Cheering For The Dinosaurs

I like Jurassic Park.

Yes, surprising, I know. It's not like I talk about it or constantly reference it in my stories or have such a reputation for liking it that I got to watch the Netflix series early and write articles about it for a major online magazine or anything.

But it’s not just that I like the movie. It was a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. And when you grow up immersed in something, it becomes a part of you whether you realize it or not.

I make Jurassic Park references without intending to. Half of my stories it seems like the plot is some version of life finding a way or people being too preoccupied with better they could and not stopping to think if they should.

Cheering For The Dinosaurs, published in Breath and Shadow, is an essay about being the weird, autistic, disabled, queer kid of abusive, if well-intentioned, parents. It's about me leaving home, coming out, gender stuff, and dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs.

I use the plot of Jurassic Park as a metaphor for my life, and the essay is framed around Ian Malcolm's "Life Finds A Way" speech.

That line kind of got me through moving out, when the adrenaline of actually leaving wore off and it hit me what I had just done. How majorly I had just uprooted and possibly ruined everything I had ever known.

It was the second or third night in the nursing home, and nothing was like I was used to. I couldn't communicate with anyone yet because for all of our problems, my mom and I had a system. I was alone, not just for one or two nights, but forever. I didn't know if I would ever have good people in my life again, and I was scared, and I wanted to go home but I didn't have a home to go back to, and I didn't know if anything would ever be OK ever again.

But life finds a way, right? Isn’t that what Jurassic Park raised me to believe?

I clung to that idea for dear life, and maybe things still aren't the way I would like them to be sometimes, but it is okay. Good, even.

And you know what’s interesting, in the essay I mentioned that I have "Life finds a way" on a bracelet that I never take off; I received the acceptance email for this essay the first time I took the bracelet off in almost a year. I had to go to the hospital overnight for blood pressure problems, and it was horrible and I was alone and scared and I felt like nothing was going to be OK ever again. Just like when I moved out, exactly two years earlier.

Sometimes life really does… uh… find a way.

Read Cheering For The Dinosaurs at Breath and Shadow.