So far, this year has been a whirlwind of work, family and looking for balance.
Honestly… I can say that it is turning out to be a stellar year in many ways.
I’ve been coming into contact with more and more of my blood relatives thanks to the miracle of Ancestry.com.
With that said, I have also been adding them weekly and even daily to my social media and knowing how strange random strangers can feel in instances like that, even if they are family, I decided to shoot out an introduction post for everyone.
Even if you aren’t my family, and feel like you “know” me, perhaps you will learn something new.
I was born in an area of Detroit, Michigan called Highland Park. My mother, Stephanie Marie, was 21 years old at the time and was a lifelong resident of Detroit. She spent time in New York City and in Arizona, as well, although I am not sure of many of the details why. My father, William Charles, who was considerably older than my mom, was 33 at the time. He had moved to America in his mid-teens from Ireland. He was born in the town of Drogheda, in County Louth, and I am still hashing out all of the details of where and how and why he came here. There are a lot of details to sort through on both sides of the family for me, but I am persevering, one day at a time and cultivating relationships along the way.
I don’t have any memories of him, except for one brief glimpse of falling asleep on his chest once when I was very little. I also remember him having a Doberman Pincher around that time, but don’t remember him, per se. That was around the time my parents split up and everything else I “learned” about him was from my mother in the years after their divorce. It was not much.
My mother struggled in and out of sobriety, eventually giving my sister, Mary, and I up for adoption after a whirlwind of foster homes and failed visits with her. She disappeared into New York City and it would be more than 20 years before I saw or spoke to her again. We had what could be called a tumultous relationship, to say the least. During the majority of our time together as adults, I was new into recovery myself or not at all yet, was an undiagnosed bipolar person at the time and dealt with the world in a lot of interesting ways. The last time I spoke with Stephanie was in 2012, several years before her death.
I was adopted into the Welch family in Michigan in 1982, along with my sister Mary and that is eventually what brought us to Kansas in late 1985. Daniel, my adopted father, moved to the region to help his brother open a business and the family settled in. Kansas is not Detroit and I was not very happy with the move and remember feeling like I was being punished for some reason. I did not have the best relationship with Dan, and suffered more than one beating from him over the years. I discovered alcohol and drugs and the punk scene in Wichita and am still friends with many of those people years after the fact.
I moved out of Wichita in the later 80’s to Oceanside, California (just north of San Diego) during my senior year. I have lived in Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, Dallas and Austin, Texas both. I was what you could call a geographical addict who thought everything and everyone else was the problem. I’d move to the next place to escape the “problem” and did nothing more than take the “problem” with me; myself.
I got clean finally in 2006, after a period of homelessness and utter despair. I had been responding to years of abandonment and trauma by self-destructing and self-medicating with alcohol and whatever drug was handy at the time. I have written extensively about all of that in the past 17+ years of my sobriety and I will leave it at this: I am incredibly grateful to have made it out of it alive. It finally became apparent to me that the universe had kept me around for a reason. In 2010, about five or so years into my recovery, I landed in Lawrence, Kansas and have been here longer than anywhere else in my life. It feels like home now. I began my mental health recovery journey in 2012, which was a complete gamechanger. I took back my birth name of WIlliam Matthew Reilly in 2019, and became an official Irish citizen with an Irish passport around that same time. I may not have known my dad, but Ireland is the greatest gift he has given me.
These days, I am a somewhat reclusive man. Fully grey hair, a big belly and an even bigger heart.
I keep a very small circle of people around me. I find comfort in knowing my life is manageable and I live it on my terms. In a world full of people constantly critisizing and judging and screaming at us to “be better” I am my own crowd. Spiritual, but not religious. I pray and meditate every single day and I try not to cause harm. I work on a death penalty defense team in Topeka, our state’s capital and have found my calling.
I avoid drama, I take my meds as prescribed and I love good coffee and long bike rides.
Love, Always
WMR
April 16, 2023
MISTER WILLIAM REILLY 