Embracing the role of the heel – anger as inspiration

Disclaimer and Trigger Warning

This post is not about Salesforce Administration. This story is one human’s interpretation of events that have happened between the years of 1991 and 2024 and are still actively developing. Please remember that there are always multiple sides to every story and that my experience only encompasses one of those sides. That said, nothing in this story has been exaggerated, nor have I changed names, addresses, none of that shit. People WILL be held accountable.

If you are sensitive to explicit subject matter or language, mentions of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse, violence, addiction, cancer, or death, I ask that you not read this post. It is emotionally charged. Please call 988 urgently if you feel suicidal or need help. You are not alone.

If you are one of the people I acknowledge in this story, you have two options. You acknowledge your role in it and fight to be better, or you keep your mouth shut and you remain complicit in exacerbating child abuse and toxicity.

Hi y’all. It’s been like a week and a half since the last post. I was hard at work on a Salesforce project. I’ll write about it this next week. It was insightful. I’ll save my thoughts.

Today’s post is about embracing self.

My biggest issue in life has always been being understood. I’ve always been acutely aware of my surroundings out of necessity, and understood why I thought what I thought, but I could either not verbalize it to others nor did I care to. Really depends on the context. But honestly, there’s only been one person in this world whose acceptance meant more to me than anyone else, and if you’re not my grandma, you wouldn’t understand why.

When I was younger, it was important for me to feel understood. I wanted people to be able to identify with me easily, as I found it very difficult to identify with anybody. That state of mind was good for keeping an open mind and being a conversationalist. This state of mind was not good for making a stand for myself, as I was trying to find my place in a fucked up world. Wasn’t great for the mental health either.

I had the bittersweet experience of intimately understanding pain, addiction, abuse, and homelessness at an early age, which meant that I was more inclined to risk than others, but also very openminded and generally understanding. I also had the unique experience of my hero being someone with a similar arc, albeit 70 years prior to mine. Additionally, I didn’t need to look outside the confines of my direct biological family for cautionary tale after cautionary tale about where life could end up. New dumb shit was happening every day. If you weren’t there, you have no fucking idea.

That’s not really what this story is about though. This story is about how the foster care system in this country so miserably fails people on the fringes of society. Please allow me to elaborate. Happy to provide all sources of research and available concrete proof upon request for anybody interested.

• To qualify my statements, I was placed into the foster care system in 1997. Between the years of 1997 and 2002, I was a ward of the state of South Dakota. Between the years of 2002 and 2007, I was a ward of the state of Colorado. I had the opportunity to remain in foster care until August 2009. I willingly chose to waive my remaining eligibility in November 2007 as my sister aged out of the system. I was presented with the two options and a brief synopsis on what both scenarios would entail. Thankfully, both situations ensured a level of monetary support for me in the form of foster care scholarship eligibility for secondary education. That was the first point in my foster care experience in which I was given a choice in my own life, and also the first point in my foster care experience in which I was given any insight into the actual machinations of the system. It was reading up on the system itself yesterday that led me to wanting to write about it in the hopes that this could potentially impact one person currently in the shit. If my message today resonates with one single person, I’ve done my job.
• In 1997, the Casey Family Program became my foster care provider. The first caseworker I had, Dennis Ritter, was the only one who I felt cared about the people more than the job itself. He knew how to make bad news better, and it was Dairy Queen. As Casey Family Program in Rapid City, South Dakota, became Lutheran Social Services and Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota transferred my case to Adoption Alliance of Colorado, the case workers progressively got worse. Dennis Ritter was absolutely the best, a throwback to a different era. Jerry Meyer was unequivocally the worst, a dude who just punched a clock and chose to visit me in college more to experience New Orleans than to visit me. He didn’t even try to hide it. I had to deal with these motherfuckers THROUGH college, as recently as December 2013. Smiling to your face and fighting for your opportunity to be revoked behind your back. Making it to New Orleans by way of Rapid City and Denver was infinitesimal odds to begin with, I also had to live in financial offices during college and fight for funding every single day. My 2.4 college GPA would have been a 3.4 GPA if life was stable.
• One consideration that my grandma wished for as my sister and I were placed into foster care was that we would remain together. Yesterday I learned that was a requirement by law for a consideration, otherwise they would not have accommodated the request for a single moment and told Eileen to get lost. For the sake of their souls, I’m glad they didn’t tell her that. My grandma had that boy Jesus on speed dial on the VIP burner phone.
  • The first family, Twyla and Gary Miller, only wanted a girl. They made that clear from the beginning with the case worker and only chose to take me because they wanted a little girl they could rescue and feel more self important for. To illustrate this point, please reference the below autofellatious article about changing lives from the May 25, 1999 issue of the Rapid City Journal. I’m the 7-year old that they talk about. They also had a segment on the local news. Please read about how they planned to get out of foster care once I graduated but I would always have a home to come back to. This was less than a year before Twyla made up a mental breakdown in order to get rid of me. They didn’t even tell me goodbye, my case worker picked me up from school. They fully intended to keep my sister until grandma let them know how grimy they were. They did not make it another year as foster parents after the turn of the millennium. They live in Florida now, where their hobbies consist of being pieces of shit. What that article failed to mention is that Alicia got kicked out of the house at 18 for getting knocked up. What stellar parents. Rusty visited ONCE in two years. Brandon Garrett isn’t a big fan of them either.

• The second family, Christal and Jeff Noonan, had much better intentions than the Millers did. Unfortunately, they were in their mid-late 20s when we lived with them, meaning my sister was almost half their age. They had the right intentions but could not provide stability at all. I cannot go into detail much about what happened here as most of it is not my story to tell, but just know that it ended with them recording my sister trying to end her life on camera rather than trying to talk to her about it. My sister went to the hospital and then to Montana directly after that. I moved back in with my grandma again at that point. My sister and I never lived closer than 500 miles from each other after 2001. The issue in this situation was parents who were very underprepared for children with special emotional needs.
  • Update: Since I published this article, I learned that Jeff Noonan died in August 2023. (https://www.osheimschmidt.com/obituary/jeffrey-noonan). I’m very conflicted about this information and unsure how to feel about it.
• At this point, our external options were basically out, so I was forced to move in with a family who made it clear that they didn’t like me even before I lived with them. Out of my dad’s 8 adoptive brothers and sisters, Joel was well into the 6 figures per year already, and was easily the best off financially. Unfortunately financial stability did not prevent him from having a cancer of a wife and three dunces of children. Katie is the only child of theirs with any level of decency.
  • This is another point in the story yesterday that hit me like a ton of bricks looking through some rules and regulations to the foster care system yesterday. In Colorado, it is against the law to put your hands on a child in the foster care system. Although my uncle played by the book, I specifically remember my bitch aunt trying to drag me down a flight of steps in 2004 at the house off of San Joaquin Ridge. Verbal abuse was expected. Just me though. Nobody else got it. She should have been put in jail 20 years ago. I was never informed of the laws regarding this.
  • When I say that Joel Patrick Sauer played EXACTLY by the book, he did it to a level of calculation that is disturbing. No more than 15 minutes after my case worker left in November 2007, he informed me “this means I can beat the shit out of you now”. Upon my research into foster care in Colorado on March 30, 2023, it turned out that he was calculated with everything from his money to physical abuse cycles. It doesn’t surprise me that he is LITERALLY losing his mind to dementia now. He lost it in spirit decades ago. I received it more often and to a higher degree than anyone else and was literally the one they called Cinderella. Not going to detail the exact actions that took place. Anyone who was around remembers. Not going to speak for some shithead cousins either. They’ll likely deny it though as they have MILLIONS of dollars headed their way in ~20 years.
  • I sniffed one move out clear ahead of time though – they were arranging their will into a trust to avoid tax liability a couple of years ago and asked for my SSN. I didn’t want to give it to them, as they surely had documentation of it already. In situation of family disputes, if the subjects are clearly identified and what they receive is also clearly identified with a short description why, there is no legal way to argue against their final wishes given sound mind and legal notarization. The minimum amount for this would be $1. That one dollar is going to make a great piece of toilet paper to adorn a gravesite with one day. I’m not hard to find nor am I scared of manipulative fascists. I’m actively seeking out all the smoke. Email me at fuck@christophersauer.com if you’ve got a problem with it.

That part of the story complete, why did it take me until yesterday to do my requisite research on what is and is not allowed in foster care? Even my high school counselor knew what was going on and she wouldn’t provide me resources for minor emancipation that I requested. What is so dangerous about human service resources that they are regularly denied to those who have a legitimate case for them?

There were a bunch of people who had to work in unison to make these decisions. This is why nobody in this entire story can avoid fault. I can’t fucking avoid fault in this story either. Not actively fighting against it is practicing compliance with it.

This is why I appreciate the role of the devil’s advocate/heel much more as I approach my mid 30s. Do you see all that shit from above this paragraph? That will never happen to my daughter. She won’t ever understand that feeling. A lot of people won’t ever understand the feeling. It’s not a feeling of power by any means. It’s more a burden of ultimate responsibility that envelopes me in fear and caution and can often immobilize me. This isn’t me blaming others for the way I turned out. I could be fucking dead.

This is me emotionally holding everyone complicit in psychological and physical abuse accountable. I’m partaking in emotional warfare every day. I’m part of the problem. Let me not reassign blame from myself because I am absolutely one of the denominators to the situation.

My abusers met my daughter once and I decided on July 4, 2022 that they would no longer play any role in our environment. I’m not going to set up my fucking kid for failure. Success at any cost. This means removing myself from any situation that does not fight for decency for all and actively speaking my experience in the hopes that it impacts just one person in a similar situation.

If anybody in an emotional situation such as this feels like you’re without hope, please understand that you are not alone, and please contact me on a private channel. I will connect you to any resource that I possibly can and I will fight for you for the rest of my fucking life, as the invisible ones are often the ones going through it the most. Nothing would feel better than helping someone realize they are more than their situation.