jaye

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, and having gone to Georgia at the age of sixteen for forty years, she was exposed to a myriad of personalities. She developed an interest in people. Those people who expressed themselves differently caused the blank canvas in her mind to begin using hundreds of colors to explain the journey she didn’t know she was on. The colors formed words, and the words developed into her personality. Jaye understands loss; being orphaned at the age of thirteen, along with the feeling of abandonment, seemed to welcome addiction with open arms. Suicide attempts and a visit to the State Mental Hospital didn’t resolve a thing. Counseling worked. The years she fell in love with the homeless alcoholics on the 14th Street Bridge in Columbus, Georgia, explained a purpose. Jaye mattered. Struggling with her true identity, Jaye decided to go back home to Pennsylvania at the age of fifty-six, where she now lives openly as a gay woman, married to a woman, and a foster parent to a genius Autistic. Jaye will never claim to understand the entirety of autism, nor have answers to all the medical whys. She does know that we all matter. Jaye has a story to tell, and it may weave in and out like a knotted tapestry, but she hopes that if you carefully flip it over, you will see the beautiful picture of it all painted by one of her stories, catching the threads of now living with an autistic.