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.

Always There At The Beginning, Never There At The End

April 12, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

This morning I woke up with an all too familiar feeling already in place, like I had somehow missed something before I even opened my eyes. Not in a dramatic way, not in a way that demanded immediate attention, just a quiet, steady awareness waiting for me to catch up to it. I lay there longer than I needed to, not moving, not thinking anything particularly useful, just noticing that something felt off and that the feeling itself wasn't new enough to question. And in that moment, it didn't feel like an isolated moment—it felt like a continuation of something that has been repeating itself in my life for as long as I can remember.

I've spent years in environments that are built, at least on the surface, around the idea of connection. Summer camp, school, work, volunteer organizations post retirement—systems that are structured to bring people together, to create friendships, to give people a place to belong if they show up and stay long enough and do things the way they're supposed to be done. I did all of that. I showed up. I stayed. I learned the rhythm of each place, learned how to move inside it without causing friction, learned how to read people quickly enough to adjust myself in real time so that nothing about me disrupted what was already forming. I was never standing outside of those systems looking in—I was inside them, participating, contributing, doing the exact same things everyone else was doing at the same time they were doing them. And still, the outcome kept resolving the same way.

What I started to notice, slowly at first and then with a kind of uncomfortable clarity that made it impossible to ignore, was that I was almost always present at the beginning of things. I was there when people first met each other, when conversations were still open and unstructured, when connections were still forming and nothing had settled into permanence yet. I could move through that phase without any real difficulty. People would talk to me, include me, rely on me in small ways, share things, laugh, build something that looked, from the outside, exactly like the early stages of friendship. There was never a moment where I felt rejected at the start. If anything, I was part of what helped those early connections take shape. And then something would shift.

Not suddenly, not in a way that could be pointed to, named, or corrected, but gradually, almost quietly, like the social structure was forming in such a way that didn't include me. The same people I had been standing alongside would begin forming something more stable with each other, something that carried forward beyond the initial phase, and I would find myself no longer part of what continued. There was never an argument, never a falling out, never a clean break that would at least give the situation a defined edge. It was always just…absence. A subtle reconfiguration where I was no longer included in the version of things that lasted, even though I had been there from the beginning while it was forming.

That pattern repeated itself across years, across entirely different environments, across different groups of people who had nothing in common with each other except for the fact that the outcome kept resolving the same way.

Different cities, different institutions, different stages of my life, and still I would find myself in that same position—present for the formation, participating in the early structure, and then, once the bonds between other people settled into something more permanent, I was no longer part of what remained.

It stopped feeling situational after a while. It stopped feeling like a series of unrelated experiences and started feeling like a consistent structural outcome that I could no longer explain away as coincidence. What makes it difficult to even talk about is that there is nothing to fix.

There's no single moment where something breaks, no clear mistake to identify and correct, no conversation that could be revisited and resolved differently. It doesn't fail in a way that produces evidence. It just…resolves on its own without me. And when something resolves without you often enough, you stop assuming the outcome will arrive differently next time, no matter how much you want it to.

Eventually, I stopped expecting continuity. I stopped assuming that proximity would convert into something durable simply because it was sustained over time. I learned to accept that outcome, which changes how you build a life whether you want it to or not.

When you start approaching connection with a different set of assumptions, you become more precise about where you invest your time, more aware of patterns as they form, more willing to step back before the shift happens instead of waiting for it to confirm itself again. You stop confusing access with belonging, and you stop negotiating for a place in systems that have already demonstrated, repeatedly, that they don't incorporate you into what lasts.

I've had a small number of people in my life who were real in a way that didn't require interpretation, who stayed in ways that didn't depend on circumstance or proximity or convenience. Enough to know that I'm not incapable of connection, enough to know that when the conditions are right, it works without effort or adjustment.

But the scale of that has always been very small, and the stability of it has never extended into the broader systems where most people seem to build their social lives without thinking about it.

The majority of my life wasn't built on that kind of continuity. It was built around a consistent pattern of being present without being integrated, of contributing to the formation of connection without being included in its continuation, of watching other people build something stable out of the same starting conditions that, for me, never translated into something that lasted.

This morning just brought that back into focus again, in the same quiet, factual way it always does. I woke up and recognized the pattern without needing to analyze it further. It wasn't new, and it wasn't confusing—it just lined up, cleanly and predictably, with everything that came before it.

At some point, you stop asking why something keeps happening and start recognizing that it simply does. And once you recognize that, the question isn't what went wrong. The question is what you build knowing that it never worked the way it was supposed to in the first place.

I didn't chase being good at the work I did—I locked onto it the way you lock onto a lifeline in cold water, because once you understand that nobody is coming and nothing is guaranteed, you stop treating skill like ambition and start treating it like the only thing that will carry you through—especially after everyone and everything else already proved it wouldn't.