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.

For much of my career in emergency medical services and technical rescue, I worked in environments where competence alone was not enough to guarantee respect. I entered a profession that publicly claimed to value skill, composure, and patient care above all else, but privately often operated through old loyalties, informal hierarchies, and deeply gendered assumptions about who belonged there and who did not.

As a woman working in emergency services, I frequently found myself in the impossible position of having to prove my competence repeatedly, even after I had already demonstrated it. Male coworkers who possessed less training, less experience, or weaker clinical skills were often assumed to be competent by default, while I was expected to justify my presence continuously. If I performed well, I was treated as an exception. If I made even the most minor of mistakes, those mistakes were treated as evidence that I did not belong.

I was routinely undermined in front of patients, coworkers, and supervisors. There were times when male colleagues openly questioned my abilities while I was actively performing medical procedures, telling patients that I was inexperienced or did not know what I was doing despite years of training and operational experience. This was not done quietly. It was done publicly, in ways clearly designed to diminish my authority and confidence. In emergency medicine, where patient trust and team cohesion matter enormously, this behavior created both professional and emotional damage.

The discrimination was not always overt. Often it came through systems of exclusion and obstruction. I was denied equipment routinely provided to others. Requests for proper protective gear were ignored or delayed despite the obvious safety implications. I was left using personal equipment while coworkers received department-issued gear immediately and without issue. This not only affected safety, but also reinforced the feeling that I was viewed as less legitimate than the men around me.

Scheduling became another method of control. My hours were changed unpredictably, removed without warning, or manipulated in ways that made it difficult to maintain financial stability or personal consistency. I was often denied opportunities routinely offered to others, including overtime, advancement, or specialized responsibilities, despite having the qualifications and experience necessary to perform them safely and effectively. Newer or less qualified male employees were frequently treated more favorably.

At times, I felt I was being deliberately set up to fail. Schedules would change without notification, leaving me blamed for absences from shifts I had never been informed about. Policies were enforced inconsistently, often applied rigidly to me while ignored for others. The unpredictability created a constant atmosphere of anxiety and instability. I came to feel that some supervisors were less interested in evaluating my actual performance than in manufacturing reasons to portray me as unreliable or difficult.

Being a woman in rescue and EMS also meant existing inside a culture where emotional intimidation and public humiliation were normalized. Loud reprimands, dismissive behavior, and deliberate isolation became part of daily life. Some supervisors and coworkers appeared threatened by the fact that I was highly skilled, technically capable, and unwilling to quietly accept mistreatment. Rather than acknowledging competence, they responded with resentment, hostility, or attempts to marginalize me professionally.

At the same time, I was operating in some of the most demanding environments imaginable. I worked trauma, rescue, industrial accidents, fatalities, suicides, hazardous atmospheres, active shooting, difficult extrications, and recovery operations involving human remains. I was expected to remain calm, technically precise, and emotionally controlled under extraordinary pressure. Physicians trusted me with difficult airways. Teams relied on me during high-risk rescue operations. Patients entrusted me with their lives and, sometimes, with their final words.

The contradiction was painful: in the field, my skills were often respected because outcomes mattered more than politics. During emergencies, people cared whether I could solve the problem. But once the scene ended and the adrenaline faded, I was returned to an environment where gendered power dynamics frequently overshadowed merit.

There was also the exhausting reality of carrying multiple layers of difference simultaneously. Existing as a woman in emergency services already meant navigating skepticism and hostility. Existing as a autistic neurodivergent lesbian woman added another layer of misunderstanding and prejudice. Behaviors related to concentration, communication style, or emotional processing were sometimes interpreted unfairly through the lens of bias rather than competence. Instead of recognizing that different minds can produce extraordinary clinical performance, some people viewed difference itself as weakness.

Despite all of this, I stayed. I stayed because I loved the work. I loved the patients, the rescue environment, the clarity of purpose, the teamwork during real emergencies, and the knowledge that my skills genuinely helped people survive terrible moments in their lives. I stayed because, beneath the politics and discrimination, I believed deeply in the mission of emergency service itself.

But surviving inside that culture required enormous emotional endurance. Over time, I learned that being exceptional at the job did not protect women from discrimination. In some cases, it intensified it. Competent women in male-dominated environments are often treated not merely as coworkers, but as disruptions to an established hierarchy. The better I became, the more resistance I sometimes encountered.

Even so, I remained operationally effective for decades. I performed rescue work, advanced medical care, recovery operations, and leadership responsibilities under conditions that demanded absolute precision and composure. I built a reputation based not on image or politics, but on consistency, technical skill, and the trust of the people whose lives depended on me.

That trust mattered more than the hostility ever did.

Sometimes I think about the girl I used to be—the one who slept with a camera under her pillow, who wrote things down before she understood what she was writing, who kept her real thoughts folded tight because she learned early that truth made people uncomfortable. I don't try to become her again. I just honor the fact that she was right about more things than anyone gave her credit for. The hardest part of growing up was realizing no one comes to save you from the person you used to be. I've had to walk her home myself.

I learned to trust what functioned under neglect. Not the things that claimed meaning, not the voices that insisted on it, but the quiet systems that stayed upright when no one was keeping score. There is a kind of intelligence in continuity, in showing up without needing to be witnessed. When you have lived long enough inside failure, you stop romanticizing revelation. You start paying attention to what still works.

There are nights when the moon hangs low and indifferent, and I feel the weight of the days responsibilities slip from my hands without ceremony. The doctors wanted to operate when I was young—early enough that I would never remember the decision.

They would have removed tissue that appeared as male genitalia but functioned as my clitoris. That wasn't correction. That was a decision about my body I wasn't allowed to make. My mother refused. Not loudly, not completely—but enough. She held them off long enough for me to decide for myself. I'm glad I was born this way. I'm glad I stayed this way. That was the one place where the system did not finish its sentence.

I stand alone outside in the cold air beneath the pines and let the sky decide who I am for a moment. The pines don't judge me for staying. The wind doesn't ask why. The land doesn't care about my back story. The moon, high above the clouds—she knows only the beauty of love, and her borrowed light reminds me that I'm never truly alone.

There are moments when the world narrows to its most practical truths, when abstraction loses its grip and only accuracy remains. I have learned more in those moments than I ever did in places designed to inspire. Beauty did not arrive with intention. It arrived sideways, unannounced, and usually while I was busy doing something else. That is how I learned that meaning does not require agreement to exist.

Empathy is just pattern recognition applied to pain. Not everything worth keeping announces itself. Some things just stay. And what mercy the truth brings—that even though it sometimes hurts, I'm still willing.
I stopped looking for answers that wanted to be admired. The ones that mattered never introduced themselves that way. They showed up quietly, often late, and stayed without explanation. I have come to respect anything that does not ask to be believed, only tested. If something holds under pressure, I pay attention. Everything else is commentary.

Sometimes I realize I'm living the life that girl never dared to picture because she thought she'd burn out before she grew up. Not because she was reckless—because she didn't have any evidence that things could get gentler. I think about her more as a witness than a wound now. She wasn't dramatic. She was exhausted. And she kept going anyway, even when she didn't understand the reasons.

I used to think understanding was the goal. Now I think care is. Care requires attention, patience, and a willingness to remain present as things change shape. It is easier to explain the world than it is to stay with it. Easier to categorize than to tend. Intelligence, as I have come to know it, is not about mastery. It is about stewardship.

The pines hold still, tall and knowing, their needles catching the light in quiet applause. They've seen all of me—the rage, the ruin, the rebuilding. And they still let me stand among them. I don't say much to them anymore. I don't need to. Everything important already runs at it's own pace. The river flows, the wind blows gently, and the youngest of hearts that kept its own time.

Night comes softly here. No arrival, no fanfare—just the quiet certainty of something that's kept its promise. I've learned that stillness isn't the absence of movement. It's what remains in moments when you stop needing, or desiring to be elsewhere.

There are nights when the fog rolls in like it bears a tale that needs to be told again, and I swear I hear my younger self somewhere in it—quiet, stubborn, still waiting for someone to tell her she wasn't wrong about everything.

I've known a lot of people in my life, and most of them are gone now—not dramatically, not ceremonially, just gone in the way people are when time decides it is finished with them. I used to believe that if I loved people correctly—paid attention, stayed loyal, showed up early, stayed late—I could keep them. I learned early that loss does not bargain, and effort does not protect. What stays with me is the knowledge that people disappear even when you do everything right, and the fear—rarely spoken, but always present—that one day I will disappear the same way, quietly, completely, and without anyone noticing the moment I am no longer remembered.

Growing up around people the world recognized taught me something early that I did not yet have language for. I watched people speak fluently about inclusion in public spaces while quietly drawing lines in their personal lives—lines that included my wife and me. My family was publicly supportive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights, yet struggled deeply with the biological fact that I was born intersex, and identify as a lesbian.

That contradiction did not make me cynical. It made me precise. I learned to listen less to what people declared and more to how they behaved when no audience was present. Being an ally, I learned, is not proven by statements. It is proven by proximity.

There are places where the ordinary reveals itself as something fragile and exact, something that only survives because someone—or something—kept going without fanfare. I notice those places more now. They feel honest. They remind me that most of what matters does not arrive dramatically. It endures.

There are memories I never talk about, not because they hurt too much, but because they don't belong in conversation. Moments where time folded, where someone's desperation pressed into the lines of my voice, where the world expected me to be steady even when I wasn't fully formed myself. There is a certain loneliness that only gifted children grow into—the kind that makes them translators for worlds that never asked to be understood. I don't carry guilt about those moments anymore. Just a quiet acknowledgment that I was there, and I did what I could with what little I had.

Before mom passed she asked, since I had been present for many people's passing, if there is anything that is said or any prayers, or what the standard protocol is. And I said, "there really is no protocol, but I want you to know that if you have to go, that wherever you end up, just know that I have things here totally under control, because we made it up until now, together."

I still catch glimpses of my younger self in reflections I wasn't prepared for—shop windows, darkened computer screens, water that stayed still long enough. Sometimes in these passing moments, I look back and realize I spent years trying to be a version of myself that made other people comfortable. Quieter. Smaller. Easier to interpret. It took until my forties to understand that comfort is not the same as love, and neither are worth sacrificing your own outline.

Nobody ever took the time to know me. I was seen but never remembered. And over time I became a ghost waiting on a crumbling shore. And for awhile I lost sight of who I was and for years and years I roamed. Long time. Nothing new. I showed up, worked hard, and was repeatedly failed by the same institutions I helped maintain.

A certain ache comes eventually when you realize that you spent a lifetime saving everyone but yourself, and somehow made peace with the imbalance. I'm not quieter now—I'm just more selective. A steady reminder that I somehow carried myself through everything I thought would break me. It wasn't hope. It certainly wasn't pain. It was continuity. The proof that I'm still here. Still standing. Still learning what it means to live with everything I've kept, everything I've lost, and everything I never got to say.

I was never confused about who I was. Confusion belonged only to others who needed the world to stay simple enough to manage. From the beginning, I understood myself with a clarity that didn't require explanation, only permission to exist uninterrupted. What complicated things was the constant insistence that I needed to be corrected, redirected, or translated for other people's comfort. Over time, I learned that clarity without power is treated like defiance, and that being certain can make others deeply uneasy.

Most people spend their lives trying to outrun the past. The wiser ones eventually realize the past is not chasing them—it's waiting for them to finally understand it. The past only stops hurting when you stop negotiating with it. I have spent the majority of my life learning that survival and happiness are two entirely different skills. I learned early that the woods do not care who you are—but they will teach you how to stay alive. I trust the way pine trees stand in winter—steady, patient, and unconcerned with anyone's opinion.

Every system eventually reveals its weak point; patience is simply the discipline of waiting for it to appear. I stopped asking life to be fair a long time ago. Now I only ask that it remain interesting. Some stories are not meant to be explained—they are meant to be survived. And yet there exists a particular loneliness that comes from understanding things too early.

I used to believe that the point of life was to outrun the periods that hurt. But the older I get, the more I realize that you cannot outpace anything you haven't yet named. The past catches up eventually—usually on a quiet evening when you think that everything is going fine.

Some of the darkest parts of my life weren't defined by what happened, but oftentimes by what failed to happen—silence where there should have been support, stillness where comfort should have existed, and the empty echo of being left alone to figure out things that no one should have to handle alone.

There is a particular stillness that arrives once you stop needing to be understood. It's not resignation. It's relief. You stop translating yourself for people who were never listening in the first place. You stop editing your life to make it more palatable. You let the truth sit where it is, unsoftened, and trust that the right people will recognize it without instruction. Everything else becomes background noise.

People often misunderstand stillness—they think it means nothing is happening, that no decisions are being made, that no movement exists beneath the surface—but stillness is often where the most irreversible choices are made. It is the place where you measure the cost of speaking, of leaving, of staying, and decide—without witnesses—what you are willing to carry.

There are moments when I look at someone I care about and realize I don't love people the way people are used to—urgently, anxiously, hoping they're doing it right.

My love tends to be quieter, steadier, more observational. Love, for me, looks like remembering small details, giving space without disappearing, and offering care without the need to be seen giving it. It feels more honest.

I learned reverence from vending machines that still worked at three in the morning, from small systems that kept doing their job long after the people around them had given up. The places where people most often claim to feel god are not the places filled with noise or performance—they're often the quiet ones. The woods in winter, the moment before sunrise, the stillness and silence that comes after something has ended. It's not the content of those moments, it's the absence of interference. Whatever is there becomes easier to perceive when everything else falls away.

Maybe enlightenment is just remembering how to marvel without needing a reason. Understanding the world isn't the goal. Loving it and caring for it while it changes—that's the real intelligence. And if there's a god, she's probably quiet, holding the sky steady while we argue about what it all means. And when I die, I hope my spirit will always remember exactly how it felt to be me—to think this much, to feel this deeply, and to exist long enough to notice how beautiful the ordinary really was.

We are all, in some quiet and unspoken way, trying to prove that our lives mattered—not to history, not to the world at large, but to ourselves, to the version of us that kept going when it would have been easier not to, and sometimes that proof is nothing more than the fact that we are still here, still choosing to continue.

Sometimes when I sit on the front porch of moms house it feels like I'm just Emily, as if sixteen year old me had been patiently waiting for me on moms doorstep all this time.

At some point, you realize that the life you built is not something you need to justify. Not to your past, not to other people, not even to yourself. It exists because you made it, because you maintained it, because you chose it repeatedly when it would have been easier to abandon it. That is enough. Not everything meaningful needs external confirmation to be real.

I was born in New York City. I was raised in Upstate New York. I became myself in Vermont. We move through life believing we understand the forces shaping it, when most of the time we are blind to the tide that turns the sea. And yet we keep going anyway.

The moon in her glory shines down upon me from above the pines. The night breathes softly now. Finally alive and somehow we made it through together.

With love,
Emily ♥