I wrote this short piece recently as a series of tweets on Twitter and then transcribed it to my Instagram and Facebook accounts. But because too much falls into the social media ether these days, I have transcribed it here with a few small changes.

When I was 16, going on 17, I dug my first garden without conscious thought or reason. I hid it behind the garage* and planted no seeds.

For there were no seeds to plant then and I didn’t even know I was digging a garden exactly. I just needed to dig.
And really, what I was digging was my way out of the hell world my parents had created & a place to bury the trauma.

I was digging connection to nature, life, hope, future, self. Beginning an act to nurture & heal wounds I couldn’t voice.
Eventually, sometime later, I did plant seeds in places that were not meant to be gardens but became them anyway.

Misfit gardens by a misfit gardener.

Over time, as I found the words to put to those experiences, I learned that in a world dominated by perfect gardens & perfect gardeners, I am not alone. There are others like me who need to garden for similar reasons.

The earth’s body; our bodies.

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Writer Lydia Yuknavitch invited people to tell their stories as a part of the launch of there book, The Misfit’s Manifesto. I first found Lydia’s writing by chance — an essay excerpt from her memoir, The Chronology of Water so blew me away with its power, fierce honesty and prose that I ordered the Kindle edition of the book and began reading it not five minutes later. So when she called, I felt especially driven to answer. Here’s her Ted Talk on being a misfit. The above was my story.

*I wrote shed in the original. However, for accuracy, it was more of a garage, although no car was ever stored there.