EMILY PRATT SLATIN

About

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

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

What Being Different Has Taught Me About Integrity

October 8, 2025 — Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

Lately, I've been thinking about how much of modern life feels like living inside a microscope. Everyone's zoomed in on everyone else—opinions fired off like buckshot, strangers dissecting each other's choices as if they've earned the right to name them. Somewhere along the way, curiosity turned into judgment, and empathy got priced out of the market.

I see it everywhere—online, in conversations, even at the grocery store checkout where my total gets side-eyed because how could anyone spend that much on butter? It's small, but it's constant. We've mistaken surveillance for connection. People call it accountability, but mostly it's cruelty with a polite caption.

Sometimes I wonder when we stopped letting people be complicated. We used to give each other room to mess up, to grow, to be wrong without being ruined. Now it's as if everyone's waiting for proof that you're undeserving of the air you breathe. It's exhausting, being awake in an age where sincerity is mistaken for weakness and privacy for guilt.

I was born with a brain that saw through walls, an empathy that cut both ways, and a curiosity that refused to rest. That mix isolated me, sure, but it also built entire worlds—the kind that eventually led me here, to this quiet stretch of Vermont, where the silence finally feels earned.

I don't claim immunity—I still surf the internet like it's 1998. I notice. I flinch. But out here, the noise hits differently. Vermont forces you to hear yourself think. The hills don't care who you voted for. The maple trees don't scroll your feed. When I walk the property line in the early evening, I realize the world isn't nearly as loud as we've made it. It's us, amplifying each other's echoes until truth gets distorted into opinion and opinion becomes law.

I've asked myself a hundred times if life might've been easier had I been more ordinary—less open, fewer edges. Maybe it would've been quieter. But it wouldn't have been mine. The same wiring that keeps me restless is the reason my words carry weight—the reason my work feels lived-in instead of observed.

I've lived long enough to see the shift from quiet observation to constant commentary. Maybe that's why I still build things by hand—why I write code line by line, fix what breaks here at the farm, and only speak when I have something worth saying. It's my rebellion against the culture of overexposure. I don't owe the world a reaction every time it demands one.

There's a strange kind of peace in choosing not to perform. I used to think standing apart meant being alone, but now I see it's the only way to stay intact. When you stop explaining yourself to people who've already decided what you are, you get your life back—messy, unfiltered, unapproved.

I keep to my lane. I keep my circle small. I pay attention to what's real. The rest can stay online, arguing in circles. Out here, the air is cold, the stars are honest, and that's enough proof of meaning for me.