Grand Resets & Pivot Points (Part 2)

Rebuilding the Timeline When Memory Is Chunky

Oh, Standing on the ledge, rebuilding from the rubble.

This is me continuing the “grand resets / pivot points” thread from yesterday — but this time I’m trying to do something more practical: put scattered memories into a timeline, even when the details are sketchy.

I’ve got gaps. The motorcycle accident (and what may have been an undiagnosed concussion) seems to have left me with time distortion and missing chunks — especially in that plus-or-minus five years zone around it.¹ Add grief, stress, and teenage survival-mode, and some of this becomes less “a neat story” and more “a box of loose photos with no dates on the back.”²

---

How to Read This Timeline

• ✅ Solid = I’m confident about the rough date.
• ≈ Probable = best fit based on age + sequence.
• ? = I remember the event, but the timing is fuzzy.

Anchor: I was born July 11, 1969. So I’m using age as the ruler when the calendar is missing.

---

Timeline (Best-Fit Reconstruction)

1985 (Age 15) — Grief as a Fault Line ✅

• Jan 25, 1985: My brother Steve died. After that, a lot of high school life becomes harder to place cleanly in my head.

From a psychological angle, this makes sense: grief doesn’t just make you sad — it can reorganize attention, memory, and the way time feels. The “before” and “after” become different worlds.²

---

Mid-1985 to 1986 (Age 16–17) — Displacement & Survival Logistics ?

• ≈ Just after my 16th birthday (Summer 1985+): I moved to North Bay with someone I knew from group home days, then eventually moved back home.
• ? Around this stretch, I did what I had to do to get where I needed to go — some of it I’m not proud of — but it happened.

Sociologically, this is where “choice” gets messy. When your supports are unstable, you don’t make decisions in a vacuum — you make them inside a constrained set of options. That’s the difference between a tidy moral story and a life-course story.³

---

Summer 1986 (Age 17) — The Midway/Carnival Year-End in Toronto ≈

• ≈ Summer I turned 17 (Summer 1986): I worked traveling with a midway carnival — operating games, setting up and tearing down rides.
• ≈ End of that run (late 1986): I landed in Toronto and kept working with my boss — doing scrap metal work.
• ? I eventually returned home because I wasn’t happy with the direction.

In plain terms: that kind of work is brutal, but it can also be clarifying. It’s identity in motion — “I can survive anywhere” — but also instability disguised as freedom. In life-course terms, it’s a pivot that can either become a pathway or a warning sign.³

---

1986–1988 (Approx.) — Motorcycle Accident & Memory Distortion ≈

• ≈ Somewhere in the late teens: The motorcycle accident happened around here (exact year unclear), and my memory gets “chunky” across this whole band of time.

That “chunky” feeling isn’t a character flaw. Concussion/mild traumatic brain injury can affect attention, encoding, and the sense of time — and trauma can do similar things through stress physiology and avoidance.¹²

---

1988–1989 (Age ~19–20) — Pizza Pizza, Settlement, S10, Still at Home ≈

• ≈ 1–2 years after the bike accident: I worked at Pizza Pizza as a delivery driver (I remember a winter in there, and roughly a year of work).
• ≈ Moderate insurance settlement: I bought a secondhand 1985 Chevy S10, replacing my Monte Carlo.
• ≈ Still living at home: I remember being in that 18–20 environment and it feeling cool and not cool at the same time.

That “cool/not cool” line matters. It’s role conflict: you’re an adult in some ways (work, money, vehicle, responsibility), but still under a family roof with family weather systems you don’t control. That tension is a real psychological load.⁴

---

Summer 1989 (Age 20) — Graduation + Grocery Store Job ✅

• Summer 1989: After graduating high school, I began working at the local grocery store (Freshmart).

Work becomes a stabilizer here — not just income, but routine, status, predictability. Sociologically, employment is one of the main ways we anchor identity when everything else is unstable: “I exist, I have a role, I can show up.”³

---

1989–1991 (Age 20–22) — Horses Enter the Story ✅/≈

• ≈ 1989–1990: I met someone who was into horses.
• ≈ About a year later: We broke up.
• Early 1990s: Even after that relationship ended, horses became a huge part of my life for years.

Psychologically, that tracks as regulation and recovery. Horses aren’t just “a hobby.” They’re structure, grounding, non-verbal relationship, competence, and a nervous system reset. Sometimes a person finds a stabilizer that isn’t a person — and it’s still real support.⁵

---

1992–1993 (Age 23–24) — Family Pressure, Work Instability, Alcohol Escalation ✅/≈

• ≈ 3 years into Freshmart (around 1992): Life started getting complicated.
• My mother didn’t like the woman I was dating.
• My mother’s alcohol issues got much worse.
• My father’s company (Storewell) closed.
• I put in notice at Freshmart — then, a week before I was supposed to quit, I begged to keep the job (because the ground was shifting under everything).

This is where the sociological lens gets sharp. When institutions wobble (workplaces closing, family systems destabilizing), people don’t just “feel stressed.” They get pushed into emergency adaptation — scrambling to keep any stable platform under their feet. That’s not weakness; it’s the logic of survival under uncertainty.³

---

May 1993 (Approx.) — “Cracking Bricks”: Removing My Brothers from the House ≈

• ≈ May long weekend 1993 (Victoria Day weekend): My father was away (a trip to Green Bay tied to startup discussions around a new company taking over the location and bringing in a core group of former employees).
• I got fed up with my mother’s drinking and removed my brothers from the house.
• I took them — and myself — to my aunt’s place and told my mother they wouldn’t be coming back until she dealt with her alcohol issues.
• ? I can’t fully recall if I was still living at home in that exact moment — but I know if I was, I wouldn’t have been for long after.

Psychologically, this is a boundary event — and also a role shift. In families affected by heavy substance use, roles often invert: the kid becomes the containment wall, the regulator, the decision-maker.⁶ That’s what “cracking bricks” feels like: you’re holding the line with your bare hands because nobody else is.

---

What This Timeline Is Really Doing (Under the Hood)

I’m not writing this to “tell a story for clicks.” I’m writing it because I need to understand myself — and because timelines turn chaos into something you can work with.

• Psychologically: this is narrative repair — taking scattered fragments and organizing them into a sequence that my brain can hold without spinning out.⁴
• Sociologically: this is a life-course map — showing how work, family instability, grief, and constraint shape “choices” in real time.³
• Practically: it gives me anchors. If memory is fog, anchors matter.

---

Next Step (Simple, Real-World)

Here’s what I’m going to do next, because I know this kind of writing can become its own loop if I’m not careful:

• One-page “Anchor List”: 10 facts I’m confident about (dates, places, vehicles, jobs) — no interpretation, just anchors.
• One “Gap List”: 5 questions I want answered (bike accident year? exact Pizza Pizza year? North Bay month/season?).
• One verification attempt: a single external check (old paperwork, a family member’s memory, a record, anything).

Godspeed.

---

Footnotes

1. Concussion / mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) can affect attention, memory, and the sense of time; symptoms can include gaps and distortion around events. See: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concussion and TBI resources. ↩
2. Stress and trauma can disrupt memory formation and retrieval; grief can also reshape salience and recall. See: van der Kolk (2014) on trauma; and general stress-and-memory research. ↩
3. The life-course perspective emphasizes trajectories, turning points, and how historical/social context shapes individual pathways. See: Elder, Johnson, & Crosnoe (2003). ↩
4. Narrative identity: people make sense of their lives by organizing events into an internalized story, especially after disruption. See: McAdams (2001). ↩
5. Human–animal interaction can support emotional regulation, self-efficacy, and stress reduction (including equine-assisted contexts). See: Fine (2019). ↩
6. Family systems approaches and addiction literature discuss role shifts, boundary stress, and “parentification” dynamics in families affected by substance misuse. See: Bowen (1978) for systems framing; and broader clinical literature on family roles in addiction. ↩

References

• Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Jason Aronson.
• Elder, G. H., Jr., Johnson, M. K., & Crosnoe, R. (2003). The emergence and development of life course theory. In J. T. Mortimer & M. J. Shanahan (Eds.), Handbook of the life course (pp. 3–19). Springer.
• Fine, A. H. (Ed.). (2019). Handbook on animal-assisted therapy (5th ed.). Academic Press.
• McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122.
• van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score. Viking.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). Concussion / traumatic brain injury (TBI) information and resources.