EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

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

Moments In My Life That Changed Everything

August 31, 2026—Stamford, New York (Mom's House)

I was thinking about a book I read in 1994 called Illusions by Richard Bach. I have not read it in many years, but there are parts of it I remember clearly.

There is a handwritten section at the beginning about creatures living at the bottom of a river. They spend their lives holding onto rocks because they believe the current will carry them away. One of them eventually decides to let go.

I remember reading that part over and over again. I was fifteen.

There are books I remember reading and books I remember owning, but Illusions was different. It changed the way I thought about my life. I decided that someday, when I was old enough and the time was right, I was going to let go.

At the time, I had no idea what that would look like. Four years later, I was at boarding school one afternoon and I took the books out of my backpack and replaced them with a change of clothes, some money, my diary, and two bottles of Coke Classic. Time behaves differently between midnight and sunrise when everyone else is asleep.

I hitchhiked to Buffalo, New York during a snowstorm. I had decided to start EMT training, although getting there was not always easy. Sometimes I hitchhiked. When I could not find anyone to drive me, I walked alongside railroad tracks that would take me most of the way.

I still had my dorm room at boarding school and used it as my bed, although I was rarely present for classes.

Eventually I became an EMT. My career started on a Tuesday morning at 0600. Then a few years later, I became a paramedic. I had a career in the fire department and eventually became a lieutenant. The latter years of my career were spent in incident command and paramedicine. I served for twenty-two years, six months, and two weeks.

I have been retired long enough now that sometimes the entire thing feels distant. It feels like another lifetime—time upon time, from another lifetime or some forgotten dream.

I have been thinking about that more often lately. There was a really bad rescue years ago where someone questioned why a girl had been put in charge. The rescue was successful, and from that night forward I became known as Rescue Girl.

When I was a small child, I wrote more than I spoke. As an adult it has remained the same for the most part. I guess some things will never change.

Nobody at work knew I had autism. I made no attempt at hiding the fact that I was diagnosed early in life. According to my superiors I was exceptional at my job so it simply wasn’t discussed. Post-retirement, a lot of my career has been called into question, citing autism and being female as barriers to becoming brass.

I never know what to do with those statements. Eventually I understood that the statement was not an inquiry about who I was. It was asking whether I was willing to repeat what someone else had incorrectly assumed. I’m not interested in the repeated social defense of my own lifelong conviction.

People have always been remarkably confident when explaining my life to me. When I was young, it bothered me. Now I mostly wonder where they get both the time and the energy.

I know what happened. I know who I am. I was assigned female at birth, diagnosed with autism in adolescence, and mistreated by my father because of all of it. I also know that I am deeply, completely homosexual. I have publicly identified as a lesbian since coming out at sixteen.

Lately I have been thinking about the handful of moments in my life that changed everything afterward. Helping raise Makayla changed my life. Falling in love with Amelia changed my life. Meeting Maddie and eventually becoming her friend changed my life. None of these things seemed especially magical while they were happening, and yet looking back years later, it becomes obvious.

This afternoon, Amelia arrived home from her trip to Pittsburgh, which she regarded as a place that she wanted to see and apparently once was enough.

I filled Amelia in on everything that had happened while she was away. A surprising amount can happen in a week, although I suppose this depends considerably upon the week.

Later that afternoon, Nora stopped by.

We spent some time in my childhood bedroom, as we usually do when she visits. I have known Nora for only a year, and yet somehow she became the only friend I did not know in childhood who regularly spends time there.

My bedroom has not changed very much since 1996. The technology is modern, the bedding has been replaced and upgraded, and various things have accumulated as the years passed, but otherwise it remains remarkably similar to the room I knew thirty years ago.

It almost feels like a trip back in time to the day before I left for summer camp, and yet at the same time it feels like a new beginning.