When I accepted a six-month contract as a technical writer at Corning Glass in Wilmington, North Carolina, I felt a strange mix of relief and guarded hope. The pay, especially with the per diem that wasn’t taxed, meant I could finally make ends meet on my own. My engineering background had made the job possible — technical writing was work I could do without loving it, and I didn’t need to love it. I needed it to carry me.
I took everything with me, though the contract was temporary. Maybe part of me wanted to leave the door open to return after six months. Maybe part of me already knew I would never go back.
The truth was, leaving my parents’ house wasn’t about logistics — it was about survival.
Growing up, I had learned the art of hiding: sharing only enough to appear as if I was doing what was expected, while keeping my real feelings out of sight. In those last months under their roof, that old strategy had become my lifeline. I gave them just enough to keep the peace — talk of job applications, polite conversation — while my deeper grief and panic stayed locked away.
What I didn’t say was that every day under their roof felt like I was disappearing.
I was leaving on rocky ground, carrying everything I owned. The contract gave me distance before it gave me direction.
In April 1992, just after my twenty-sixth birthday, I arrived in Wilmington operating mostly on automatic — not thinking in terms of a long-term plan, just the next thing, and the next.
Wilmington did not heal me. But it gave the part of me that still wanted a future enough room to move.
I felt the difference almost immediately, in small physical ways before I had words for it. I could sit in a living room without scanning for the next sharp word, without measuring every move against my mother’s cold judgment. My breathing was easier.
Celta’s love had been the great leap — the coming alive I have already described, being seen through the eyes of love. The years in my parents’ house had taken some of that ground back, a few steps at a time.
Wilmington was not another leap. It was the chance to return to healing — to start walking forward again. I was still grieving, still frightened underneath — but away from that house, I could act. The dream I had carried since Georgia Regional, the one that had gone still and quiet in North Augusta, began to move again.
Donna, my new roommate, was friendly and welcoming. We went out together a few times, but nothing romantic ever developed. Mostly, it was just comforting to share a home with someone who was easy to be around. That simple comfort was more healing than I realized.
The Poetry Reading That Changed Everything
That first week, I decided to attend a poetry reading at the Coastline Convention Center. Martin Kirby had encouraged me to keep sharing my writing, and I knew I wanted more than quiet evenings in my room. I wanted to build a circle where I could belong.
Before I went, I called to ask about the reading. A man named Jean Arthur Jones took the call — Jean, spelled the way a woman spells it. I asked him one question that mattered more than it sounded: did people read their own poetry there? They did.
That was when I made the decision — before I ever saw the room. I would be at the microphone. Not “maybe,” not “if it feels right once I’m there.” I deliberately left myself no option to back out, because I knew that if the choice stayed open, the old patterns would take it.
I had never been the focus of attention in my life. In my undergraduate years at Georgia Tech I could not bring myself to speak in a classroom where people would turn and look at me — and that was after years of real growth there, growth I was proud of. The old patterns had remained anyway.
But the dream demanded something different. A therapist stands where people are looking to him. He leads groups. He is, whether he likes it or not, the center of attention. If that was who I intended to become, then I had to start getting used to being seen — and the decision had to be made in advance, where fear couldn’t veto it.
The reading was on the fourth floor, overlooking the Cape Fear River. As the sun set, its light streamed through tall windows, scattering into a kaleidoscope of reds, oranges, and blues across the water and spilling into the room. The warmth of that light clung to me like a promise.
The room was small — maybe ten or fifteen people — intimate in a way that made every voice feel important.
Dusty, the emcee, moved through the group with an ease that reminded me of what I had always longed for in a mother: calm authority, warmth without judgment. She did not have to know my whole story to make room for the part of it I could bring.
When it was my turn, the decision I had made on the phone held. I walked up to the microphone, put myself at the center of attention, and read a few poems I had written about Celta and the grief that still weighed on me. My voice didn’t shake the way I feared it would; the applause that followed felt genuine.
A small act, but for me it was a break from years of shyness and selfdoubt. The room became one of the first places in Wilmington where Celta’s name could exist.
As I sat down, Dusty passed by, and her look met mine. It wasn’t just a glance — it was a message: You did great. You’re welcome here. You belong.
Later, she called our poems “gifts,” and for the first time I believed she meant mine too. To bring grief and loss into the open and have it received as a gift — that was something no medication had ever given me.
The light from the windows faded into twilight, and for the first time in a long time, I felt anchored.
It wasn’t that Celta was still with me — she wasn’t in Wilmington. But the love she had given me had planted something I carried forward: the belief that I was worth loving. Her delight in me had become an internal anchor.
It did not remove the grief, but it changed the meaning of being seen — and it placed me in a position to feel the warmth of this new place, to receive Dusty’s welcome, and to let the applause of strangers sink in.
In hypnosis, they call this an anchor — a cue that connects you to a particular state of mind. I had never created one deliberately, but that night, I discovered one had been planted in me. Celta’s love had given me the capacity to feel calm, belonging, and safety here, in Wilmington, under a sunset I would never forget.
The room gave me more than applause. Jean Arthur Jones — the man from the phone call — turned out to be a fixture of that circle, and he offered something rarer than praise: honest feedback.
That first weekend I shared with him a poem called “The Swing.” He was direct about what worked and what didn’t. It was humbling — and it made me want to grow as a writer.
In those first readings I was still sharing grief and loss, and the room received it. But a circle was forming around me, the thing I had wanted when I walked in, and a circle pulls you forward.
Finding My Way Back to the Work
At the same time, I was searching hard for a foothold in mental health. Reading at the microphone had been part of the same plan — practice at being seen, proof that I could step forward instead of hiding. But practice wasn’t the work itself.
The search led me to The Oaks, the psychiatric hospital affiliated with New Hanover Regional Medical Center, and to Chris Hauge, DSW, LCSW.
I told him I had volunteered at Georgia Regional Hospital, that I was preparing to pursue a Master of Social Work, and that I hoped one day to return to The Oaks as an intern. I had doubted, in the worst months, whether the dream could survive. In Wilmington, I acted as if it could.
Because I worked weekdays at Corning, I came in on Saturdays. Often it was just the two of us covering new admissions, and the social-work assessments had to be completed within twenty-four hours.
From the first morning, Chris treated me like a clinician in the making. He would hand me the census and a blank intake packet — “We’re on a 24-hour clock” — and we would split the list. I would breathe, introduce myself to the first patient, and start where the story was strongest: What brought you in?
Before I checked any psychiatrist’s note, Chris would ask, “What’s your impression?” I would say it out loud, and later compare. Sometimes I was right, sometimes close, sometimes I simply learned. The point wasn’t perfection. It was learning to see clearly under time pressure — and to trust that seeing.
Georgia Regional had given me something essential: the comfort of sitting with psychiatric patients, of listening without flinching, of discovering that I could care. But the patients I had known there could tell me their stories. The Oaks introduced me to a different challenge.
Some of the people I met on those Saturday mornings had what clinicians call the negative symptoms of schizophrenia — though what I saw was simpler and harder than the term suggests. A flat voice. Answers of two or three words, offered without energy or elaboration. A gaze that stayed somewhere in the middle distance.
I remember sitting across from a young man whose entire history had to be assembled one short answer at a time, each question a small act of patience, mine and his. There was no hostility in his silence. There was just very little coming out, and a person somewhere behind it whose story still needed to be told within twenty-four hours.
At Georgia Regional, I had learned that I could care. At The Oaks, I began learning that caring had to become skill — structure, persistence, knowing which question to ask when open questions returned nothing, and staying present when presence was difficult.
I was not fully trained; I knew that. But the work asked more of me than sympathy, and I found I could answer.
The work at The Oaks was real — deadlines, charts, intakes, people in pain whose stories needed to be heard quickly and well.
It wasn’t a place to shadow or play at learning. It was where skills, values, and purpose began clicking together. Helping others wasn’t just a career path. It was what made my life make sense.
Flyers Everywhere
By early summer, the poetry world I had stepped into that first week had its own rhythm — the readings, the familiar faces, Dusty’s room above the river. And flyers had begun appearing all over that world, announcing a larger poetry event down in Carolina Beach. The host was DJ Ray, who lived there on the beach — a man of music as much as poetry, as I recall.
It seemed like everywhere I turned, the same flyer was looking back at me.
I could not have imagined how amazing the next part of the story would be. I was not thinking in terms of destiny or the life I would eventually build. I was working at Corning, reading poems at the open mic, finding my way back into psychiatric work, and planning to attend a larger poetry event in Carolina Beach because the flyers seemed to be everywhere.
And somewhere in that spring, without my noticing the moment it happened, grief had stopped being the only thing I felt. There was a girl in that poetry world. Lynn.
I was curious about her. Then I was captivated.
I wanted to know more about her.
I wanted to know her.