purplerabbit | Tremor of the Heart

So the anniversary past yesterday. I didn't watch the news, so I don't know who else but those of us who lost someone remembered.

Can 15 seconds change your life? Did mine.

Eighteen years ago, Oct. 17, 1989 at 5:04 PM.

I suppose to be fair it wasn't the Loma Prieta Earthquake itself that changed my life. It was the trauma surrounding digging for a friend's body for the next three days, and care-taking and grief after.

Robin Oritz was my friend. She was only 22 and she died that day. Crushed under tons of bricks and rubble.

But something else happened too.

Major shifts that occurred in my life after that ground shook. Three I mark today:

In a rant against homophobia to the media, I outed myself on CNN as bisexual. Because I was already a well-known journalist and activist in Santa Cruz, I ended up being "the bisexual" that people came to for a long while. This led me to explore issues of sexuality in my own life, help found the Santa Cruz Bisexual Network, and eventually become an author of several books that deal with queer issues.

I became interested in spirituality. I had always said that I had strong religious beliefs, but that I didn't know a church that shared them. I had found out about Wicca during an Anthropology of Religion class but not followed up on it. The week after the quake, I began reading Spiral Dance by Starhawk. I went on to co-found a number of Pagan groups over the years, teach classes, etc.

I was diagnosed as having Post Traumatic Stress at the UCSC clinic, and after short term therapy brought up a lot of issues from a difficult childhood, I was recommended for long term therapy. The experiences of that week brought down the "unreinforced brick walls" in my psyche that kept me from facing a lot of the damage of my past. I have been in and out of therapy several times over the years and credit it with saving my life in many ways.