If you missed part one… you can find it here at Barnes and Noble: rescuegirl557.com/darkhorse

You can find Volume 2 here on B&N: rescuegirl557.com/darkhorse2

This is the second volume of my wife Emily Slatin’s autobiographical essay series. I’ll be taking notes on this book just like any other. I will return to cover part one at some point in the future. 

…

The dedication is very touching, and I don’t know how to properly express my own gratitude for everything Emily has brought into my life.

“Most of the wisdom I have started as arrogance that survived contact with the world. Empathy doesn’t mean letting people in; it means knowing who to keep out. There’s a kind of peace that only comes after you stop trying to improve on quiet. I don’t believe in fate, but I believe in familiar chaos. The world runs on recognizable mistakes.”

This is what leads off the prologue. I absolutely have to agree that setting boundaries is one of the wisest things you must learn how to do in order to find peace. It truly concerns me how few people truly know how to set healthy boundaries.

“Familiar chaos” vs “fate” seems like a perfect deep dive topic for my philosophical musings.

There’s more I can say about this very first paragraph, but I actually want to get to the rest of the book within a reasonable timeframe.

“…some lives bleed inward instead.” That is a brilliant phrase.

The whole prologue is pretty good but this bit particularly stood out to me: “I didn’t come from stillness. I came from fire. I came from late nights under siren glow, from rooms that didn’t stay standing, from long drives back to the station with soot in my teeth and a knot in my throat I never let anyone see.”

This right here from the Writer’s Note also caught my eye: “Survival is the cheapest version of being alive—anyone can do it long enough if you back them into a corner. The real work begins the moment you stop bracing and let the damage speak plainly.”

This is something I’m still learning to do myself as I approach the age of forty. Now is as good of a time as any to come to a similar realization as Emily did here.

I’ll also say that the medical stuff that Emily describes here is all accurate. I’ve been to the doctor with her multiple times. I’ve seen the transcripts. People need to stop arguing over things they don’t understand, and just leave things be as they are, and let Emily live her life. I truly wish that people would stop wasting so much energy trying to put Emily in a box and take that time and energy in reexamining their own lives to figure out why they care so much about how a complete stranger was born differently from them.

“The world keeps trying to teach me softness like it’s a skill I somehow missed. But softness was never my deficit. I carried softness through things that would have shattered harder people. My strength isn’t the opposite of softness—my strength is what kept the softness from dying.”

What people seem to entirely miss about softness is that being too “hard” can actually make you inflexible. Softness should not be a gendered ideal state of being. That softness that Emily was able to retain for over two decades, plus what she went through in childhood, is a miracle I probably won’t ever be able to explain. But thanks to that softness, I was able to make a soft landing when all that was ahead of me was a gaping abyss. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

“People who mishandled themselves will eventually mishandle you as well.” I know this from personal experience.

I think this is one of the best things I’ve ever read about closure: “People talk about closure like it’s a door you shut. It isn’t. Closure is a language you learn only after you’ve stopped trying to rewrite the story. It’s the moment you look at your own reflection and realize she’s not the aftermath—she’s the author.”

Many people consider themselves a product of their experiences, when the reality is, as long as you’re still breathing, you are still in control of how you react to the things happening now, and how you process and gain knowledge and wisdom from everything that’s happened up until this point. And that point does not wait for you to catch up with it.

“Most things don’t fail on their own. People get involved, try to perfect them, and remove the exact conditions that made them work in the first place. The miracle was that I stayed kind.”

I think that paragraph speaks for itself.

“Maturity, I think, is simply learning the difference between a feeling that needs exploration and one that simply needs space.” I would add that maturity involves not suppressing, but privately processing, our difficult feelings, to make room for those that deserve to be expressed openly. There is a great value in a private, unexamined life that is being lost in our chronically online age, something that both Emily and I are rediscovering.

“You can’t repair what was built on pretense, and I refuse to apologize for noticing the cracks before anyone else did.” 

The problem is that our entire civilization is mostly built on pretense, which is, obviously, an issue. This is why so many people are in survival mode despite the fact that technology and systems already exist for this to not be a thing. The abundance present in this modern age is sufficient to give everyone a decent standard of living, no matter where you are. This obvious gap of abundance inequality is something I hope to see resolved in my own lifetime, and I have plenty of ideas as to how this could happen, but many other smarter and more resourceful people than myself have tried and failed thus far. Therefore, I feel it’s my duty as a conscientious human being to continue pointing this out, pointing at the cracks with great urgency, until something is actually done about them.

…

“Being Queer In A Town That Doesn’t Ask Questions” is the first article that Emily had published in a local paper during 2025, this being the only in the Rutland Herald. I’ll say that the way she describes our town sounds about right. 

“…your problem is that you’re the daughter of a broken man.” What kind of diagnosis is that from a professional therapist? My diagnosis from therapists was always that I was unwilling to choose a niche, stay in my lane, and take a couple little pills each day to keep the chemicals in my head from going “out of balance” (read: compliance.) At least there was structure to my diagnosis; what Emily got just baffles me.

What they failed to recognize what that I HAD chosen a niche: overanalyzing everything. My lane was just the one that I created for myself, which ran diagonally across all the other lanes drawn out in front of me. So, technically, I took their advice, but the pills either made depressed or manic so I ditched them all together. It seems Emily prefers me this way… your results may vary. (Yes, I stole Emily’s joke.)

As Emily says, that phrase she was given was stripping her of her agency entirely. Mine was a prescription that tried to do the same thing, but instead gave me a framework which I could subvert and use to my own advantage. They want to see me choose a niche and pick a lane? Well, I ran roughshod over everyone’s plans for me, and while it was a disaster for a while, it all worked out in the end, right?

“Grief has a way of peeling back the layers of illusion.” I know this feeling all too well. 

“I’ve learned that jealousy is a thief that steals your own story while you’re busy coveting someone else’s.” This is something you don’t want to take forty-plus years to learn. Glad I learned it just before I turned forty myself.

“I’m not sure which is worse—to be the one envied, or the one doing the envying. Neither sits well. Both rot you in different ways.” I’ve looked at envy from both sides a lot over the years. It’s time for me to compost all the envy, felt and received, and hope something beautiful grows from the remains.

This is where the title came from: “Adults treated me like a special case. I simply had high functioning autism. My friends knew better. One Saturday morning, we were sprawled on the floor with our horse toys, and I picked the dark-haired one. From then on, I was nicknamed Dark Horse. They named me right. I was always the one no one bet on, the one counted out before the race even started. And still, I outran them all. I defied the expectations and made it on my own, in my own way.”

I finally was the one to bet on Emily. I won.

…

Love this line: “There comes a time in every girl’s life when she finally feels like she belongs, and for me that time is now–arriving fashionably late, but all the more profound for its tardiness.”

“Firelight has a way of drawing out stories…” Yet another benefit of the most important technology in human history.

Few opening sentences to a diary entry can top this: “Some of us aren’t born with straight lines or clear directions—we’re drawn in crooked constellations, held together by memory and the people who don’t flinch when the world tries to rewrite our coordinates.”

Everyone tried to rewrite my coordinates, too. Especially when people met Emily and didn’t or simply couldn’t, or chose not to, believe Emily’s wild life stories. I assure you they are all true. Some of them are simply too strange to even be fiction. And people kept asking how much she was paying me to lie for her. What was I getting out of it? I was never paid to lie because it was all the truth. What I got out of it was the only person I feel has ever seen me for me, and in fact, sees me for a lot more than I ever saw in myself. I like to think I do the same for her. 

“The world still squints at people like me, like I’m a question they can’t answer.” I actually prefer to be unknowable. There’s something to be said for a private unexamined life. 

“But I’ve learned to take that question and make it art. To use my differences to teach the world to see nuance they never know existed.” And for me, nuance is everything that so many people miss entirely because they aren’t paying enough attention. 

“… maybe it’s just the fault in my stars, the misprint in my genetic poetry that made me different from the start. Maybe I was never meant to follow a straight path. Some of us are born on diagonals. Some of us are capable of seeing the world from another angle. Some of us learn to build our own compasses.”

I was definitely born on a diagonal. I have written about that before. I see the world from various obtuse angles, which is very eye straining. And my compass is usually backwards, north is south and east is west, as so on. But that phrase, genetic poetry… I don’t want to sound like chatGPT here, but chef’s kiss!

About me: “We share a wavelength that hums somewhere between love and logic, friendship and firelight. She knows every unspoken sentence that lives behind my eyes.”

I like to think I’m a rather reliable source when it comes to myself. I would love to chart these precise wavelengths between such disparate things, but at least they are alliterative. Also I do NOT know every unspoken sentence behind her eyes because that would be both creepy and TMI. Anyway, the sentiments are gorgeous and greatly appreciated. 

…

“There’s a strange kind of peace in choosing not to perform. I used to think standing apart meant being alone, but now I see it’s the only way to stay intact. When you stop explaining yourself to people who’ve already decided what you are, you get your life back — messy, unfiltered, unapproved.” – Emily Pratt Slatin, October 8, 2025

“People want you to line it all up in a tidy arc. They ask things like what did you learn, or what would you tell your younger self? My younger self would not have listened, and honestly, she shouldn’t have. The point of a year like this isn’t the lesson – it’s the ledger.”

2025 was a major year of loss for both Emily and I. Without going into my half of the story, what I can say is this is a passage that I completely vibe with here. Life may be linear, but the stories of our lives, the lessons we learn, are not. And yeah, years like this aren’t about learning lessons so much as taking inventory. Years like this force us to take stock of where we’re at right now. The ledger is more than just a record of what we’ve lost, gained, and otherwise. You can’t look at it as a balance sheet so much as what it tells you about where you’re at in space, and a lot of times, you find yourself wrestling with several different versions of yourself as you attempt to discover the better versions of yourself still ahead. And yeah, the younger versions of yourself will likely never listen, because they lack the experience and context, but a future version of you just might, because who knows how many versions that future you may have needed to move on from, too.

There is a list of morals she has in her piece about the day her mom passed. The first one gave me pause: “Sometimes the kindest sentence is the shortest one.”

I often find myself at a loss as to what the right thing to say is to people. And when it comes to Emily and I, it seems that this is indeed the case; the shortest, simplest thing is usually the right thing to say. I always want to write novels in the comments sections of my favorite YouTube creators, but I’ve come to realize, just telling them something as simple as “this is the video I needed today” or “I really felt your passion for this subject today” or “I know where you’re coming from because I’ve been there/am there right now…” those are the comments that mean the most. Or what I told my favorite podcaster recently: “This is what you were born to do.” I never returned to see if she “hearted” it or replied to it. But yeah, this is excellent advice not to overlook.

“Friendship can outlast the version of love that society dictates comes with matching rings.” 

This is a beautiful sentiment that I share with Emily. I have very complicated views on the entire institution and ‘industry’ of marriage that could be its own book.

“By the time you read this, the leaves in Upstate New York will have made their annual argument with gravity and lost.” 

I don’t know why I find that sentence so funny. Perhaps this is because I have many grievances with gravity myself, and thus far in terms of winning arguments with me, gravity is undefeated.

“Every road carries a memory you didn’t consent to revisit.”

I know that feeling all too well. It’s why I can’t return to the places I used to live ever again. I would just break down crying so much that I’d just be stuck there in neutral and Emily would have to drag me home sobbing. It amazes me the fortitude that Emily has to continuously drive the streets and highways that involved so many moments in her career she’d rather forget. If it were me, I’d always keep finding a longer way home each time.

…

This entry was written just a couple weeks after Emily’s mom passed, and this bit is one of my favorites from this book: 

“…somehow, it doesn’t feel like an ending. It feels like someone intentionally left the gate open. Like she knew I’d stand here too long if she didn’t make it obvious there was more life waiting past the fence. There’s grief, yes — but also that strange flicker of beginning that shows up right when you least want it to.”

It’s also notable that this short page-long entry from November 2, 2025 ends with “(unfinished).” I like to say More to come with my own work, but sometimes just absolutely signifying that this entry will be forever unfinished, that the words she meant to write just never coalesced into something on the page, that brings its own sort of finality. I think she said exactly what needed to be said anyway. (I confirmed this was intentional.)

This sentence on page 73: “Death finally found her too, as it eventually does with everyone who thinks they can outstare it.”

It’s funny, I’m so bad about noting page numbers., but I made it a point to here.

On page 78, there’s this: “I thought about how many versions of me the weather has already met: the woman who fought everything, the one who ran toward it, and the one who finally let the storm pass without needing to name it.“

There’s just something beautiful about that sentiment I can’t quite yet describe.

“You stop rushing once you realize no one’s keeping score.” (pg 79). This is perhaps the most important thing you CAN learn. (Except, one could argue that the body keeps the score; there’s a whole book on that concept, after all. Funny, I never finished reading my copy at the time back in 2021…I may have to revisit it with all the life experiences I’ve had over the past 3-4 years.)

“The one who mistook motion for meaning.” (pg 79). This was me, also.

“I was handed responsibility long before I had the language for any of it.” (pg 81)

The context here is obviously important: Emily was in charge of scenes from a very young age, especially as the only EMT on scene many times in upstate New York. She also had superior training to most of her peers in rescue situations.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure any of us truly ever get the language quite right when it comes to responsibility. I think some of us just stumble into it, or have excellent mentors, or both. Many ‘leaders’ never quite get it right, and only rise to that position through some element of luck, social standing, or who they happen to know. Emily happened to stumble into that language over time because she didn’t have a choice but to learn it all for herself. And yes she had some mentors, but most of it was purely from field experience. 

…

“…the scrambling people do when they realize the argument they build is collapsing around their feet and they need to salvage whatever pride is left, even if it means rewriting history on the spot.” (pg 90)

I’ve witnessed this more times than I can count, the truth laid out plainly before people and they seem to be living in an entirely different parallel universe in which their bizarre, twisted version of their truth is somehow fact. I begin to wonder if some people just happen to phase out of our shared reality (if it’s even shared at all) through some quirk of quantum mechanics that we haven’t mapped out just yet. Perhaps people living in their own seemingly unfounded versions of events as truth has some deeper cause we can’t yet measure. More likely it’s just people are too self-centered and think in such strict binaries that they can’t afford to invite any sort of nuance into their worldviews. But there may be a scientific explanation, and I would love for there to be one to afford these foolish folks at least some amount of grace.

Great words on grief: “Time has its own ideas about healing — people act like it’s a medication you take once a day and wait for results. But grief doesn’t work that way. It’s more like weather. It shifts. It lingers. It returns when the air pressure changes. You don’t control it; you adapt ot it. And eventually, you forget what the old climate felt like.” (pg 98)

This is one of the best lines in the book thus far: “When you’ve seen enough endings, you stop romanticizing permanence. There’s a certain mercy in broken things; they no longer pretend to be perfect. I learned to build altars out of ordinary things — coffee mugs, dead pens, cracked mirrors — and call it faith.” (pg 103-04)

A reality I know all too well, “…socioeducational milestones are not guarantees. They are just events people attend out of social obligation if the gatekeepers let them.” (pg 112) Truly, they are meaningless. Graduations are just a time at which you’re thrown to a new pack of wolves to either put you in your place in the hierarchy or be torn apart.

On diplomas: “People love diplomas because they are neat. They are rectangular proof that you endured a sanctioned timeline. They are a stamp that says, yes, this person followed the steps. They were obedient, did what they were told, and are now a product of the modern industrialist education. I have never been that girl. Not fully. Not even when I tried. So I left.” (pg 113)

I do have my high school diploma. Actually, I left it behind at my childhood home. It has the wrong name on it, anyway. And all I ever learned at that school, besides a handful of truly exceptional teachers who exposed me to things I wouldn’t have found on my own, is that I was never going to belong in the society my peers were expected to participate in… never. I regret even ever trying at college… wasting four important years of my life when I should’ve just done the trading card stuff instead of putting me into over a decade of crushing debt. It would’ve been at least something with a future.

“I remember sitting there, realizing I was surrounded by a system that cared more about compliance than comprehension, more about credentials than capability. I was not learning — I was memorizing, agreeing, performing. I was not growing — I was being managed.”

And when I realized that college was just an infinitely more expensive version of high school, I literally told my writing “teacher” in my senior year to do something impossible and walked away from academia forever. Even then, I still tried to fake my way into a “respectable” marketing career. That never happened. I had to take a very different path, just as Emily did. Mine was just a lot messier.

…

This is the opening sentence of the Christmas Eve 2025 entry: “I woke up before the light had decided what it wanted to be today.”

Not only is that a beautiful word picture, but it makes me think about waking up with the question, “Who do I want to be today?”  More specifically, “Where should I be shining my light today?” (pg 120)

“How being central to someone else’s world can turn into a strange kind of isolation.” (pg 120) I know this feeling, too.

“I thought about how the sun never asks to be looked at, but everything still turns toward it. I thought about how the moon survives on borrowed light and somehow gets blamed for being cold.” (pg 120)

Beautiful ironies. And I’ve been thinking a lot about heliotropism lately thanks to a video I recently watched about being more like flowers quietly and slowly bending towards the light.

“I do not confuse mere signs of motion with progress. I understand preservation. I understand sometimes the best thing to say is no. I understand that holding something together for a long time requires more discipline than building it once.” (pg 124)

This is a great mindset to have, and one I’ve been trying to learn from Emily. For many years a lot of my “progress” was mere motion. This is why I’ve turned to preservation of the bits and bobs about myself that I think are worth sharing, in much the way Emily has with her website. It’s an archive of who we were, who we are now, and who we’re becoming. And damn, having to say ‘no’ was something I learned the hard way. I prefer to say, “No, but instead…” whenever possible, but sometimes a ‘no’ with a polite smile and you turning away to go about your own business is absolutely necessary. And the discipline of building a mystery over a long time is indeed difficult to master, and it needs constant training, but it’s worth doing.

“There are nights when I sit in the quiet and feel every unfinished sentence inside me shift like unsettled dust, and I realize how much of my life has been spent carrying things I have had the language for. Not secrets, per se, just simple truths no one ever asked to hear.” (pg 126)

These are the very same sorts of things I’m trying so hard to relate through opening my journal up on my website and trying to build better language to convey. It seems that Emily and I share this particular aim with our creative work.

On closure: “… people leave for reasons that rarely match the stories they tell, and that closure is something you build, not something you receive.” (pg 127)

We’re now into 2026.

“…longevity without integrity is just inertia.” (pg 130) That line should speak for itself.

The hardest part of letting people go from your life is when they only hang on trying to extract some former version of you that they preferred, and sometimes that version was just a facade or a mirage that never truly existed. 

“Every decision you’ve ever made still exists somewhere, living out its own alternate ending.” (pg 134) Got me thinking deeply about parallel quantum realities again!

“The true measure of strength is walking away while your hands are still shaking, leaving behind the memories of who you used to be because it’s killing you to keep pretending that the past can be revisited like movie sequels that come after the premise became irrelevant.” (pg 135) This is what I call gathering up the will to walk away, and sometimes, it’s extremely painful, but a necessary step in preserving yourself.

“I’ve learned that the hardest part of growing up is realizing how much you tolerated because you were lonely, scared, or too used to chaos to recognize peace when it finally showed up.” (pg 136)

Sadly, some of us never are able to learn how to live in peace.

“It’s wild how long you’ll stay in places or in relationships that drain you just because leaving feels like admitting the truth you’ve avoided for too long. The truth being that some people never loved you for who you are — only for the parts of you that made their lives easier.” (pg 136)

Or more bearable, perhaps. And in addition to what I wrote earlier, sometimes those versions of you did exist at one time. But no matter who you happen to be, none of us stay exactly the same. In fact, if you wish to truly grow as a human being, you’ll likely be a slightly different, wiser, more self-aware version of yourself with each advancing day.

“Everyone I’ve ever known has wanted to be understood, but no one really wants to be truly known.” (pg 136) 

I think this is because most people don’t even know themselves all that well. So if someone knows you better than you know yourself, it’s going to make you feel kind of weird. Something I should dig into further…

…

“Sometimes nostalgia is unrequited love with nowhere left to go. And in life, whatever path we choose to walk, inevitably, in the end, we walk alone.” (pg 143)

It is somewhat tragic how the things we love rarely do (and often can’t) love us back. And yes, in the end, it all comes down to what we alone choose. The other tragedy is too often we let other people choose for us. 

I’ll also add that my concerns about keeping the house in Stamford are very complex, and circumstances changed in such a way, as you’ll learn later, that changed my mind in letting her keep it. My main concern was it being an anchor, the wrong kind of emotional anchor that I myself have tried hard to avoid. I don’t see it that way now, but I will say I didn’t handle this situation as neatly and calmly as Emily gives me credit for in the book.

…

“I believed that belonging was cumulative, something you earned by presence and time, by knowing when to speak and when to say quiet, by learning how not to be a problem.” (pg 148)

I used to think the same exact way, until you realize that is all a clever little lie you tell yourself to feel some sort of comfort when the people around you are really just looking out for themselves and only keep you around as long as it’s convenient.

“I learned then that belonging and usefulness are separate categories, and that you can be discarded personally while still being required institutionally.” (pg 151)

And yet so many of us still fall through the cracks, whereas others are fortunately very talented at fire rescue and emergency medical technician work. Others like me languish away writing words no one reads until one day you decide to post a writer’s lift thread on Twitter, just because nothing else is working, and one of those Fire Rescue/EMT individuals takes a chance on you…

“Entire lives unfolded without intersecting mine in any meaningful way. And yet, when we speak now, there is an expectation of familiarity, of shared history still intact, as if time simply paused in my absence and resumed when I returned.” (pg 154)

Even when I’ve tried to reconnect with people from my own past, they often barely gave me a reply. I was always on the fringes myself it seems, so I know how Emily feels here. I chose to live behind the scenes and under the radar because that was how I survived in a world that was often hostile to my quirky autistic nature. But it actually makes me angry that Emily was a public servant, a true hero, for many years, and she is dismissed by so many people who simply don’t understand or appreciate the sacrifices she made. I could say a lot more about that, but I’ll leave it there for now.

“I became practiced at living inside a fiction that other people insisted was real. Correcting it was not an option. Refusing it was not possible. I did what I had already learned to do well — I endured.” (pg 157)

The saddest part is that this fiction is the so-called “shared reality” of much of modern society. It just seems most people are willing to live in that fiction so long as it doesn’t fail them. And it usually does.

“When I say I was educated elsewhere, I do not only mean geographically. I mean I was taught — systematically — that who I was could be overridden, that compliance would be rewarded, and that safety came from not insisting on being seen.” (pg 158)

This is what boarding schools, “prep” schools, and colleges are meant to do, and they do quite a damn good job at it, while also separating you from financial freedom for most of your adult life (if not all). The really sad part is that kids growing up today and young adults out in the world trying to find their place are struck by an inversion of what safety used to look like. Like Emily, I was taught to keep your head down and stick to your lane. But nowadays, the youth are expected to not only be able to pivot at the drop of a hat, but from CONSTANTLY being seen! It’s a complete reversal. And I don’t succeed in that kind of world where I have to play PR for my own “personal brand.” 

I’m one who needs a private, unexamined life to be able to maintain my own self-identity. Emily is that way, too. I refuse to create a marketable, commoditized version of myself, and I still found a way out. But most people can’t, and honestly, I think the blame lies entirely on kids being forced into college before they truly understand the consequences of what signing away four to six years of your young adult life actually means. I’d love to get back to the days when you would find a job out of high school, work smart, build your skills and personal network, and save up to buy a house. This is simply not an option in a world where degrees are necessary for so many occupations. Yes, it still happens, but only for those lucky enough to be blessed by the algorithm (not me, but for many of my clients), hyper-competence at one or more highly demanded trades (Emily), or dumb luck (me)…