I lived in the High Desert of Southern California for a time. It was there that I began homeschooling my sons and it was there that I started my "shotgun marriage" to the internet.
While there I joined a gifted homeschoolers email list called TAGMAX and I often seemed to have much better advice than average for particularly thorny problems. I never knew how to relate to that.
It was that experience that caused me to begin blogging -- because there was clear need for what I knew -- but my writing has never really caught on, least of all my writing about parenting and homeschooling, though that was where my blogging began.
The High Desert is about 3000 feet above sea level, but it's called the High Desert because it's mostly flat. I have a fear of heights but this wasn't an issue there because although you are up high in terms of sea level, you aren't up on some steep cliff face where you might fall.
There are some crags sticking up out of it but it doesn't feel like you are "in the mountains." It's a strange landscape because the crags make it clear that you kind of are in the mountains, but it's mostly a wide, flat, rocky plain with a few desert plants.
Living in the High Desert likely saved my life. In my youth, I was tall and skinny and had a bizarrely narrow ribcage for someone so tall.
In the first six weeks there, I would wake up in the middle of the night gasping for air. I wasn't getting enough oxygen in the thin atmosphere with an undiagnosed lung disorder while my metabolism was slowed down for purposes of sleeping.
It eventually stopped and my bra size permanently changed. The band size -- the measure around the rib cage, not the cup size -- permanently increased. My lungs had grown larger in the thin atmosphere at elevation.
While living there, I took a trip to the East Coast to attend a conference, I think it was the Beyond IQ conference. I made it to the conference with some help from some connections I had due to being the Director of Community Life for The TAG Project, which was the project that TAGMAX was a part of.
So I was on the East Coast for a month in May that one year and I had boundless energy for that month. I read at some point that people who live at altitude have crazy amounts of energy when they go down to sea level because of their increased lung capacity.
And then I got back to the High Desert and I was just TIRED and not recovering. I quit my pro bono position as Director of Community Life and that fall I ended up having a tooth pulled and this started ten weeks of chronic sinus infections.
In the midst of that, we moved from the High Desert to the San Francisco Bay Area and were not much above sea level in our new home. In November, I went from being about 3000 feet above sea level to thirteen feet above sea level.
In January, my chronic sinus infections turned to pneumonia and I was bedridden until sometime in April. In May, I was diagnosed with Atypical Cystic Fibrosis.
I survived the months of being bedridden with pneumonia that wasn't quite clearing up in part because my lung capacity had increased and in part because I came down to nearly sea level right before things turned from bad to worse.
On TAGMAX, my uncommonly good advice made me something of a minor celebrity in a group so small it should have been a circle of friends. This caused some people to be jealous and to hate me.
I was never comfortable with being a celebrity in part because I didn't have a PhD or something. I was just a mom and just saying what made sense to me and I had no explanation for why my advice seemed so much better than average. I wasn't comfortable with trying to claim "I'm just better than you!"
It took me close to two decades to conclude that my experiences growing up were something akin to living at elevation in the High Desert: That if I had better parenting advice than others, it was largely because I had "stood on the shoulders of giants" and didn't know it because my social environment was one that existed in some sense at elevation.
I knew so many "giants" that I didn't know they were giants. I thought they were normal people and this was just how people lived.
For many years now, I have sought to try to find a way to put out better information on some subjects, such as parenting, so as to elevate the lives of other people. I seem to be going nowhere fast in terms of establishing credentials or reaching an audience, but I've at least made a bit of progress on trying to write well about my ideas.
While there I joined a gifted homeschoolers email list called TAGMAX and I often seemed to have much better advice than average for particularly thorny problems. I never knew how to relate to that.
It was that experience that caused me to begin blogging -- because there was clear need for what I knew -- but my writing has never really caught on, least of all my writing about parenting and homeschooling, though that was where my blogging began.
The High Desert is about 3000 feet above sea level, but it's called the High Desert because it's mostly flat. I have a fear of heights but this wasn't an issue there because although you are up high in terms of sea level, you aren't up on some steep cliff face where you might fall.
There are some crags sticking up out of it but it doesn't feel like you are "in the mountains." It's a strange landscape because the crags make it clear that you kind of are in the mountains, but it's mostly a wide, flat, rocky plain with a few desert plants.
Living in the High Desert likely saved my life. In my youth, I was tall and skinny and had a bizarrely narrow ribcage for someone so tall.
In the first six weeks there, I would wake up in the middle of the night gasping for air. I wasn't getting enough oxygen in the thin atmosphere with an undiagnosed lung disorder while my metabolism was slowed down for purposes of sleeping.
It eventually stopped and my bra size permanently changed. The band size -- the measure around the rib cage, not the cup size -- permanently increased. My lungs had grown larger in the thin atmosphere at elevation.
While living there, I took a trip to the East Coast to attend a conference, I think it was the Beyond IQ conference. I made it to the conference with some help from some connections I had due to being the Director of Community Life for The TAG Project, which was the project that TAGMAX was a part of.
So I was on the East Coast for a month in May that one year and I had boundless energy for that month. I read at some point that people who live at altitude have crazy amounts of energy when they go down to sea level because of their increased lung capacity.
And then I got back to the High Desert and I was just TIRED and not recovering. I quit my pro bono position as Director of Community Life and that fall I ended up having a tooth pulled and this started ten weeks of chronic sinus infections.
In the midst of that, we moved from the High Desert to the San Francisco Bay Area and were not much above sea level in our new home. In November, I went from being about 3000 feet above sea level to thirteen feet above sea level.
In January, my chronic sinus infections turned to pneumonia and I was bedridden until sometime in April. In May, I was diagnosed with Atypical Cystic Fibrosis.
I survived the months of being bedridden with pneumonia that wasn't quite clearing up in part because my lung capacity had increased and in part because I came down to nearly sea level right before things turned from bad to worse.
On TAGMAX, my uncommonly good advice made me something of a minor celebrity in a group so small it should have been a circle of friends. This caused some people to be jealous and to hate me.
I was never comfortable with being a celebrity in part because I didn't have a PhD or something. I was just a mom and just saying what made sense to me and I had no explanation for why my advice seemed so much better than average. I wasn't comfortable with trying to claim "I'm just better than you!"
It took me close to two decades to conclude that my experiences growing up were something akin to living at elevation in the High Desert: That if I had better parenting advice than others, it was largely because I had "stood on the shoulders of giants" and didn't know it because my social environment was one that existed in some sense at elevation.
I knew so many "giants" that I didn't know they were giants. I thought they were normal people and this was just how people lived.
For many years now, I have sought to try to find a way to put out better information on some subjects, such as parenting, so as to elevate the lives of other people. I seem to be going nowhere fast in terms of establishing credentials or reaching an audience, but I've at least made a bit of progress on trying to write well about my ideas.