I build things.

I always have.

Shoebox furniture for my secondhand Barbie collection. Grass trimmings in the playfield scraped together in lines to define walls for playing "house" with my playmates at recess. I assembled the odd things mom bought for the house that came "to be assembled." Later I sat in the passenger seat of a little sports car while a mechanic did some tuning repair. The ratchet in his hands hummed, the tool out of my sight but the smooth lightning-fast swish and whisper mesmerized me. Now I know he had choked up on the handle, so it was a flutter of his fingers, not arm motion, that allowed the speed that created that sound. I have rebuilt carburetors on my kitchen table. Used a coat hanger to fish an aluminum compression washer out of the number 1 cylinder of a Ford 150 engine that had sputtered its last gasp as I pulled into the auto parts store. Really. My preschool daughter played in the old van while I pulled the carb in the parking lot. When I brought the rebuilt carb back to the van the next day, I found out the shop rag that had "protected" the exposed throttle body was the same rag I had used tinkering with the lawnmower to get it running a few days back. Good lord, but the sound of that washer slapping the top of the cylinder as the engine fired over on the first crank! Cute little donut-shaped clean spots on the piston head when I got a peek in from the spark plug port. Got it out with that coat hanger and a prayer.

That type of creative problem solving, fearless planning, and just plain stubbornness paved the way for a repurpose-ful life. Cars, houses, pianos, and a vintage trailer. Repair, renovation, creation — time and again on places and things in my life. Ignoring the internal world, mostly. But not in any conscious way. More of a lack of awareness, a defensive stoicism — in the not good way — to what my inner self experienced. Patterns, patterns everywhere in the external world. But always a vague sense of disconnect, unnamed and barely recognized.

But if I find a job I believe in, the sky is the limit.

Democracy as we thought we knew it died January 20th, 2025.

That had followed a harsh reckoning with the fact that 30% of my fellow Americans believe their pursuit of happiness required an authoritarian president. I witnessed the distress on full display as a quiet account observing on Bluesky. Some friendships made there fractured some of the barriers in my mind. And as sometimes happens with me, I got an IDEA. A grand idea. But it had to be my way, one that left me uncompromised in my stubborn values.

I could, and would, write letters. I could move hearts. The memorial website I built for my mom was proof. It was quietly bearing witness to injustice, to a system that almost failed my mother. But they messed with the wrong girl. I kicked the hornet's nest then, but good. I could do it again. This time, instead of writing a judge about an old woman's guardianship, I would write to whole-ass committees of the 119th Congress of the United States of America. And I would soon write on behalf of all Americans. No party, no lobbyist, were going to muzzle my voice, and I had confidence from vetting my letters in the community I had built on Bluesky.

I brought to that endeavor a habit of pouring all of me into a project. My strength, my spirit, my mind. I did it on a legacy architect's building on a "ghost project" as an electrician stepping into the unrecognized role of systems integrator. I rebuilt a flawed lighting control design. Punching above my weight, telling them where the faults were and forging my own path to fix it. Somewhere in that time frame I built a whole-ass website to counter the misdiagnosis of a health care doctor and the whole sham guardianship system she represented. Social workers, adult protection investigators, doctors, guardian ad litem, and ultimately the judge in the case were my target audience.

All of me.

That is how I do it. That citizen's letter-writing campaign grew into building a "toolbox" to show how anyone could do the same. I created a YouTube channel for expanding the civic learning project. I learned YouTube allows 5,000 characters of text for the description! I used that social media platform to create a civic learning electronic journal. All of me, opening my humble kitchen to share the idea of civic self-remediation. Swallowing my pride and bringing my naivety to the table. Walking a path of ignorance to empowerment, inviting any who would listen to join me. Most recently I have built a document processing pipeline and infrastructure to scale up a citizen team's effort to shine the light of truth on the Epstein class. Gleaning almost 2 million files that had been released chaotically, holding a coffee cup and a grudge, I again entrenched at the keyboard. I pushed as hard as I knew how against the system that would silence us. I found a small circle of citizens against abuse and exploitation as my sisters. I laid the pipes and built the file tree, putting together everything I could to support these citizen investigators. They read the documents; they put the pieces together. I do it for all of us.

See what is here on this site. I believe it speaks for itself.

All of me. All of us.

Wishes for strength and healing to you,

Rainey