EMILY PRATT SLATIN

About

Press Kit

She/Her/Hers Lesbian

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

Pictures Came And Broke My Heart

November 19, 2025—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

I found the childhood pictures my mother hid from my father, tucked into the back of a drawer like they were contraband, and holding them felt like touching a version of myself I barely remember but somehow still miss. In every photo, I'm this small, stubborn girl with and bright eyes, already trying to figure out why the world felt tilted—already bracing for a fight I didn't yet have the words for. Mom must have known dad would try to erase me, or rewrite me, or turn me into something that made sense to him, so she tucked those pieces of me away like a silent act of rebellion. Standing there in my childhood home decades later, pictures spread across the table between the coffee mug and the stack of mail, I realized she saved the evidence that I was always exactly who I said I was—long before doctors, long before labels, long before the years that hardened me. A whole childhood hidden in plain sight, waiting for me to be strong enough to claim it.

(Pictures circa 1990—Stamford, New York)