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.

The Dreams Survived

June 9, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

Today I found myself thinking about how many lives I have supposedly lived.

There was the little girl who cried when Dad announced we were leaving New York City because, at six years old, New York City was not merely where I lived—it was the entire world. There was the child who eventually made Stamford, New York her home. There was the teenager who spent more time carrying notebooks and cameras than common sense. There was the young woman who learned that being useful could become a survival strategy. There was the firefighter, the paramedic, the photographer, the writer, the woman who left, the woman who returned, and the woman who somehow ended up retired on a farm in Vermont with a wife she adores.

Looking back, it is tempting to divide my life into separate chapters and pretend each version of me belonged to a different story. The truth is less dramatic. I have lived only one life, yet it was a life with an unusual number of detours.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing life moved in straight lines. Every time I thought I understood where I was going, something happened that sent me in a completely different direction. Jobs changed. Homes changed. Relationships changed. Opportunities came and went, some were unfairly denied or handed to someone less qualified. More than once, I found myself standing in a place I never expected to be, wondering how I had arrived there and whether I had somehow taken a wrong turn years earlier.

Yet the older I get, the more I realize that the essential things never changed at all.

The dreams survived.

I wanted a home. I wanted meaningful friendships. I wanted room for my curiosity. I wanted to understand how the world worked. I wanted to love and be loved. I wanted a place where my mind could exist safely without explanation or apology. Every era of my life carried those same desires, even when everything else was changing around them.

This year, something strange happened.

Many of those childhood dreams came true.

Life rarely grants us the courtesy of following one's own plans. Instead, it arrived through a long sequence of accidents, misadventures, losses, wrong turns, unexpected friendships, impossible timing, and opportunities that only became recognizable years later.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder whether I asked for too much. Then I look around at the life Amelia and I have built, the friends who became family, the books I've written now sitting on my shelf. Apparently nobody left me adequate supervision.

And I realize the dreams themselves were never extravagant.

The route was.

Today I thought about the necessity of having many dreams because one of two things inevitably happens in life. Some dreams never come true. Others do, and once they do, they stop being dreams and become ordinary parts of everyday life.

Recently I published Volume Two of the Dark Horse series, and local newspapers covered the story. It was one of those strange moments where reality quietly fulfilled a dream I had carried for so long that I had almost forgotten it was a dream in the first place.

I found myself thinking about third grade in New York City.

Dad spent an enormous amount of money to send me to one of the better schools in the city. The school had a reputation for producing what they considered successful graduates. Some students would eventually become actors. Others would become executives, politicians, lawyers, or the children of people who were already famous. It was the sort of place where adults spoke confidently about futures they imagined they could predict.

One day my teacher asked what I wanted to do with my life.

I told her I wasn't entirely sure yet, but that I had a list of hopes and dreams.

She told me I was an idiot. It would not be the first time, nor the last, that she held such an opinion.

My father had enrolled me at the school as a male despite the opinions of doctors and despite the reality of who I actually was. Looking back, the entire thing feels strangely unimportant. I knew who I was. The people who mattered seemed to know who I was. The confusion largely belonged to adults.

Unfortunately, many of those adults also worked at the school.

This occasionally created friction with teachers who seemed convinced they understood me better than I understood myself. I was sent to the principal's office because a teacher chastised me for using the girls bathroom, despite the fact that I had been doing exactly that for as long as I could remember.

Her proposed solution to my autism was a piece of yellow paper with the word think written on it in black marker. She instructed me to tape it to the headboard of my bed so that every morning, when my bedroom windows welcomed the first light of day, I would be reminded to think before I acted.

I still remember sitting there afterward, confused more than anything else. That seemed to happen a lot in those years. Adults often appeared convinced they knew who I was, what I should be, and what sort of future I ought to have. I was a child. Children are supposed to have dreams.

I of course asked her to clarify the instructions for me. I was to take this piece of paper that had the word think written on it, tape it to the headboard of my bed, and read it every morning when I got up so that I would be reminded to think.

Of course, right before I left her office, I proceeded to ask her, "what if I forget to read the note?" I was suspended instead. The note never did make it to my headboard. I still sleep in that when I go to moms house.

One of the dreams on that list was to write a book. If I was exceptionally lucky, I hoped somebody might read it. If I was unbelievably lucky, maybe it would get mentioned in the newspaper.

I never forgot that conversation.

Decades passed. New York City became the place where I came from rather than the place where I lived. Stamford became home. Then came cameras, firehouses, ambulances, friendships, heartbreaks, photographs, notebooks, misadventures, Vermont, Amelia, and all the other detours that eventually became my life.

I spent years trying to build a life. What I really wanted was a home. Home is the place where you stop preparing to leave.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking about that particular dream. Then Volume Two was published. The newspapers covered the story.

And for a moment I found myself thinking about that little girl sitting in a classroom in New York City, quietly making a list of impossible things she hoped might happen someday.

Apparently she was not nearly as foolish as some people believed. The child I was would be delighted by the woman I became.