EMILY PRATT SLATIN

About

Press Kit

She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

2 Weeks Notice

December 18, 2025—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

"Some endings do not arrive like storms—they arrive like paperwork."—Emily Pratt Slatin

I have spent most of my life thinking the big, life-altering moments would announce themselves with some kind of unmistakable drama—like the universe would at least have the decency to kick the door down to get my attention.

It does not. At least not in my case.

For me, the moments that changed everything tended to show up the way a termination letter shows up—quietly, impersonally, and with a timeline that feels almost insulting.

Two weeks was all the time I was ever given to prepare in life when it came to life-altering turning points. Two weeks is long enough for your nervous system to register that something is off, and short enough that you cannot build a new life fast enough to outrun what is coming. Two weeks is the runway where you can still pretend it is not real—while the ground crew is already pulling the cones out and pointing at the exit.

I can trace so many turning points in my life to that exact window. It is like my brain holds them as keyframes—frozen images with hard edges, burned in so sharply I can still feel the temperature of the air in each one. The goodbyes, the betrayals, the exits, the sudden recalibration of who I was allowed to be.

I keep thinking about it tonight because my autistic mind is already doing its usual nighttime audit. The furnace cycles on and off—steady, mechanical, loyal. The linoleum floor in the kitchen answers back cold when I leave my bedroom. Outside, the pines hold their shape against the dark like they are refusing to be moved by anything as petty as time. I have the radio low, because I always do. Not for company—more like a baseline, a signal that says, yes, the world is still turning, and yes, I am still here with it.

And in this quiet, the memories come in the way they always do for me—not as a tidy timeline, but as a stack of still frames that my mind flips through when it wants to remind me what it has survived.

Grade eight. I remember the hallway like it is still lit up in fluorescent glare. I remember that weird institutional mix of floor wax, paper, and somebody's cafeteria pizza from three rooms away. I remember the feeling in my stomach—this low, cold, sinking thing that did not even have language yet, just physics.

Two weeks before graduation, I got suspended.

One afternoon I was sent to the principal's office—not for fighting, not for failing, but for existing wrong. Under pressure from my father, I had been reported for acting "too feminine," as if that were a behavior and not simply biology doing its job. The school psychologist tilted her head and spoke carefully, suggesting I might be transgender, because my father had enrolled me as a boy and it was, to anyone with eyes, obvious that I was a girl.

The principal sat behind his desk, tired and irritated, explaining that he was running out of options, that he would likely suggest boarding school to my parents—as if distance could solve what honesty refused to name.

I listened, calm in that way children get when adults are already lost, and when he finally stopped talking, all I said was "You know you cannot reach me…the devil controls me…obviously."

I did not mean it theatrically. I meant it precisely. It was the only language available that matched the absurdity of a room full of adults trying to correct something that was never broken, just misunderstood.

People like to treat school suspensions as moral theater. As a lesson. As an example. As a cautionary tale. But in my memory, it was not about discipline. It was about exile. It was a line drawn in permanent marker that said, you are not wanted in the room where everyone else gets to be normal.

I did not have a teenage movie moment where I cried into a locker door. I did not have a dramatic apology arc. What I had was a strange, calm clarity—the kind that only shows up when a door closes and you realize you do not have to keep auditioning for the people behind it.

Two weeks. I remember going home and looking at the calendar hung from an oversized magnet on my parents refrigerator, and realizing that graduation was going to happen with or without me, and that the world would keep moving with or without my little body in the chair, wearing the "right clothes", and pretending it meant something. It meant nothing to me, and that was the first time I understood—deeply, in my bones—that socioeducational milestones are not guarantees. They are just events people attend out of social obligation if the gatekeepers let them.

This was one of my first lessons in how my life would go: I would never be handed a clean, easy "normal" path, and I would find a way to survive anyway.

Then there was boarding school. I still have complicated feelings about that word, because it sounds so polished, so intentional, so respectable—like it was a privilege, like it was a choice, like it was some kind of curated stepping stone toward a future I was supposed to want. What it actually felt like was being put in a box and told to behave like a boy. And then, two weeks before the senior trip, I ran away.

That one is a keyframe with motion blur. The kind of memory that smells like cold air and metal, like fear mixed with adrenaline. I remember the way my body moved with a certainty my mind did not have time to question. I remember thinking, I cannot stay here another day. Not one more morning waking up in a place that felt like a polite cage. Not one more hour being watched, graded, corrected, and quietly shaped into someone who would survive better on paper than in real life.

Two weeks before the trip. Everyone else was counting down to buses, and whatever version of teenage freedom they were allowed to rent for a few days. I was counting down to escape. Not from homework—from a system that had already decided who I was supposed to become, and how much of me was permitted.

Running away is always written like a dramatic act. In my life, it was a practical act. It was triage. And the consequence was brutally simple: I earned my certification as an Emergency Medical Technician in Buffalo, New York, but never graduated high school.

People love diplomas because they are neat. They are rectangular proof that you endured a sanctioned timeline. They are a stamp that says, yes, this person followed the steps. They were obedient, did what they were told, and are now a product of the modern industrialist education. I have never been that girl. Not fully. Not even when I tried. So I left.

My story did not include the ceremonial ending. No cap, no gown, no senior trip, no neat closure. Just a cut scene. A jump cut. A missing chapter that people still sometimes try to use as evidence that I "failed."
But the truth is—I did not fail. I refused. That is a difference people who have never been cornered do not understand. Two weeks. Then college.

I have such a specific relationship with academia. I understand it. I respect learning. I can go toe-to-toe with the best minds in the room when the topic is real. But institutions have always tried to turn intelligence into obedience, and I have never been good at obedience—especially the kind that demands you swallow your own instincts just to keep the adults comfortable.

My second year of college lasted two weeks. Two weeks, and then I dropped out.

I can still feel the internal click of that decision—like a switch flipping in my head. Not chaos. Not panic. Just a sudden, clean clarity: this is not worth it. This is not where my life lives. This is not the road that gets me home to myself.

I remember sitting there, realizing I was surrounded by a system that cared more about compliance than comprehension, more about credentials than capability. I was not learning—I was memorizing, agreeing, performing. I was not growing—I was being managed.

I walked away, and the world did not end. My life did not suddenly collapse. What collapsed was the illusion that I needed the institution's permission to be what I already was: different. I was clearly a woman with a mind that does not do well inside cages.

When I think about how these moments adding up—middle school suspension, boarding school escape, college exit—they form the same pattern. A signature. It is always two weeks. It is always the quiet lead-up to a keyframe moment where time freezes, and the next version of my life begins without waiting for consensus.

I think what bothers me is not that it happened. What bothers me is the precision of it. The way my life seems to deliver turning points with the same timing you would give a job you are leaving. Like the universe slides a note across the table and says: you have fourteen days to pack up your identity, your expectations, your attachments, and whatever fragile story you were telling yourself about how this was going to go.

And then it happens.

It is not just that I have lost things. Everyone loses things. It is that I have been trained—over and over again—to recognize the exact moment the air changes. The exact moment the room stops being safe. The exact moment the future quietly retracts itself. Two weeks before the end, I start feeling it in my body like a pressure change. I start noticing the micro-signals. The tone shifts. The silence. The difference between how people look at you and how they used to. It is not paranoia. It is experience. Experience makes you accurate.

The part nobody wants to admit is that society rejects a strong, accurate, competent woman, so they call you "intense." They say it like it is a flaw. Like it is a personality quirk. Like I woke up one day and decided to be the kind of woman who sees too much. By midlife, I had been described as "ahead of my time," "difficult," "intense," "unmanageable," or, I suppose because I managed to survive long enough, "exceptional." The labels change depending on whether or not the culture benefitted from me yet.

No. I became this way because life trained me with repetition. And the training schedule was always fourteen days—these moments that arrived on standard western socioeconomic notice did not turn me into someone fragile. They turned me into someone who can leave. Someone who can end a chapter without begging for it to be rewritten. Someone who can accept that a door closing is information, not a personal referendum.

I do not romanticize that. It is not cute. It is not a superpower. If anything, it exposes some of the problems with modern society. It is a survival skill I paid for in lost ceremonies, lost friendships, and all the times I watched other people take the neat path while I took the necessary one.

Those two-week moments are also where I learned that my life does not require permission. The suspension did not ruin me—it taught me that institutions will punish the wrong people to protect their own comfort. Running away did not ruin me—it taught me that escape is sometimes the only honest choice. Dropping out of college did not ruin me—it taught me that my mind cannot be contained by someone else's syllabus.

If anything, those moments built the spine that later held up everything else—the jobs I earned, the skills I mastered, the way I learned to trust myself when the crowd insisted I should not. They taught me that the life I was "supposed" to live was never going to be the life that fit.

Two weeks is not just notice. It is a warning light. It is the part of the story where my younger self still thinks she might be able to negotiate. Still thinks she might be able to behave her way into being accepted. Still thinks she might be able to explain herself clearly enough that the world will finally understand.

But the older me knows better. The older me knows that when the notice comes, it is not a negotiation. It is a shift. It is reality giving you a short runway and expecting you to take off anyway.

And I did. Every time. I did not graduate high school or college the way they wanted, but I grew up. I became operational. I became skilled. I became exact. I became the kind of woman who does not panic when things suddenly and drastically change. I became the kind of woman who can hold her own life steady because she learned early that stability is not something you inherit—it is something you build.

Sometimes I think about the girl I was in those three keyframes—eighth grade, boarding school, college—standing there with the two-week countdown ticking above her head like a hidden scoreboard. She did not have a plan. She did not have a safety net. She did not have adults who were dependable.

But she had one thing. She had the refusal to disappear. She had the instinct to move. And she had this strange, brutal gift—pattern recognition.

I used to hate that my life seemed to end chapters abruptly. I used to envy the people who got the clean ceremonies, the neat endings, the congratulatory photos, the cakes with names and congratulatory words written in bright colored frosting. Now I think…I do not envy them anymore. Because I know what those neat endings often cost. They cost truth. They cost autonomy. They cost the part of you that whispers, this does not fit, and you are allowed to leave anyway.

So this is what I am writing down tonight, for the new book, for the blog, for the version of me who still sometimes needs proof that she was not crazy, and that she was not weak:

My turning points came with two weeks notice because my life never gave me the luxury of long goodbyes. It gave me something else. It gave me clarity in advance. It gave me the chance to feel the air change, pack my internal bag, and get ready to become the next version of myself—whether anyone approved or not.

And I did not become someone else. I became more myself. That is the part people miss. Two weeks notice was never the universe being polite.

This year, it felt as if the universe handed me a countdown and said—a new year is about two weeks away, show me what you are made of. And every single time, I answered the same way:

Challenge accepted.