EMILY PRATT SLATIN

About

Press Kit

She/Her/Hers Lesbian

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

Fault Lines, Star Maps, And The Beautiful Static Between

October 4, 2025—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)
Some of us aren't born with straight lines or clear directions—we're drawn in crooked constellations, held together by memory and the people who don't flinch when the world tries to rewrite our coordinates. This one's about finding peace in not knowing, and learning that the static between signals is sometimes the truest sound of being alive.

Doctors laughed when they came to my cradle. They told my parents their child would grow up and be different. I sometimes wonder if the laughter was nervous—like they knew something the rest of us didn't, something written in the invisible ink of chromosomes and quiet miracles. They said different like it was both prophecy and curse. Turns out, it was just a truth—one of those things that sits in your bones long before you have words to name it.

As I grew, people kept asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Everyone else had these ready-made answers, but I never really knew. All I wanted was to live—fully, honestly, freely. I'm 46 now. I've lived through decades of reinvention, adaptation, and quiet resilience, and still, I don't know what I want to do with my life. I used to think that meant I was lost. Now I think it means I'm alive. I'm not sure yet; my mind is always changing day to day.

Maybe that's what makes life interesting—this refusal of the heart to settle. Or maybe it's just the fault in my stars, the misprint in my genetic poetry that made me different from the start. Maybe I was never meant to follow a straight path. Some of us are born on diagonals. Some of us are capapable of seeing the world from another angle. Some of us learn to build our own compasses.

When I think about the word different, it doesn't sting the way it used to. It's not a wound anymore—it's a mirror. It shows me how much I've lived, how much I've seen, how much I've felt. The world still squints at people like me, like I'm a question they can't answer. But I've learned to take that question and make it art. To use my differences to teach the world to see nuance they never know existed.

Most people spend their entire lives chasing things that don't matter—money, approval, status, the illusion of control. I chase connection. I always have. Connection is the only thing that feels real.

There's Amelia—my wife, my code friend, my equal in every way that matters. We share a wavelength that hums somewhere between love and logic, friendship and firelight. She knows every unspoken sentence that lives behind my eyes. Then there's Luke Apy—steady, genuine, the kind of friend who reminds me that loyalty isn't about proximity but about showing up. Maddie O'Malley, a sweet girl who understands my weird, nonlinear ways of thinking and never tries to fix them. And Andrew Raymond, my former co-lieutenant from the fire department—the one who still knows the version of me that commanded chaos and kept her voice calm while the world burned. Those are my people. The ones who saw through the armor and didn't flinch.

If life were a constellation, they'd be the brightest stars—Amelia to the north, Luke to the west, Maddie to the east, and Andrew holding the southern line. My fault lines and my star maps. The anchors that keep me from drifting too far into the void.

There's a strange sort of peace in admitting I still don't know what I want to do with my life. I've worn too many uniforms, carried too many titles, and I've realized that none of them define me. What defines me is that I keep waking up, still wanting to understand, still wanting to love, still wanting to be.

Maybe I'll never have the kind of answers people expect. Maybe my story will always sound like static on a radio, full of interference and half-sentences that trail into silence. But it's my static. My signal. My truth. And in that noise, I find something that feels an awful lot like meaning.

Sky above, Earth below, Dark Horse within.

—Emily