Fred Was Always There
Fred didn’t just show up one day behind the house.
He’s been following me my whole life.
Not literally, of course—but in that strange, emotional way certain symbols cling to you across time. Quiet. Familiar. Easy to overlook until you start connecting dots that were there all along.
We used to raise raccoons when I was a kid.
Well—my dad did, mostly. But I was there for it.
We had a couple of them over the years. I got to watch them grow from helpless, jittery little things into curious, wild-hearted scavengers. They had this rawness to them. A kind of feral charm. Survivors with soft hands.
They’d cling to your shirt, make a mess of everything, and still somehow make you want to protect them. They weren’t pets. They were something else. Something closer to us than I realized at the time.
One of them shit on my brother once.
He was home visiting—my older brother—and one of the raccoons climbed up on him, left a little gift on his sweatshirt. He took it off and never touched it again. My mom washed it. I wore it to school the next day.
It was a Nintendo 64 hoodie. I liked it for obvious reasons. But deeper down? I think I liked it because it was his. I looked up to him. And even though he had kind of abandoned the sweatshirt, it became something I quietly held onto.
I still have it.
All these years later, that sweatshirt has outlived the raccoons, the house, and a lot of versions of myself.
I think Fred’s been trying to get my attention for a long time.
Not Fred specifically, but what he represents.
Raccoons keep showing up in my life—messy, misunderstood, sharp-eyed, always lingering just outside the main story. That’s how I’ve often felt, too. Watching things from the edges. Cleaning up what others tossed out. Learning how to adapt without losing my soul.
Fred just happens to be the one showing up now—when I’m finally in a place to see meaning in it. Now that I’m healing. Now that I’m building something of my own. Now that I’m no longer dismissing things as “just coincidence” or “just nostalgia.”
Fred is the ghost of every version of me that made it through.
The kid who held onto a sweatshirt for comfort.
The teen who watched wild things and felt more kinship with them than people.
The adult who’s finally letting himself see symbols as sacred instead of silly.
He’s a raccoon, sure. But he’s also a mirror. A memory. A bridge back to the parts of myself I never fully buried—just tucked away until I could afford to feel again.
Fred’s been around.
I just wasn’t ready to name him until now.
I think that’s the thing about healing—sometimes you don’t need to find something new. You just need to finally notice what’s been with you all along.
And lately… the noticing hasn’t stopped.
A raccoon at the stop sign.
A monk at Starbucks.
A black-and-white cat that makes me slow down.
A strange series of moments that keep threading themselves together like the world is whispering,
“Keep paying attention.”
Fred might be a raccoon.
But he might also be the reason I’m finally seeing what I used to overlook.
Next time, I’ll share how the signs started showing up everywhere—and why I stopped brushing them off.
The Weight We Carry Softly
He left behind a sweatshirt.
I picked up more than warmth.
And somehow—years later—Fred still remembers.
