Photo by Mikhail Odintsov on Unsplash

What I Would Say to My Younger Self in the Beginning Days of Activism ~

Diane Cotter
10 min readDec 31, 2023

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You will not know it, but your traumatic and complicated childhood will give you the tenacity to fight like a war-hardened warrior.

In your 55th year of life, you will be forced to shed your treasured shroud of privacy by which you have encased yourself since five years old.

The love of your life will lose the love of his life and you will fight for his life from the grips of the common thread that encased his tribe. Your warrior will suffer a grievous injury that will debilitate him in ways your heart cannot bear to witness. This pain will drive you to expose the great deception.

You will seek to understand the reason how this calamity found it’s way into your home.

Your research will lead you to uncover a great deception. You will seek assistance from tribal authorities - government agencies with names disguised as agents of citizen protection and will learn your first hard lesson of corporate capture and the great sin of omission.

Your husband will process his great loss and execute his knowledge as tribe elder to teach his brothers and sisters about the process of ‘next steps’ in the novel war against products of deception in his heroic occupation.

You will not want the matter that will be laid at your feet. You will protest savagely that it is not your duty or responsibility. That there are leaders in power and institutions to protect the protectors. These same leaders of powers will be the primaries you will wage war against for years.

Your great love and you will be forced to leave your family home built by your warrior’s hands, for it is no longer afforded, the home of wonderful memories where you raised your children. the great disease has brought great financial difficulty, when you had reached the pinnacle of success with your warrior’s position it will be cut down from you, and you will suffer the loss of the great income at too young an age. You also will sacrifice your great place of respite in the great north woods of Maine, your treasure and lifelong dream.. so that you both can dwell in a new home for which you can afford on half of the income you once had.

You will have no credentials nor resources. Still, your army will swell as you expose the enemies through war cries as you inflict savage personal attacks on corrupt elders betrothed with absolute power over the ranks you seek to warn. You will overcome subterfuge while processing the silent effects of your husband’s cancerous downward spiral.

You and your first infantry division will discover a great deception. And with childlike naivety you will seek out any and all who will help you sound the alarm.

Beware wounded girl, for the people you seek to help you will use you to test what you know as a ruse for their own involvement in the deception.

The million strong tribe you seek to warn will attack you with venom.. will label you crazy and dangerous as you take on their great snake… your skin will grow thick against arrows from those who know nothing.

Your unwavering faith in your God will be your greatest weapon. You will ask for and receive extraordinary strength from Him at every turn.

Many will be brave with you.

A small group of braves will risk everything to warn the great tribe with you. And while they cannot speak the way you do with, flaming arrows against those who you will see with eyes wide open, legions will cheer you on to do so for them. Your allies will be caught in institutions where decisions are made for them., and should they raise the alarm they will be dealt with by strong arm tactics to align with the words spoken by their nathartha chief.

You will be given great warriors who will challenge the opposition with you. They will be the bravest of the brave. They will risk all they have worked for to lead their tribes into the truth. Their voices will reach many tribes across the great nation.

You will ally with the mother of a warrior who has lost all yet risen as a phoenix over the same tribe you fight for ~ and she will join your war bringing her tribe with her.

Outsiders will join your cause. In your second and third year of war you will acquire the nightmare of your enemy,

…along with the great múinteoir in the House of Notre Dame.

These monumental warriors will educate the tribe in all the lands of the great tribe.

You will join forces secretly with the righteous fierce warrior chief within the occupied territory. He will be exasperated by your razor sharp edges, and while he is chief of the speaking piece of the enemy he will use his this same speaking piece to educate the tribe.

He will deliver information to you that will confirm your worst fears. Before he passes to his God, he will deliver the message to front line of what was done to you — by using his great speaking piece.

You will work under the silence of clandestine operations with insiders~ delivering information to and from your warriors incessantly. You will be cheered on by fighters who see their nathartha chief conspiring with the enemy. These fighters will break free from their once silent support and boast your war colors.

Your eminent nemesis will order a great shunning to be cast upon you and your husband for the threat you pose to the fluxes of golden gifts. This will leave you nearly mortally wounded and add to your growing burden of pain.

Your nemesis will claim victory for your greatest achievement while cowering within enemy lines. You will use this opportunity to reveal him publicly.

You will be inflicted with great wounds. Wounds you will burry deeply so that you are not seen as luaineach. You will confide in one warrior that your time may expire and that he must speak as you would to the acmhainn cogaíochta.

The great nightmare will ally you with his great weapon, the lovers of the land, air, and sea. And you will ally your great warriors with the new great weapon to teach the tribe of many nations of the dangers they are in.

The new great weapon will use its’ reach into the great House of White to raise 9 alarms for your firefighter nation.

Many warriors from the land of eolaíocht will join the great effort to discover, reach, and teach the bravest who have been abused for decades in the great deception. They must deliver the great truth, to the great lawmakers — for without their sacred word the great nathartha will rule with its endless gifts of gold.

You will build a network of officials, scientists, lawmakers, activists, and wordsmyths. You will call on them daily with missives and your missives will invoke action. Many of these officials will not say your name. They cannot. And that will pain you, but you will understand the rules.

Two great chiefs from the House of White will work directly with you, defying and mystifying the nathartha. These two great chiefs will not fear saying your name as others do in public. These chiefs will seek your help in writing laws to protect the protectors. In your second year of battle the great chief from your own village land will tell you, “I am with you, but you must get the great ceardchumann to stand with you”. Six years later these words will be echoed in your speech to the gaisgeach that stood with you in the palace of your father, and the mission will be accomplished.

Yet, your greatest ally will be buried deep within one of the institutions you rage against. He will take on your nemesis. This ally will become Great Gaisgeach of the great tribe of fire warriors.

Your great love and warrior will wear his great scar for all to seee. The great disease takes so much more than what is visible to the naked eye. He will use his great pain to carve the flesh with his indignation for all to see — to be warned for this great disease takes everything ~ for surely if the great disease can cut him down he must warn his tribe in the most humiliating way a warrior can do.

The great múinteoi r will reveal the great truth of the deadly deception kept shrouded by the enemy who held the battleground fortress bent at the knee for decades. Your now bursting army will revolt against the power of the enemy that bound itself with gifts of gold within the mighty walls of the trusted empire of hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

You will watch in horror as daily messages from the ranks advise they have the disease you rage war on. You will befriend widows and widowers who must stand in the damage done by the enemy. Your mind will not rest for them.

In your sixth year the warriors in from the west coast tribes will sue the poison makers for their cancers. They are led by a warrior who became a lawman and took up the mantle in his lands. This will be the first of thousands of lawsuits built with your science project.

In your seventh year your east coast nation led by your warrior will sue the posion makers for the great deception that has robbed them of everything, and in your own land your great lawmaker will remain silent. For she has done nothing to help you but has taken the cues from the snake.

You will be chastised for seeking recognition and bear witness as those that chastised you receive great recognition in the Golden-domed halls and city where you began your war.

Your work will be exploited and appropriated by those that know better. You will bear witness appalling acts of stolen valor.Remain steady warrior, for a great healing will take place in your eighth year. You will be summoned to a great reveal of your efforts and will be surrounded by and lifted by those that have wounded you. You will receive and deliver raw and full contrition with those you have thrust flaming arrows into the hearts of.

You will wear that recognition as a badge of honor as you will have done so without so much as an award or citation for your almost decade of work. And while the recognition is magnificent, you cherish the tangible items you have received over the war years; the helmet, the coins slipped in your hands, the pens and the letter written from the first great warrior to break the ranks of the enemy, and the roses now dried in your war room from your longest friends in this war who are also your greatest allegiance.

You will be labeled a sellout for aligning with the institution you raged against by those that say you’ve given your power away. You will not be deterred as years in the war will teach you the institution must push your body of work into the big house.

In your ninth year a great story teller will memorialize the war with the talents they have acquired while fighting the same evils that poisoned their homeland and loved ones. And the new great warrior chief will welcome the storyteller to the teaching parlor and ceremony of his great tribe. The new warrior chief has made it clear you fought long and hard, and gives great thanks for your sacrifices.

Stand strong, for you will heal. And while the healing will take time, you will begin to recognize yourself again, and live again, and you will have made peace with many who have stood against you, and who you have inflicted great pain.

In your ninth year of war you will stand beside the once great ally, then foe who joined the great shunning, now esteemed ally again, and together you will walk the halls of the golden domed house of law defending your aligned message of the great deception together.

In the golden dome on the city on the hill, known for revolution and patriots, a red haired warrior chief of the laws of the land has taken up the mantle to issue the command to sue the cancer distribution chain in your homeland. This will be a great relief to you, and you will deliver the fact finding and dirty deeds of the evil ones to the red-haired law enforcer.

Your final battle will emerge in your tenth year, as you write the story of the chogadh in your memoir as testament for the timeline of the great deception, as you must also now protect the accounting of actions from those who will seek to portray their involvement as innocent.

Those with pens and voices will tell the story.. your story, of the wounded child turned warrior who rejected the war, but took it on blindly, and built a righteous army.

You will wear a great celtic shield of gold gifted by your warrior united by your celtic heritage. You wear it knowing the the meaning of the shield and the cost you have paid.

You will be forever changed. The painful scars of the great war will fade but remain raw just under the surface of the skin ~ and you will accept that the cost was worth the price you paid. As the cost not to act would be catastrophic.

d.c 12/31/2023

Photo by DDP on Unsplash

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Diane Cotter
Diane Cotter

Written by Diane Cotter

A very private individual who fell into a very public rabbit hole of epic proportions. I call it the #greatestdeceptionever - really, EVER.