's ever going to see this because I'm not doing that.
Well, actually they might they see an ad for this, but I gave you a printout for battleship.
I have mine.
We have placed our ships.
And now throughout the throughout the thing, just, you know, we'll go back and forth.
We'll do a letter number combinations and see just how many hits we get.
We don't, we're not even like measuring ships here.
We're just going to see at least how many hits we get.
And as you were the guest, I'll go ahead and let you shout out the first combination.
Okay, let's see.
How about a 10?
That would be a mess.
All right.
And I'll come back and come back at you in just a little bit.
Just just real quick.
When did you like battleship?
You said it is one of your favorite games.
It's one of your favorite games from childhood.
Is it something that you discovered later?
Yeah, I grew up.
I just have one sibling.
And so two player games were kind of the norm in our household.
Our parents would play with us sometimes, but they usually wanted to play games like
monopoly or Euker.
So battleship was something my brother and I played quite a bit.
Yeah, monopoly and Euker.
Those are the real good games that young kids just want to dive into.
Yeah.
Property tax, please mom.
Just, you say that's 10% so I know exactly what that is.
I'll come back with a, like I said, another shot here in a little bit, but let's, let's
talk about junkyard dogs for a minute, which is a wonderful book.
The characters have depth.
The stakes just always seem to be rising throughout there, but it starts from a very much from
a place of hurt where this character is, I mean, still, still reeling from it.
It seems like even though that things are kind of settled form, how much, I mean, obviously,
like I said, it's got to come from point of catharsis, but how much of your own personal
pain did you feel like you were putting into the character when you were creating Josh?
That's a great question.
I feel like a lot of times writers hear this axiom about write what you know.
And so I really have struggled with that in my early writing career.
I was writing a lot of autobiographical stuff and I realized, you know, my own life isn't
necessarily all that interesting told intact as an autobiography or memoir, but my own
emotional journey has a lot of relevance for what other people are going through and what
they're experiencing.
So I mind what I knew emotionally and the questions that I had about why, why things
happen, why there are losses in our lives to inform the characters that I was creating.
So everyone in junkyard dogs is dealing with some type of loss, as is everyone in the real
world.
They really are.
Yeah, we've all lost something.
So I wanted to think carefully about, you know, my own emotional journeys and how I could
use that to inform Josh's emotional journey specifically.
So with him, you know, he's trying to define what family means and how to, how to be who
he is in a world where his family isn't the typical family, isn't what we would hope for
in a family.
Right.
So he's dealing with that continual ongoing loss of what, what, you know, losing his idealistic
family.
He doesn't have that.
And then he does also lose his house.
So that also informed it.
Yeah.
And you said that pretty much everybody is dealing with loss in there.
And you're right.
Like even the, the from protagonist to antagonist, like everybody is dealing with some sort of
loss and you can tell who's doing it healthily and who is just writing the flames as far
as they will go.
Adds to the intensity of the story.
I'm going to go ahead and call it a shot here.
I'm going to say about C2.
Yes.
Okay.
When did you, you said you were fifth grade, right?
Fifth grade when, when your house were known.
So tell me, like, if you're still processing it, you got to know, what was your emotional
standpoint?
What was going through your head when you found that out?
I think it's kind of like the stages of grief.
You know, I didn't believe it at first.
My dad showed up at school and a classmate came down to the cafeteria to tell me, Hey,
your dad's in the office.
And I'm like, why?
You know, so as a fifth grader, I tracked down to the office and my dad is standing there
and he just blurts it out.
Our house is on fire.
I'm taking you home.
So he went and got my little brother who was four years younger than me and put us in this
truck and drove us home to watch our house burn down.
It was so just incredibly surreal, like be there in the moment watching that happen.
So it was just this, like, this is, this isn't real, right?
This is like a nightmare.
It just, it's not even, not even a nightmare in terms of fear.
It's just numbness.
You're just your first initial response is like, this can't be happening.
Right.
Wow.
I can imagine it just, just out of curiosity, would you have rather had seen the aftermath
or had seen the flames?
You know, I have so many questions about my parents' choices in life, but I really, I
believe that we all do the best we know how to do in the moment.
And so I, you know, it's hard to say what's best for kids in that moment.
I definitely have a lot of writing material now because I'm having watched that.
The trauma barrel is full.
And I think it was really helpful because my mother had been at work and she went straight
to the house thinking that we were there.
So for her to see us physically alive, okay, standing outside the house, that that was
really helpful versus, you know, just my mom showing up and my dad saying, Oh yeah, they're
at school.
It's really interesting how parents handled different things though, because during 9-11,
when all of that happened, I had a child in kindergarten and a two year old.
And I called the school and I was like, what should I do?
And they're like, no, leave your child here.
We want their day to be normal.
And so I showed up at the end of the day and my kid was the only kid left because every
other parent picked their kid up.
And I'm like, there's no win here.
And it still didn't turn out to be a normal day.
They were like, oh, where's everybody else going?
Yes.
Wow.
And that, I mean, I've made questionable choices on other people's behalf when like
traumatic events happened, like we had a pet that passed away one time.
It was, it was sudden.
It was sad.
And in that time, my only thought was, and this was weird, it was, it's a disconnected
trains of thought that were just like hitting each other.
And I thought at the time, my wife, my wife at the time was like, she, she has a hard
time bending down.
She's not going to be able to pet the dog.
And then so I picked up the dog, which if you know anything about animals after they
pass away, that's not a good idea.
There are things that are, that were contained and all of a sudden they're not anymore.
And the horrified response from her, you went, what the hell are you doing?
I'm like, I wanted you to pet the dog.
And like, so we like to think we have our shit together as adults, but let's be honest,
we're just, we're holding on.
No, I mummified a frog once from that same, like my, my child's bullfrog died while they
were away at summer camp.
And I thought, you know, they need to see their, they need to see their pet and say
bye, so I put it in a little box because they were going to be home the next day.
I'm like, I'll just save, take it out of the water so it doesn't degrade and I'll save
it.
And then when they came home from camp, everything was so hectic and busy that I literally forgot
for three days.
And then when my child asked, I'm like, oh, let me show you sparkle.
So I go to open, open the little box I have sparkle in and it was legitimately like mummified.
Oh yeah.
The child was so horrified.
And I just dried out desiccated frog husk, oh my goodness.
Awful.
Once you, once you call out a shot for your next shot, what you got?
Okay, let's try A8.
A8, that is a miss as well.
The house is burned down.
Now in, in Josh's story, he lost a significant member of his family.
And I don't want to give it away in case anybody wants to read your book, which they
should.
But would you lose anybody in that like pet or anything like that?
No, we were really fortunate that we were at school when it happened.
It was kind of a departure from the norm though, because normally my mother, she was a school
bus driver.
She would have left for work and my dad would take us across the street to my aunt and uncles
where we would catch the bus from there.
And that day my dad didn't take us over there.
He drove us directly to school.
So my mom thought when she called my aunts, and we weren't there and my aunt didn't know
why she thought we were in the house.
So it was terrifying for my mother until she got there.
But yeah, but luckily nobody was home except our cats.
And Frisky was my childhood cat and she had just had a litter of kittens and she carried
them one by one out through a broken window.
So we had a hero cat when I was a child.
They all survived.
That's a good mom.
So I've had a lot of mom cats in my life and none of them, like some of them just like
forgot half their litter.
I'll be honest with you, this mom's super hero.
That is amazing.
Well, I'm glad.
I'm glad you didn't lose any people.
But I mean, obviously, like you said, there's a sense of security.
Obviously a loss of a whole lot of items, which when you're in fifth grade items are
your world.
Like you got your parents and you got your items.
So what were some kind of like coping mechanisms like looking back?
You probably didn't think that you didn't know the word coping mechanism probably in
fifth grade.
But like, what do you think?
Like maybe you were developing around that time.
Like how were you handling it?
Not well, probably.
You know, as a kid, you don't really, you don't realize how loss will continue to affect
you later in life.
So like, I don't have baby pictures of myself or my brother.
I don't have my parents wedding photos.
You know, all of that stuff was destroyed.
Any family heritage stuff that we had was all destroyed unless my grandparents had some
of them.
So we have a few baby pictures, but it was just what my grandparents had.
But just your room, like you were saying, is the center of who you are as a person.
It's where you cultivate your own artifacts and start to see yourself reflected back at
you.
And that was just suddenly gone.
And I was living, you know, immediately going from my room, my comfort zone, into living
in an apartment that had completely white walls and I had nothing to put on them.
So luckily the community came together for us and donated a lot of things and someone
donated some posters and I had stuff eventually, but it was a sharp transition.
Sure.
Big loss like that happens.
It doesn't just like happen to you.
You know, it happens to you.
But the idea of it, it kind of shakes other people around you as well.
Like, like were you ever, you ever at school and like one of the kids come in and found
out like their grandparent passed away or something like that during the school year
and all of a sudden like all these other kids are just like kind of awkward and they're
like, I'm so sorry for you.
And like, and then like somebody makes a joke and he's like, one person gets really angry
and he's like, don't make fun of him.
His grandma died.
Where did you, you develop like a stigma to the rest of the people at school at that
point where you like all of a sudden the girl whose house burned down and it's so like,
how long did that last?
I don't specifically remember that.
The stigma that I remember is, hey, you're wearing my shirt because a lot of the kids
in the community had donated because we lost everything on the fire.
So kids are blunt.
Yeah.
I had no clothes.
I had no shoes.
I only what I was wearing that day at school.
So the kids who had donated things would sometimes comment on the fact that I was wearing what
they would donated.
And you know, as a child, you feel that kind of shame and humiliation because we were already
living in poverty.
And so then to like wearing other people's hand me downs was, there was some real shame
in that.
Yeah.
So that made it difficult.
Man.
From somebody who suffers a social anxiety and I feel like it's only gotten like kind
of worse as I got an adult because I'm more self aware than ever was when I was younger.
I, yeah, that, that I'm getting like secondhand embarrassment now.
Just thinking about how you were feeling at that.
That's rough.
And by the way, G five.
Oh, that is a mess.
Oh, crap.
You were able to stay with your family.
After Virginia, you got the apartment.
You started building from there on which, you know, I can only imagine what that did
for you as far as like preparing for like later in life, like the fragility of knowing that
everything could be gone in a moment.
But in, in the book that you wrote, Josh's living situation seems to be like out of the
frying pan into the fire type situation.
So like when you decided to make that choice for him, or sometimes people let the characters
have their own decisions, like where they wind up landing, but that's a whole different
other conversation about writing.
Was it for the story's sake that you wound up putting him in kind of like a more dire
situation, or were you just feeling like it was the natural progression of things?
It seemed to be so the original story idea had him losing his home and having to go live
with his uncle Stan, who is homeless at the time, they're living in an abandoned building.
So that's where the story kernel started.
So I knew that was going to happen.
And how he got there was where I had to think about how did he lose his home?
Why is he all of a sudden living with his uncle Stan?
And so that, that's where I was like, well, what could happen where you would lose your
home?
Someone could throw you out, your house could burn down.
And the, the idea of the house burning down became such a pivotal theme in the book because
it, it started to drive a lot of the choices that he made.
It drove a lot of the, the character development of other characters.
And then it wound up becoming a very strong plot point.
Yeah.
It was very, it was very much an anchor, an important anchor in that.
And it's, it's good that it, it's an event because an event spawns so many other small
eddies that you can follow along.
You know, it gives you a little bit more play when it comes to writing, but also I think
it gives more depth for you to play with in general.
Speaking of Stan, I wanted to ask, was, was there a, a parallel of Stan in your life?
Because Stan, Stan was a, a very layered and ultimately very dark person.
Was there, is there a Stan in your life?
Well, that's a money question, isn't it?
Everybody was like, you know, who, who did you fashion Stan after?
Who did you stash fashion grand after?
Oh, that's true.
Grand was also very dark character.
And so the safe answer is no one, no one.
But the truth is that, you know, all the characters are amalgamations of people that I've had in
my life at some point.
You know, like the character might not be directly my uncle or directly this person,
but I take facets of people I've met in my life and I try to figure out who people are
and why they're doing the things they're doing and the choices that they're making in the
world.
And so sometimes putting them in the form of a character or giving one trait to that character
helps me kind of, it's almost like therapy.
It's like, why did that person do that?
Well, let's play with this idea a little bit.
And maybe I can change the story on the page a little bit, even if I can't change it in
real life.
So Stan is not directly modeled after anyone.
He actually was inspired by someone that I just saw walking on the street one day that
was just had very interesting mannerisms.
The gentleman was walking down the street in November, which is cold here in Southwest
Michigan.
He didn't have shoes on and he was walking with his head tilted up toward the sky, which
is an unusual way to walk, especially if you don't have shoes on alongside of the road.
You know, I'd be looking at the ground and make sure I don't step on anything.
But then he was rolling his hands as he walked and looking at the sky and I just thought,
I really wanted to know more about that individual.
So that was the initial character sketch came from him.
So nothing to do with his personality or, you know, any life choices he had made other
than that momentary...
That snapshot.
Yeah.
So a lot of people, when they develop the coping mechanisms to deal with stress and
or trauma, they wind up overanalyzing people.
Ultimately, up to the point where they even try to do like mind reading, you know, to think,
hey, what is that person thinking just by the way that they're acting or moving?
And I'm wondering if maybe you didn't pick up a little bit of that and kind of like squirreled
away and become this power of trying to amalgamate people.
Like wondering if that might have something to do with it.
I don't know.
I've been going to therapy.
These are things that I've been learning.
That's an interesting question though, because I think I had that trait even before the fires
because my mother also drove Dyloride, which is kind of like a Uber for multiple people
at the same time.
So it would pick you up at your house, but it might pick up other people and drop them
off on the way.
And I would go with her sometimes and take my notebook with me and I would sit in the
back of the Dyloride bus and I would make notations about other people's behavior.
But I think that came from the book, Harriet the Spy, which I had read.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
You know, I've always been a writer as long as I can remember.
So that was just a, let me be Harriet the spy and I'll write about people and make up
stories about their lives.
That's a good wholesome way to pick up that trait.
I like that.
Yeah.
I think that's one of the people who are reading Harriet the Spy and Encyclopedia Brown, you
know, the books that talk kids critical thinking, maybe that's where that came from.
I like that.
Do you have a shot for me before we continue on?
I do.
I'm going to go with F4.
F4.
That is a miss.
I know.
Without like digging too much in the book, because the book only takes place like, for
me, it felt like it took place over like three or four days.
And I'm not quite sure about the timeframe, but that's because I binge read that.
Like actually I had an audio book, which is, which is a treat in itself because the guy
who they chose to read, can't remember his name.
Do you remember his name, Ronald Fand?
Oh yeah, Robbie Damon.
There we go.
Robbie Damon.
Yeah.
One of the voices for Spider-Man back in the nineties.
Actually, great voice actor, brought your book to life.
And like I said, it was within a day that I read it.
So you don't get to see what happens to Josh as he grows up, as he becomes an adult and
takes all of these experiences with him and becomes whatever he becomes.
But you have, you know, you've grown up.
You said you're just still processing.
What are some of the biggest traits that you feel in your life are in direct response to
losing such a big part of your space at a young age?
I think that I processed some of that in writing the character of Gran.
I just want to say I am not Gran.
Yeah.
No one in my life is that just inherently not.
Gran was horrible.
She was a horrible person, but her own choices were limited when she was, she went through
some very difficult things and she was really struggling.
And you know, as she says in the book, she's, she's already raised her kids and now here
she is with two more and she just isn't bound for that.
And should she be, you know, does she have to, and that's one of the questions I was
exploring, like, do you have an inherent obligation to take responsibility for other
people's choices?
She didn't choose to have those kids and now.
Yeah.
They're a good point.
So, um, yeah, I mean, I think I was through the character of Gran, I was exploring this
opposite of hoarder.
So no one in my life is a hoarder, but I kind of have this tendency to not let things matter
very much, let items matter very much to me.
So, um, you know, when someone gives me a gift, I'm grateful for it.
It has that meaning attached to it.
But if I were to lose that, I wouldn't have a huge meltdown.
It's the momentary they loved me and gave me this item that, that emotional response
in the moment that mattered the most to me.
It's like that, the personification of it's the thought that matters.
That's actually how I feel about things.
If, you know, I just don't feel the need to collect things.
And that was really helpful.
I went through a kind of a, not great divorce and we had a lot of things in our home and
he wanted to keep most of them and I didn't fight because it wasn't the things that mattered.
It was the relationships with my kids and I wanted to keep that civil with their father
instead of fighting over all these things.
And I think if I hadn't had that core mentality of items in your life are not what's important,
I might have fought harder in relationships.
So that probably pretty much shaped your love language going forward too.
You're not so much of a physical gift neater, but more of like actions or maybe words of
affirmation or something like that.
I mean, like the flowers are always good, but it's, you know, it's, they're not going
to stick around forever either.
Right.
So do you think maybe it shaped your relationship with people at all with the way that you handle
relationships like a come and go type situation?
No, I think I have deep, deep bonds and deep connection.
I don't see people as disposable.
I do.
There's a lot of stuff, you know, we all have stuff.
Yeah.
There's a lot of stuff in my family history growing up and relationships with extended
family and that has shaped things.
I think that the one thing that house burn burning down did for me is it showed me that
you don't have to be completely alone when there's trauma.
And so the way the community came together and helped our family so that, you know, the
neighbor, my baby said or donated her dresser.
So I had a place to put the clothes that other people donated instead of just piles in this
apartment.
You know, somebody donated dolls for, I was a little bit old for dolls at that point,
but it meant something that they cared enough to give me a doll.
And you know, I just, I saw community as a resource, not in a way that you like exploit
the resource, but like as in you have people to lean on, you're not in this alone.
And I've continued to think of it that way.
That's one of the themes in junkyard dogs is Josh has to figure out that, you know, his
family might not be great at supporting him and being there for him, but there are other
people around who can be there and help him.
Right.
So let's talk about book writing and whatnot.
I feel like it's a good space for this ad read.
So this podcast, shamelessly is brought to you by my own book, dink.
That's right.
DND and the coffin hold of the USS enterprise.
It may not have burning buildings or evil grandmothers, but it does have a bunch of coming
of age and great stories about being in the military and trying not to be depressed.
Pick it up in Amazon or wherever you get your digital books.
And I'm hoping that everybody is going to get a chance to read that, including you.
Yeah, including you.
I want everyone to, to, to read it.
So you know, I'm just going to, you know, shamelessly say, Hey, read my book.
Awesome.
I have your book.
Good.
I had a guy who said, All right, I'm flying to Europe.
Now I have time to read your book.
I'm like, Okay, Hey, that, that's fine.
Read the book on the plane.
It's a plane book.
I am perfectly fine with that.
I am calling out I nine.
I nine is on this.
No hits so far.
Neither one of us have hit anything.
I will tell you this, and I can't obviously do this on paper.
It would be too messy, too many scratchouts or anything.
But when I used to play with my brother when I was younger, my idea was that boats are
in the ocean and they move.
So so you cheated.
Yeah, I would put flashes, you know, assure you none of my ships.
They're all stationary ink on paper today.
Yes, yes, they are to their detriment.
All right, so you value people, you value relationships, things can come and go because
you've seen it happen.
Do you ever feel like you are on edge that something might happen in the future to the
point where maybe like you're either you're you're constantly warning yourself or you're
making sure that others are safe all the time?
Like, is there any of that happening?
Yeah, there is a hyper vigilance that comes with having.
Lost term.
Yeah, something so consequential as your entire home.
The current home I live in does not have a fire extinguisher and I'm very aware of that.
The home I lived in before this had a fire extinguisher.
This home that I live in now has a gas stove and that is slightly terrifying for me.
If I there's even a hint of any smell, I'm like, is that gas?
Are you sure that's not gas?
So I'm on top of fire extinguishers or fire or they call fire smoke detectors.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All have the batteries are carbon monoxide monitors.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that has up to date batteries and I've got one in the basement right outside my kids'
room.
I put in I remodeled the house so it would have an egress room when we put a basement
with a bedroom in.
So there is that just true fear of we have a we don't have a leaf pickup in our neighborhood.
Somebody comes and picks up the fall leaves.
And so, you know, if you live in a state that has three seasons, it's really important to
be able to get rid of those leaves.
Yes.
We have a lot of oak trees and we would break them into a fire pit now and burn them.
But when my husband's doing that, I'm like, unless the hose can reach out to that fire
pit, unless you're standing out there, unless you have a metal rake, like I can't.
Yeah, it's very hard.
Chuckling only because you're smiling at yourself because you know, you know, I mean, you've
lived with your own hyper vigilance.
So at this point, you know, it's it's easier.
It's easier for you to kind of, you know, laugh at that.
And it's like, yeah, I'm the crazy mom always thinking about fire.
But I will tell you, I wasn't home one day and my mother called me because she lives
with me because she's elderly.
She called me and the neighbors had accidentally set their field on fire and the fire was coming
across toward our property.
It melted the fence between our two properties.
So yes, it's hyper vigilance, but is it though?
Fire's always around the corner.
So let me ask you, is there a point where you're going to be like, I'm getting rid of
that gas stove?
Are you going electric sometime soon?
It's going to die on its own eventually.
It's already it's so old.
It's a beautiful antique looking stove, but the oven itself is not fun.
It's like a small little oven, like the size of my computer screen.
It's hard to put anything in it.
So it needs to go, but not because it's gas.
Gotcha.
Well, you got a, do you have a shot for me?
I know if you don't move them.
That's true.
They are stationary.
I'm going to go H five.
Oh snap.
That's a hit.
You are now on the lead.
Congratulations.
Well, can't just sit there and not retaliate immediately.
D six.
What?
That's also a hit.
Now we're even.
I've, I've, I've, I've done the thing.
I've made the shots.
There were times, a couple of times in the book that the character Josh had flashbacks
due to sense of smell or very smell.
I mean, smells one of the biggest memory triggering things out there, but you know,
where he would just kind of like flashback to that moment of seeing and just being enveloped
in the past.
Do you ever have moments like that?
No, I do have, I can still smell what it was like when the house was on fire and especially
after the house burned down, my dad let us walk through the burnt down house after it,
you know, days later when everything was done smoldering.
And I remember the smell of the molted, melted washing machine, that metal, like I can smell
it and we're talking 40 years later, I can smell that.
And I think that when I smell things burning sometimes makes me remember it, but it doesn't
take me back.
And I think the big difference is I wasn't in the house.
That's true.
Like I think I had a little bit of removal there in terms of the experience.
I was watching it, but I wasn't, I wasn't living it the way that Josh and the story,
he's in the house when it's on fire and he's not sure where his brother is, where his mother
is.
That's a whole nother level of trauma.
Yeah.
I've always found this interesting for people who create situations like that.
Where did you pull that kind of deep emotional trauma response from then?
Was it talking to other people?
Was it just you following your own mental process of what it might have been like?
I think it was, it was me.
It was thinking it through of like, okay, we could have died there.
What if, what if we hadn't, you know, gone to school that day like my mother thought,
but it's also, you know, I've had, it's not the only loss I've had in my life.
And I think that there's been other situations in my life where I felt paralyzed by what's
happening around me.
And that kind of informed that complete abject terror moment of, I don't know how to stop
this.
I don't know what's going on.
Okay.
Well, we got, we've got a little bit of, of inches left in this pool to dive down into.
Do you want to talk about one of the other now?
No?
Okay.
That's fine.
That's all right.
I'll tell you what, call, call another shot real quick and then I'll think about what
the heck I was about to just ask.
All right.
Sorry to like say no to that, but it's okay.
No, I mean, oh, that actually helps me remember what I was going to say.
So call your other shot and know where we're going after this.
Okay.
So since I have a hit here, I'm going to go H four.
That's a miss.
It's saving grace right there.
You said that you're still processing this and it's been, you know, X amount of years
later because who am I to age you on a podcast that, you know, that people don't know you
that well.
What, what methods are you using to process this?
Are you seeing a therapist?
Is it just a personal journey?
I wound up not seeing a therapist at the time of the fire because that wasn't a value trait
that my family of origin had.
My father has literally said nobody can read a book and tell you how you feel.
And I'm like, well, that is actually not the point of therapy at all.
And if you'd ever been in therapy, you would understand that they're not trying to tell
you how you feel.
They're trying to help you build resilience and mechanisms to handle the things that are
happening to you and to be able to look for ways to lift yourself up and get the support
you need.
And so I wound up, I will tell you, I did lose a baby when I was at term.
So when we lost that baby and then shortly after that, my, I'll tell you this too, my
uncle was murdered and they found him burned death in the trunk of his car.
And so that was like, came right on the heels of losing that baby.
And that the phone call I was, had been close to my uncle as a child, but I wasn't, hadn't
talked to him in, in a couple of years, but it was like, my uncle died, not just died,
but was horrifically murdered by fire.
And, and it just, just buried a child.
And then it just pulled me all back to all the trauma was all on top of me all at once.
It wasn't, I had dealt with anything about the childhood fire.
It wasn't that I had processed, even though I had, I thought I had processed all these
things individually, but in the moment of experiencing another trauma, it all piled
on me in a way that I was on the bathroom floor.
I'd been in the middle of giving my kid, my other kid a bath when I got the phone call
about my uncle and I was on the bathroom floor unable to function.
And luckily my husband at the time was there and came in and was able to finish the bath
and get me off the floor.
And this comment to me was that it wasn't about me, that my uncle's death wasn't about
me, that losing the baby hadn't been my fault.
Like he was trying to stay the right thing at the time, but he's remember if it was him
or someone else who said it was like God's will, you know, that you can't fight God's
will that these things just happen.
And in that moment I was like done, like no more, nobody can give me anything else.
I am not getting out of this bed.
And so I did go to therapy.
I was able to, through the help of an antidepressant, I was able to start to process.
I'm still, it's a life journey processing, the things that happened.
And without the therapy and without the antidepressant, I don't know that I would have, I just don't
know how that would have resolved.
So I'm very thankful that he was able to help get me help at the time because just there's
some things you can't carry by yourself and you shouldn't have to.
A lot of times, depending on where you grew up, depending on what your family's like,
you get the advice when bad things happen, like kind of like just a shrug is like, Hey,
bad things happen.
You just got to keep moving, you know, store that shit away, cry about it later.
Throw some dirt on it.
Yeah.
And then the next thing you know, something comes up and it's uprooting everything and
you're just looking at the fetid mess of everything in your past, which is what happened to you.
Which man, all that happening at once.
So sorry about that.
But I'm glad, I'm glad that you, you know, you had somebody around you who was, you know,
you got the therapy, you got the, you got the meds that you needed.
And have you ever ran into anybody in your family or anybody that you know now who knows
that you might take an antidepressant and, you know, ask, you know, Hey, why are you
on drugs?
Like, can't you just handle it yourself?
Yeah.
And I have to be, you know, transparent.
I'm not on antidepressants anymore.
It's been years, that was years ago and I haven't had to sustain that, but I know that it's
a resource I can turn to again.
And so that's also been helpful because I'm monitoring my own emotional need at the moment.
And I would definitely go back on antidepressants if I needed to.
I haven't needed that right now.
But you know, there is that stigma.
Like why are you, why do you need medication to cope with life?
Everybody has it difficult.
Why can't you just, you know, pull up your big girl panties and be fine.
And it's like you being on medication is a way of being fine.
That is being fine.
Not recognizing when you need help, not getting on medication is not fine.
But there was a long period in my life where I would literally picture problems as putting
them in a box, putting the box on a shelf and then behind a brick wall.
And that's exactly why everything fell on me when my uncle died is because all these
boxes were just stacked up and not dealt with.
And that's not healthy.
That's not fine.
I like how between different people that I talk to, everybody's got their own difference,
their own mental metaphor of what it looks like to, to suppress, to suppress, to forget,
to worry about it later, you know, burying or storing it away or burning it or shipping
it away.
When I was young, I used to think about like all the bad things that was happening to me.
I'd say up till about 25, I used to do this and I would have like little meditation moments
of envisioning a very sharp horizon line and just sending everything to it until it just
disappeared.
And yeah, I wasn't processing anything like as I found out when I started therapy and
then wrote my book, which has a lot of very cathartic things to write in there as far
as traumas that had happened to me and how I grew up.
Realize it.
Yeah, I wasn't dealing with none of it.
I was just ignoring it, putting a smile on my face.
Because that's what we're told to do.
Exactly.
It's a shot.
Is it mine?
I think it's your shot.
I think it's mine.
Let's do E6.
Oh, that is another hit.
Oh, wait.
Last time when you hit something, when I hit something, you got to fire back right away.
So since you hit something, I'm going to fire back.
Go ahead.
As is your right.
So I'm going to say G5.
G5.
That is a miss.
That's what it's called strategic placement.
But I promise you, promise you it's not.
It hasn't been.
The more I say that, the more guilty I sound, but I promise you.
I think you protest too much.
Yeah.
I'm glad we had the second go round because one, I'm a little bit more practiced on talking
with people now.
I feel like I'm more comfortable with the process and like during one of my last conversations,
I got to ask somebody, you know, were they glad that their mom died, which is a strong
question.
I mean, there's actually a couple of good things I think that came from what you were
saying as far as what you've developed.
As far as there's the hypervigilism, you know, is making sure that people are safe.
You have a stronger bond when it comes to the people around you because you know that,
you know, loss can happen.
And because you know that loss can happen, you're not necessarily holding on to physical
items, which for some people is that's huge.
That's unimaginable because physical items are kind of all they have, especially in the
consumerizing or consumer based economy.
But is there anything about the experience that you're like, maybe not, hey, I'm glad
my house burned down, but you know that because that happened, you're stronger in a certain
way.
Is there a strength that you recognize out of that?
I mean, that's kind of echoing back to what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
I would much rather be stronger without having go through all the stuff that we've had to
go through.
But I do feel like you can't experience tremendous joy if you haven't felt sorrow.
You know, you need the balance in life of these ups and downs to be able to really appreciate
where you are and what you've done and who the people around you are, you know, needing.
I learned to rely on other people a little bit more than I might have.
If my house hadn't burned down because just seeing the way the community came forward,
it also made me more giving because it happened, you know, as an once I've been an adult, there
was somebody in the area who's home burned down.
It happens all the time, but I was able to then, you know, help a little bit with that.
And I might not have been so I don't know who I would have been without having my own
losses.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I'm reminded it's a it's a big point in video games and books and a lot of media has, you
know, there's no light without the darkness.
There's no darkness without the light.
Life is very much about balance and some people lit one side or the other sweep them away.
I mean, you can you can kind of tell which side is like you find somebody who's like
a little too happy and doesn't want to talk about the negative.
You're kind of wondering what's happened to you that you want to bury that.
And then there's the other way around where they're so gloom and doom, you're like, oh,
goodness.
How can we help you process what's ever happened?
But you know, we can't fix everybody as much as I want to like, I'm a big I'm a big like,
hey, what can I do to help even though like knowing sometimes I'm not a position to help.
But again, hey, I'm going to therapy for all this.
So let's do one more round of shots on battleship, not alcohol, because I'm diabetic.
That's a bad idea.
Let's see, I believe I did the last one.
So go ahead.
No, I think I did the last one.
You did.
You're right.
I'm reading this wrong.
Okay.
Then let's say C six.
Is it?
All right.
So is that a full ship or is there still more hits on that?
Yeah, you have not sunk anything.
I hadn't sunk anything.
All right.
I'm going to counter fire.
Go for it.
So I'm going to say I five.
I five.
Oh, dear.
Okay.
I'm going to give you more than these ships.
That was a miss.
I'm going to give you one more shot just to give you continuity and also because I'm a
sporting host.
It'd be really funny if I didn't call the shop that I should call.
Yeah, I know, right?
Oh, okay.
No, let's go H six.
H six.
That is a hit and also no sinking there.
Full disclosure.
You were hitting on my aircraft carrier.
Have you ever done the, whenever you're playing battleships, you ever do the thing where it's
like all around the ring and just like have a big shield or something?
Yeah, in the center.
Yeah.
And you only get away with that for a couple of times before like the other person like
next time they play, they just start getting all the rims.
You know, like, I've also clumped them all in the middle before.
Like just like layered them together.
That doesn't usually end well.
No, no.
I will tell you from, I think anybody who's watching any kind of military anything, you
know, you don't put all your assets in one area and just let somebody get shelled.
So this is the moment where you get to talk about the things that you have done that you
are doing.
Plug away.
Yeah, plug away.
It's hard to like trumpet your own horn sometimes.
I know.
Yeah.
So who am I?
Who am I doing?
I junkyard dogs came out in 2023 in February.
So that was huge.
I'm super excited.
I'm doing tours and school visits related to that.
So I was just up in Rochester Hills, Michigan near Detroit.
Yesterday, there was a school district that did my book for the battle of the books and
then they challenged me to a trivia contest about my own book.
Oh, that's great.
So that was that was interesting.
I missed three.
I missed three out of 20 questions.
But to be fair, those were things that changed during revision, who died and when like that
changed revision process.
And then I'm working on another book.
It's well, first of all, Junkyard Dogs will come out paperback in April this year.
So I'm super excited about that and reach a whole new group of readers.
And then I'm working on another story.
It's a ghost story.
It's also about loss.
It's also about family dynamics and who's there for you and why.
And this story is its tentative title is Twisted Roots, but we'll see if we get to keep that
during revision process.
And it's the story of a mother and a child who are playing hide and go seek.
And the little boy goes missing during that game of hide and go seek.
Okay.
Well, where can people find you?
They can find me online at right with cat.
That's my website.
I'm also on Instagram and Twitter and X and tick tock.
I have a couple of TikTok videos.
So learning.
I do.
And also Junkyard Dogs is wherever books are sold.
So nice.
Nice.
Yeah, I was actually revisiting the Junkyard Dogs area on Amazon.
And the other paperbacks are available for preorder right now.
Yeah, I saw that.
And I was like, Hey, good for her.
And the reviews are pretty good, except for like a couple of them that I saw were there.
Like it's a downer.
And I'm like, yeah.
Did you read the jacket?
Like, you know what you were getting into?
Like, I knew that like this was going to be the cover and just having writing with you
before, I know you can get dark and gritty.
So I was so excited to do.
It was a journey.
I loved it.
What can I say?
I could keep gushing about you for hours, but this isn't that kind of podcast.
And I don't think reviews are so hard, you know, they're hit or miss just like Battleship.
Yes.
So it's the book you wanted to read at the time, you know, then you're going to love
it if it's not the book you're looking for.
Like one person literally gave me a one star and said, I'm very disappointed.
It wasn't a biography about my friend.
But Junkyard Dogs, to be fair, it one of the inspirations was the manhole murders that
happened in South Bend, Indiana in 2006.
There were four men found dead in the manhole covers.
And so that does play into the story a little bit.
So I think he went into it thinking it was about one of the deceased men that actually
died in the manhole in South Bend.
But still.
I'm glad you brought that up because I know we mentioned that last time that we had a
recording, but I had forgotten to reiterate for, you know, this fresh recording that's
actually going to be heard by people that, you know, you weren't involved with a bunch
of murders that happened in the area.
Right.
Yeah.
There wasn't that much trauma going on.
And well, and of course, everybody can find me pretty much anywhere at sitting with you.
No G. You know, plug myself.
It's my own podcast.
Why not?
Right?
Yeah.
And I've also been working on my outro, which it took four episodes to finally get out.
And it's pretty much just a rehash of the intro.
I have been your host, Michael the Blanc.
And if you happen to miss next month's episode, well, still it's your loss.
Yeah, it's been great.
Thanks for having me.
Not a problem.
Have a great day and everybody out there listening.
Have a great day as well.
Bye bye.