There are many ways to die, and a couple of them don’t involve body or brain death.
The method I experienced at the hands of St. Paul Schools and Black Lives Matter in March, 2016, involved gagging, banishment-at-home, and practical excision of my career, reputation, lifestyle, earnings potential, real friends and social media circles. The secondary impact on my wife and kids nearly cost me my home, and life by suicide.
Like Han Solo, I fought Carbonite encasement for three years. Forced to quit St. Paul, I fought suffocation, was then hired and fired from three ensuing teaching jobs and saw my licenses suspended by the State of Minnesota’s board of teaching.
In March, 2016, amidst my public thrashing on radio and TV affiliates for CBS, ABC and NBC, at Minneapolis the StarTribune, and St. Paul’s Pioneer Press, and other outlets, I told my union lawyer that I had been “mind-raped” by Black Lives Matter. A shudder went up in the conference room at St. Paul Federation of Teachers @SPFE28. She and my female union organizer blasted me for uttering the word rape at all.
“Well, what do you call it? I can’t talk, I can’t write, I can’t think.”
“Theo, you weren’t raped. Don’t use that phrase again.” My attorney later told me my blogging that I had done for years had amounted to racially inflammatory cultural appropriation.
Anyway, the smothering that I acceded to on a level, amounted to a kind of death. It did. And I almost finished the job on myself for real in 2019. I measured trees and gave them names. Thanks to my wife, thanks to a displaced worker rep, thanks to therapy, thanks to medication, I didn’t. And I didn’t cause anyone else great bodily harm.
Was my heart still beating — my brain firing synapses — my soul trafficking in literature among the living? Technically. Am I alive now? I think so, but at times I freeze and know that any reptilian brain with a keyboard can litigate against me and hurl me back into hell for baseless, amorphous injuries.
Today in 2022, my writing lives free off life support. My powers are undoubtedly diminished, because the toll years of nerves take on memory and intellectual breadth are unknown to me. I don’t feel great as an author any day. It’s easy to see my age in my increased sleep and pain and stiffness of body and dampened creative spunk. Whereas once I could drive past a teen mom and stroller on the sidewalk, and construct her epic rebound from a life stashing guns for bangers for drugs and a sudden pregnancy from her dead boyfriend out of the morning’s shaft of light and dew, I really can’t anymore.
I can hardly see words flying on banners behind little planes with my eyes closed washing up in the shower. When I can, I can’t store and retrieve them when I get to my desk.