This morning, on day three of Zepbound, I sat staring at the scale across the room, tucked under the bathroom cabinet yet somehow still covered in dust that nearly hid the footprints from who-knows-when the last time was someone stepped on it.

Then I remembered the other scale. It was 1985 and I was eight years old, and my mother had put me on a diet. She had taken a half-sheet of poster board and made a grid so I could write in my weight each day, and there were pictures of hot fudge sundaes from Mayberry’s that I could have with Grandma as treats if I made goals.

I went from 87 pounds to 58 pounds on my first diet. We were still using pencils instead of pens at school and I knew nothing about training bras, but I knew about calories.

That scale had a small dial on the edge, just behind the window showing the judge-and-jury needle and wheel of numbers, that allowed me to adjust where “zero” fell on the scale. It was a way to cheat. I couldn’t cheat much, but I could knock off a pound, a pound and a half. It felt good to do that.

This morning, as I sat, I realized that was intended to do what the large green scales with chunky sliding weights, the ones at the doctors’ offices, could not do. It was to adjust for clothing.

Digital scales can’t do that. They display a red number that burns onto your retinas the evidence of your failure.

I’m not eight years old any longer, but I am still staring at a scale on the bathroom floor, wondering how to bend this painful universe of pounds and fat in my favor, somehow. Somehow.

I didn’t go into IT because I love computers.

I went into IT because I hate computers and love people.

I came to it late. When you’re the girl at the top of your class, no one tells you you’re allowed to follow a career path that lets you use your hands, play with wires and screwdrivers, repair machinery, or – and this was big – generally do “guy things” for a living.

I should have known when I was sixteen. My first computer was a Tandy 1000 with a hard drive, the last model Radio Shack made before discontinuing the line. Beside it was a dot matrix printer that I used to work on the school newspaper, my hands a blur of mastery on the keyboard as I typed up articles in WordPerfect 5.1. The day that the printer became decidedly jammed and beyond repair, I was incensed, and I took my Daddy’s screwdriver to it until it was a pile of so many springs and wheels and bits. I found the jam.

I missed the hint when I put the printer back together and it worked perfectly. But it seemed normal to me, unleashing wrath on an inanimate piece of computer equipment and bending it to my will. It didn’t seem like a vocational calling. It was as natural as breathing.

My twenties and thirties were mostly about being a secretary. Sometimes for a lawyer, sometimes for a school system department, sometimes in a courthouse; always, I was the resident “computer person” that people asked for help. One attorney said, “You’re really intuitive with these, you know.” The clue whizzed overhead as I dove into paralegal studies.

The epiphany came in 2006, when I began working in the school social work office doing data analysis. A small pile of old IBM Thinkpads sat on top of a filing cabinet in our office. I asked about them and learned that the tech department (run by a woman with BPD who screamed a lot) wouldn’t touch them because they were too old (even though they were the model we were currently using), and that one had a bad floppy drive and one had a bad hard drive. I asked if I could Frankenstein them, with nothing to lose, and opened one up with a precision screwdriver. That was a big day for me. That was the day I broke my first laptop piece and ordered my first replacement part on eBay. A new world was born.

I got all three laptops up and running.

The screaming lady caught wind of it and became my mortal enemy. I wasn’t allowed to switch into a tech role in the school system until she retired. Within a month of her departure, I was on the help desk as a lead.

In the meantime, I’m pretty sure I repaired a laptop or desktop computer for each of the fifty-odd social workers in that department. I took the computers home and did the work on the side for $10/hour (student fees – and I still believe I’m learning and now will not allow anyone to pay for services, unless it’s in zucchini or lessons about this and that). My screwdriver collection grew, took on tiny tools and little gadgets. I built two desktop computers and a server for home. I repaired HP laptops by baking their motherboards in the oven on a cookie sheet at 385 degrees for 8 minutes with some quarters stacked on top of the graphics chips. I bought broken ones on Craigslist and attempted to repair them. Most of them I made worse. Most got recycled. But eventually, I taught myself enough to sit for the A+ certification exam and pass, the first time.

What is it like? I hate computers. I take joy in manipulating them, correcting them, reprogramming them, and when all else fails, thumping them or having at them with a screwdriver and a mission statement. The job satisfaction is in the human beings on the other end. Each co-worker I handed back a repaired computer was incredibly grateful, relieved that they hadn’t lost their son’s graduation pictures or their tax returns, able to work on their degree in the evening, able to do their banking without a virus, able to do anything at all. I understood what the moving parts did, but they understood restoration.

The pandemic clarified this for me. I was responsible for almost 200 classrooms’ audio/video equipment and computers and for a revolving door of broken Chromebooks (we sent 45,000 of them out to homes). Repairing was immensely enjoyable. I ripped the laptops apart and used the good bits left over to cobble together working ones so students would have computers to use to attend school remotely. I taught others how to do it. I oversaw their work. That should have been an ego boost that anyone would call job satisfaction.

Job satisfaction came early one Saturday morning in the fall of 2020, when I sat outside on a grassy patch of parking lot at an apartment complex, next to the office building (for wi-fi signal), across from a young mother and her three kids, helping her first-grader get signed on to a Chromebook. I had talked by phone with her several times that week and we just could not get things to work. She had passed through anger and frustration and into a passive, weary despair, and I had heard that in her voice and set up the appointment. So we masked and sat in the fresh air on the dewy grass, laptop out, and before she had to feed the baby and leave for work, I had fixed the problem and made her daughter smile.

It came when I talked a Spanish-speaking grandmother through resetting her grandson’s password over the phone, my broken Spanish even worse than her broken English. I spoke slowly and met her where she was, when making a capital letter began with “okay, toca a ese-hache-i-efe-te, pabajo y izquierda de las letras, mira?” and an hour later, I was spent and she was relieved. We got there.

It came when I sat across the desk from our CIO and had a heated argument about our implementation of an online-only job application system, after a cafeteria cook for an elementary school held back tears in my cubicle after I helped her change her password and tried in vain to steer her through navigating the awful new software. She just wanted to change schools. She was being bullied at her current job. No one would listen to her because she didn’t know enough English to explain, was not literate enough to write it out, could not use a computer to type it or to escape from it. We were cutting the bottom tier of our tech-capable employees out of the picture in the name of streamlining and modernizing.

The cafeteria lady hugged me when I quietly got a paper application from someone in HR and handed it to her.

I am in IT because I abhor leaving human beings behind. I am in IT because it places me in a position of power to advocate, to have a say in where “can” meets “should’ in technology. And if it means kicking a copier or quietly threatening a printer and instilling fear in its circuitry, so be it.

Now I work in a hospital. It’s exactly like a school. I receive messages and phone calls and frequently jump up to scurry down the hall, up a staircase, to do what needs to be done, however small or repetitive. I use humor to put frustrated people at ease, and I savor the relationships that form over time with those I serve. Sometimes, there’s a screwdriver or a mouse in my pocket. Sometimes, I get to help a patient directly. Sometimes, I get a high-five in the cafeteria.

It feels like a superpower, being in IT. And my career has almost nothing to do with computers.

It’s one of the last warm days before September yields to its first frost. The air is eighty degrees but the water is less than seventy. Most of the people on the north shore beach have braved wading in to their knees or chests; many are on paddle boards or in rafts. A radio on someone’s blanket plays Queen and Led Zeppelin songs and a man throws a frisbee for his dog.

I step into the water and walk, determined to acclimate and reach the point where the shivering stops and the water feels warmer than the air, determined to relive my July swim and the childlike wonder of floating while staring at Willoughby Gap, the cliffs, the summer cottages. I have to concentrate. My body wants me to return to safety and warmth, back in our camping chairs on the shore. Every second, I choose the cold, and keep walking.

When the water is waist-high, I turn and look around me. First the fjord, then the man who found a tennis ball for the dog, then our chairs hidden among the countless other chairs and blankets, then the splashing children at the far end of the beach.

Then the hillside east of the lake, rising sharply. It holds a cemetery. I’m not wearing glasses so I can’t be sure, but there are at least a hundred graves, some with new, shiny granite headstones, others old and worn, or plain white and spaced like piano keys.

The graves seem to be looking down at the beach scene, watching, remembering when they were the ones swimming a single generation ago, or maybe two, or five, in glacial waters left here in the Pleistocene.

I stare up at them for some time, then imagine them watching me as I pinch my nose and plunge under the water, submerged and shocked by the cold. I surface and breathe and let my heart pump blood and begin to warm me. I owe courage to that hillside, because my heart is beating and I don’t have much time. Already, I feel warmer. The sounds of playing children and the bustle of the beach drown out my sudden laugh of delight.

Establishing care with a new doctor means having to answer seventeen pages of questions about every detail of one’s history. It cannot be avoided, and it makes me a bit grouchy, touchy. There are too many medications to recall, a depression screening that I have to lie on because it wouldn’t give an accurate picture of me, and the family history. I leave large sections of the forms blank, but they still have to be reviewed.

“Is your father still living?” the nurse asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Is your mother still living?” she asks.

I squint and wrinkle my nose for a second, then say, “Probably.”

It’s an accurate answer. It’s been about a month since I casually checked online for an obituary and didn’t find one.

I ended our relationship in 2018. It was a time when her e-mails about the squash in her garden and when it might rain later and passive-aggressive reports about my sisters (that she knew I did not want to hear) had begun to make me simmer. She would not call; she would e-mail once every few weeks, and it would always be about the weather, mowing the lawn, squirrels getting the pecans from the tree. She spent so much time when I was growing up, then grown and gone, staring out that back door, just staring, that it was no wonder it comprised the bits of the world that made her feel safe.

It made me angry. I wouldn’t have given her more than my own squash garden – a project James did in school, how the dogs were doing, the weather forty-five minutes away and how we got more snow than they did – because when I was twelve, she read my diary and took from me what I would never have willingly given her.

I was already a writer. The contents were about the depths of my being, not hearts and doodles, not passages about crushes on boys or clues about a first kiss.

She had the gall to leave it open, face down, on my bed, so that when I returned home from school that day, I would know she had read it. I think she was expecting some kind of breakthrough in our flavorless relationship, a saccharine connection, but all I could do was stand and stare at it and wait until she finished saying words and walked away, so I could close my bedroom door and never open it for her again.

All these years later, I would not have given her more than squash, because she violated me. Yet I also held anger because she was emotionally unavailable from the time of my inception, vague, inert, cooking dinner dutifully and providing transportation and clothing as expected, custodial care; the rest of the time, staring out of that back door window. Just staring.

So we sent e-mails about squash and dogs and weather right up until the day she came out of left field and rebuked me for saying “god-damned” in a previous e-mail. She had begun attending church with my sister Kathy and, unbeknownst to me, had consumed an awful lot of Kool-Aid there. I’d had no idea. I took the Lord’s name in vain and she ripped me apart and told me I had broken her heart and she was very, very offended on behalf of her Savior who had died for her sins and redeemed her.

I thought about this. I thought about it for days. I remembered how peaceful the five years were when she rejected me after I came out and we didn’t have contact. I thought about guilt and responsibility. I thought about social duty and self-care.

I thought about a lot of things.

I wrote a final e-mail, and it wasn’t about squash. It was about the weather. I brought the storm.

Then I blocked her number, her access to me online, at the post office, everywhere. I closed my bedroom door and locked it.

I’ve had five more years of peace since then, and I do not intend them to end. I think about her sometimes because I’ve processed our dynamic and I can comfortably tolerate my ambivalence. I don’t love her, and I don’t hate her. I look for her obituary now and then because my sisters might need my signature on something that says they can leave me the fuck out of the probate of her estate.

None of them knows I live in Vermont. None of them knows I’m free. And this year, we grew some god-damned fine zucchini in our garden. There was a lot of rain, but it grew anyway.