Yep, true story. You can look it up. His name is Chris Messina, check him out at www.ChrisMessina.me
I’m Leianne Messina, we had the same dad (deceased) Donald Messina. Check out our motorcycle stud older brother Stephen in the photo, Chris as a baby, me as a feather haired diva.
Chris got the brains, I got the big mouth. Story goes in 2007, he was working at twitter (now moronically called “ X”). He told them about this communication symbol. Way over this big sister’s ADHD head.
But Chris is brilliant, a computer programmer with a degree from Carnegie Mellon. He’s also a super nice, humble guy, very low-key. The complete opposite to me.
Don’t get me wrong, if he hadn’t invented it, somebody else would have. I just want to go back to the old fashioned way how we grew up in New Hampshire and Cape Cod where you didn’t talk politics, religion, sex or race and just because you had the right to say it (free speech is what it used to be), if it wasn’t kind, you DIDN’T say it.
And you were told to go outside and play, make forts with cardboard boxes, skin your knee, mow a neighbor’s lawn for $5, solve your own fights with neighbor kids and don’t come home/inside until dinner time.
With the invention of the smart phone/social media we’re all one email, text, post, gram, tube, or tok away from a nervous breakdown.
And no Chris didn’t monetize the hashtaghashtag-that’s always your next question. Because he’s all about open access (worked for Mozilla/Firefox)and didn’t want to have happen what is happening now, where people in power with money control what we see, say, or not say, hear, think and do.
He and I took different paths. I worked my way out of one paycheck away from welfare with my single mom to the luxury treadmill to nowhere. This led me and my 2 children getting tangled up with nefarious gaslighting narcissists, stalkers, abusers and possible murderers.
In Oct 2021, after being gone for 40 years (NH, MA, CA, OR, FL, GA and Tokyo), I moved back to New England to flip farms in Maine, and I love it.
He left New England years ago and is super successful at launching products, speaks all over the world (TedX talker), is an expert in the AI space, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
We recently bought homes at about the same time. I bought mine for $195,000 he bought his for $1.8 million.
I don’t even know how a
hashtaghashtag works, I’m totally tech inept and at 54, I like it that way.
So my 2024 New Year’s resolution? To get more of you to be more like me… off the grid, out of grid lock and away from the grind.
“ I find joy on my property and at my table not on the interstate and the Internet.”
Check out my ripped-from-the-headlines story of surviving gaslighting, narcissist abuse, stalkers and domestic violence.
And my real life as the Chief Redneck
www.RedneckRevivals.com
“Pinch Me I Live in Maine” and you wish you did too.
