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Not the Credits

If this were a movie, it would end here. I had a social life, a best friend, I had made the decision to move to New York City to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology and I met the boy who would become my first love. Roll Credits.

But life is not a movie. The boy was sober when we met and even warned me about the dangers of drinking. He was very much one of the most kind, thoughtful and insightful people I have ever known. But he had a past I did not know about and even when he told me I was naive enough to believe he was past it. When the drugs started to creep back in I didn’t understand. He became a different person. All I could focus on the last year of high school and first year of college was him. Saving him, saving us, thinking we were still a team when he was fighting, and already losing, a battle. He was supposed to follow me to New York City but, of course, that didn’t happen.

We broke up a few months after I moved and even though New York City was everything I had dreamed of I had never dreamt of being there alone. My roommate at the FIT dorms was also struggling with the transition, her hometown boyfriend also broke up with her and she went to a pretty dark place. She slept most days. I did make a group friends but I realized quickly that…gasp…I hated fashion school. I didn’t really even like fashion that much. Not fashion in the high fashion Devil Wears Prada sense anyway. I liked fun outfits. Band like Paramore had hit me hard and was leaning back into my punk persona that I had dropped late in high school trying to fit in.

A few months after I got there I got a job as a nanny on the upper east side. The family could not have children of their own so they adopted two adorable girls with tragic stories that led to both of them being born addicted to drugs. The littlest, only 3 months, was still experiencing withdrawals when I started watching them. The oldest was 5 and picking her up from school and helping her with homework was part of my job. She had dyspraxia and it meant that school work, particularly learning to write, would be difficult for her. I didn’t think anything of it at first, I was there to earn money and focus on my fashion degree. But the minute I walked into her school I noticed something different. It was the first time since I moved to New York City that I felt at home, at peace, and like I was doing something right. Not only was I fascinated by her teacher’s explanations of how she was doing but I wanted to know more. I ended up being far more interested in researching how to help her with her homework than in doing my own.

Before my first semester of fashion school was over I knew I didn’t belong there. There was no reason to waste more time or money on it, it didn’t fit. But teaching did. I loved reading and I loved sharing that with these kids. I was nervous about telling my parents. But also very excited and proud. I felt like teaching was noble and stable and also such a logical path for me. Anyone who knew me would understand. Anyone who knew me would say, “Oh that makes total sense! Of course!” So on my next visit home filled with mostly excitement and only a little nervousness I sat them down to share my news.

Not only were they unhappy with this choice they were angry and disappointed in me. My mom said that teaching was something people did when you couldn’t do anything else and my dad said that it was like going from becoming a doctor to becoming a teacher, and here he held his hand above his head and lowered it when he said teacher to show how low his opinion of my new profession was. (To my parents’ credit their view of teaching has since changed and they do think teachers are the most amazing people ever, I take full credit for this transformation but it was exhausting to have to go through that same process of convincing.) I ran out of the house crying and drove around feeling lost and unmoored. Maybe I should have known better by then but they had been so supportive of fashion school that I had mistaken that for support of me as a person vs support of the “cool” career choice. That reaction led to the beginning of me pulling away. Afraid to ask for help or to tell them what was going on in my world for fear of disappointing them yet again. It also hurt, and made me want to look for reassurance elsewhere that I was making the right choices.

So I started trying to do more and more completely on my own. I chose my courses at FIT for the second semester to be all transferrable, finished the year and then transferred to Hunter College, which I loved. I had to get out of the FIT dorms because the combination of my roommate and not feeling welcome there either. I had fallen in love with the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. At the time, it was an artists neighborhood. Wild and bohemian and full of people right out of a Kerouac novel.

I had some amazing times there. Dancing on the roof with the guys from the band who lived in the apartment below me. We cut up watermelon up there and pregamed before going out all night and ending up right back there to watch the sunrise. A girlfriend of mine lived with me for a bit and we ate Reeses Puffs cereal for every meal and slept in the same bed and got through it together. But it’s an expensive city. I worked multiple jobs and was a full time student but I was in over my head. I moved back to Manhattan with a friend hoping we could help support each other. But she was more unstable than I could have known from our nights out. I was doing too much. Stretched too thin and fighting more and more with my new roommate. One visit home I met a boy back in South Carolina and we fell in love. We talked and texted nonstop and that was comforting but everything else was coming apart at the edges. I ended up calling my parents in tears asking for them to come get me, which they did immediately, in one of the worst snowstorms the city had seen in years.

That is how I ended up moving back to South Carolina to attend the College of Charleston. I couldn’t process anything beyond the fact that I needed to be held. Not literally, not in a hug. But I needed the stability of a home that was safe and, yes, rent free, so I could have a break. But I found out pretty immediately that after being on my own in New York moving back in with my parents and having someone want to know where I was or when/if I was coming home was unfathomable. So I got an apartment. My mom had logged into my bank account while I was in New York and asked about purchases made at 3am, what they were, what I was doing. She had reached out concerned when I posted lyrics from popular songs when they played while we were out at night.

Even in my own apartment in South Carolina, if she saw pictures of parties with my friends she would ask questions as if we were doing something wrong. Even going so far as to call the apartment office to ask if I was having loud parties or the police had been called. They did not like that and called me to tell me that they were not babysitters and to ask her to stop. So I was back to that feeling of constant tension, shoulders up around your ears. I was a great student, doing really well in all of my classes and I worked full time to pay my bills. I was doing everything I could to continue being the responsible “good child” But I was always tense, walking on eggshells and looking over my shoulder. We didn’t talk for a long time after that.

But the apartment was beautiful, and had a pool, and I did end up making some pretty great memories there. The first summer was one of those exceptional summers that people make movies about. Waking up and immediately putting on a swimsuit. Reading by the pool until my friends got there. Entire days by the pool followed by pizza bites and a movie. The guys playing music on the balcony. My apartment was where we ended up when the bars closed. There was usually one or more people on the couch or living room floor. But beyond that summer this was a transition time. A time of balancing my education and career goals with the traumas of what my friends were going through along with my family. It was too much. I came home to be taken care of. Instead I was thrown directly into caretaker mode for everyone around me.

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Thank you so much for reading. This is the end of Part One! The next Everything is Gray essay, Everyone’s Safe Place Except Mine, is coming May 22nd. Come back next Friday for my other newsletter, Mess and Magic — a little lightness about the present day.

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🎵 This issue's song: That’s What You Get — Paramore

I blamed myself for so many of these choices and this was my driving, singing, berating myself song.

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It is cold and rainy today so I could not go on my run but I had some pent up anxiety that I knew a stationary bike in my basement just wasn’t going to get me through. So I returned to a workout I had done throughout my recovery but haven’t done in quite a while. I did it after benders to get my energy back, in the basement at my rehab center, then in my bedroom with my newborn daughter in her bouncy seat after giving birth.

So here it is, in case you are someone who does not meditate but does need a release. No equipment. No complicated plan. Just 40 minutes. (free video at the bottom)

Right as COVID quarantine started in NYC I was also well on my way to hitting rock bottom. At the same time Julianne Hough was launching Kinrgy, her dance fitness modality. Stay with me. It’s not Zumba. I have met so many people on this platform with ADHD and anxiety who agree that sitting meditation is sometimes more harmful than helpful.

All of the moves are simple and it helped that I was doing it alone in my living room with no one watching. Here is what a basic workout looks like:

1. Earth - grounding moves, breathing in through the nose out through the mouth. A warm up basically, some light stretching and start getting the heart rate up.

2. Fire -Breathing in through the nose, out through the nose. This is difficult and takes practice. Very tribal movements, lots of jumping (if you want). You can get angry and tough with it or strong and motivated.

3. Water - Back to breathing in through the nose out through the mouth. A slow down. Very flowy dance movements with a core section.

4. Fire - Back to fire breathing and intensity. A big push to really test yourself or let out anything that’s stuck.

5. Air - The breathing here is almost like hyperventilating at times. In through the mouth out through the mouth. This one can feel silly but if you are in it you start to move however your body wants to move.

6. Aether - Free movement, just let go and be as wild as you want to/can. She calls it “play” Then you just stop, and pause, and breathe and some kind of inspiration music comes on. Think Rise Up by Andra Day. All of a sudden you have released SO much anxiety and stress that you didn’t even realize was built up. I, a person who never cries, have cried multiple times during this section. Your body is tired enough that for a few minutes you are able to sit still and breathe and actually have a sitting meditation focusing on the music or whatever has come up for you.

7. A cool down. It is a short release dance party to let go if something big came up and come back to yourself so that you can go about your day.

I write more about this later in my memoir but I wanted to share it with you today in case you are stuck and need a way to move and release and let things go. You do not need to “keep up” or do the moves perfectly. In fact you can barely move at all if you want and just focus on the breathing.

Kinrgy itself has changed a lot since it first started. There are a lot of different versions of it now but here is the original 40 minute workout led by Julianne that you can do for free:

I would absolutely love to hear if you try it.

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This is about extracurriculars, which is a boring word for the exhausting lifelong project of trying to be yourself when everyone around you needs you to be something else.

Rain Soaked Silk

The Passenger

My older brother played baseball. As far as I could tell this was his only interest other than being a very popular social butterfly. He played through high school and a little in college. Our closest cousins also played baseball, they even ended up playing major league ball. Minus a brief karate and even more brief street hockey phase thanks to The Karate Kid and The Mighty Ducks baseball was the main focus in our family. First, little league but then the travel ball that took up almost every weekend of our summer vacations and took the place of any other kind of vacation. My brother also struggled behaviorally. On top of my dad’s personal love of baseball I know now that the focus on this sport was important for a lot of really good reasons. It helped bond them since my dad had adopted my brother and his own father was out of the picture. These are beautiful reasons to play a sport and let it engulf you. I am a little jealous, in fact, that my brother had this one thing for at least 15 years straight with complete and total focus, passion, and nonstop support from the whole family.

So, of course, I played softball. I always tried my best and luckily for me I was naturally gifted athletically, but really, I just wanted to enjoy the game with my friends. If we lost a game I did not carry it around or beat myself up. As I got older and softball got less fun I enjoyed it less and less and also didn’t really have much in common with the girls. I felt uncomfortable at the sleepovers and never clicked with the group. I was good at it but didn’t crave doing it. However, gymnastics and dance were fun. I wasn’t as naturally talented at these but I genuinely enjoyed them. One year my family told me that I couldn’t do both things so I chose gymnastics, I wanted to do the one that made me happiest. I also wanted to get better at it. Who knew that would make my dad so angry and disappointed. He yelled about me quitting something that I was so good at, and stormed off. In most of these instances I don’t remember my mom talking to me about it or reassuring me that I was making the right choice. I remember a shrug and the word, “Well…” That was the first time I got that sort of reaction to choosing what felt right for me, but it wouldn’t be the last.

With softball, I had my parents enthusiastic support. After all, that was something they knew how to support. The only reason my dad wasn’t also my coach was because he was TOO passionate (poor umpires). But things that were “artsy” weren’t sports. There was no competition. My dad and brother would say that or ask when I was going to do a dance competition because if I didn’t, well, what was the point? Why do something if there were no winners? I felt that, I felt the burden of having to drive me to and from this thing that was pointless and there was a heavy guilt that came with that understanding. Even though I watched every dance movie over and over and cried during the end dance scene and had so much fun doing it, that lesson that it was pointless unless I won competitions (which I knew I wouldn’t) was stronger.

So I went back to softball. I think my dad had talked to the coach of the high school girls team and told him I was good and encouraged me to try out for the summer travel ball team (a real sport, a real high school team). He practiced with me and drove me to the tryouts. He was involved. So the summer after 8th grade I made the team. At first, it felt amazing. Since I wasn’t as good at dance or gymnastics I rarely got that feeling of being good enough to be chosen. My parents were happy and fully into it. My dad came to every practice. It was the worst summer of my life. I did not know these girls, or rather, I was not friends with them, we ran in different circles. I was in a chipped black nail polish, Blink 182, Good Charlotte, theater kid phase which these ladies, clearly, were not. These girls liked fake nails (square cut, french tips), fake tanning, french braids and generally being too cool for anything at all. I still didn’t even shave my legs regularly, hell I don’t do that now. They also had bonds. They’d been friends and played together for years and I was an outsider.. I didn’t know that me being on the team and immediately taking an infield spot away from one of the other girls was a punishable offense but oh it was. There were never kind words, no getting to know you, they hated me from the start and the commitment to not speaking to me at all that eventually turned into cruelty was honestly astounding. When we traveled I sat in hotel rooms alone while they hung out together in a different hotel room. I still had my books. Once I overheard them joking about jumping in a hotel pool in their uniforms even though the coaches told us not to but I eagerly agreed to it. We held hands and I felt like maybe this would be the moment, the test. We all ran to the edge of the pool where they all stopped together and pushed me in at the last minute, alone. I came out of the water with a full smile on my face only to look up and see them all staring down at me. The worst part was they weren’t even laughing. They were just looking down at me with a smirk that eyes that said, “What did you think would happen?” I did voice my struggles to my family. My dad told me to ignore it and show them how good I was. As if actually being a good softball team mattered to these girls. My brother told me to punch them in the stomach. Sigh. I would take the anger when I quit. It wasn’t worth this humiliation. Bring on high school.

I focus on this story because extracurricular activities for kids are often taken way too seriously but for the wrong reasons. So many kids start a sport because they have fun playing it and the adults around them take that as a signal to make it their whole lives. The sport, not the experience. Not the joy it brings. It becomes on more thing to excel at. Not the camaraderie or the team spirit and definitely not simply because it’s something that they enjoy doing. I think that’s the biggest long term detriment to this approach. If I do anything now ‘just for fun’ I feel guilty and like I’m wasting time. I am lazy. I need to justify it somehow. Laying on a couch reading in the middle of the day? Almost impossible unless I’m actually on vacation. I have to convince myself that sitting here writing this is worth my time.

I only tried to do something I loved one more time after that. A lot of my friends from middle school joined the high school marching band. Through them I was introduced to color guard. The dancers who spin and throw the flags, rifles and sabres during the marching band’s show. It turns out that color guard is really just, wait for it, hyper-athletic dancing! YES. This was a journey I was going to take my parents on whether they liked it or not (they did not). It was awesome, I was good at it, I loved dancing again, I made friends, I had a community, I eventually met my first love and some other lifelong weirdos. So why didn’t that last either? Even though we won state championships 2 times after which my dad actually showed a dvd of us to his family and bragged about me? Because getting to that point took WORK. Lots and lots of work. I had to convince everyone that this was a real sport and that it was difficult and competitive. We worked so hard. Band camp was 2 weeks, guard camp was 3. That’s 8 hours a day for three weeks of my summer vacation of real physical training. We’re talking a South Carolina summer by the way. Temperatures in the mid-90’s with 100% humidity. Rain or shine we worked (and if you’ve never had to toss a rain soaked silk flag on a 6 foot metal pole with precision and accuracy while keeping your toes pointed in a summer thunderstorm you have no idea). But band is expensive, I can’t imagine it is that much more expensive than other sports honestly but I went to a Friday Night Lights kind of high school so most of the funding went to football. The football team also liked to kick us off one of their 3 practice fields whenever they felt they needed it more. So my parents were (understandably) really unhappy about the costs and the constant requests for fundraising. Three seasons was the longest I did anything which is a testament to how much I enjoyed color guard. But after a while the exhaustion of all the convincing took its toll. I couldn’t keep hearing the complaints or feel like what I was doing was a burden so I quit. That eventual bragging moment from my dad is still a high point for me but it took the first 2 seasons and a state championship to get there. They probably would have gotten more supportive and involved if I had stuck with it but that part of it was too much for me. I was jealous of my friends whose parents and siblings were at every event and did all the fundraising and wore Summerville Band merch. It is taxing for a kid to constantly feel the need to explain and justify themselves. But everything about me seemed to require just that. My interests, my clothes, my music, my friends, everything required an explanation for why I enjoyed doing it rather than choosing something else. So I quit. I quit and got through high school with my only goal being to leave and start over somewhere completely new.

One day while I was at the orthodontist I mentioned that I wanted to go to New York to study fashion and my orthodontist said that his daughter went to a school called FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology. And that ladies and gentleman was the extent of that decision making process. I told my parents and they were, in a word, stoked.

I’m not entirely sure what made fashion school different for them. Maybe because it sounded so very cool and like I would make a lot of money. Maybe because The Devil Wears Prada had come out and I have never met someone who didn’t love that movie. It sounded glamourous. I think I have always known that I didn’t want to actually be in fashion. I just knew I needed to get to New York City . Then I would figure everything else out. It grew from there. I didn’t need extracurriculars anymore after that. We started planning. Took a trip to NYC to tour the school.

It filled up all of the empty spaces. Now I had something to look forward to and I could get through the rest of high school and the one year of college I would do locally. It was a weird and exciting couple of years. I worked, I studied, I had a best friend and a boyfriend, who had also been in marching band. He told me he had seen me from the start and watched me during practices. Very Rory and Dean. He was also an extremely talented guitar player (yes, yes, your red flag radar is correct).

I look back at all of this and I wonder how and if things would have been different if I just kept doing things because I loved them. Would I still have felt the need to escape? Would I have let my love of reading and writing and general creativity shape the college that I chose rather than the immediate positive response from others? Or was this it? Would this be the happy scene in the movie where they roll the credits as I jet off to the big city to a new adventure?

There’s only one essay left in part 1! Not the Credits is coming May 8th. Come back next Friday for my other newsletter, Mess and Magic — a little lightness about the present day. Thanks so much for reading.

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🎵 This issue's song: The Passenger — Iggy Pop

I’ve always felt like the passenger. Constantly being carried along by other people’s expectations until I finally decided to let go and ride.

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The Spins

I was walking through the park after dropping my daughter off at school, headphones in, songs on shuffle. A risky move. I never know where the music will take my mind. Then Chasing Cars came on and I was seventeen again, just like that. Free period. Nowhere to be.

In a small town in South Carolina, with a free period, no extracurriculars and a brain that wouldn’t stop, your options were limited. I would go to a park, where I used to walk with my grandfather and later my boyfriend, or to the cemetery where my Nana is buried. I would sit on the ground or a bench and study or write or read or pace. Sometimes all four. Other kids seemed to have somewhere to be, or at least the sense to go to Burger King. I was reaching for something — connection, maybe, or aloneness, I couldn’t tell the difference yet. Somehow both at once.

The problem with a small town is that someone always sees you. It happened more than once — a cigarette, an overheard conversation with friends, reported back to my parents like breaking news. So you learned to find the small hiding spots. The park. The cemetery. Places where you could almost disappear.

At home I could close my door but then I felt altogether stuck inside the stuck. I could drive for hours but gas was expensive and anyway someone would still see me. Up all night with nowhere to go, I did what made sense at the time: I covered every inch of my walls with Teen Vogue cutouts until there was zero wall space left. I did it all in one night. I know now what that was. At the time I thought I was being creative.

I had a job at a local plantation. Magnolia Plantation, another place you could wander around after a shift and disappear. As long as you could deal with the juxtaposition of how beautiful a plantation on the Ashley River could be without thinking of the atrocities that occurred there. There as nothing to do but wait. Wait for graduation, wait for New York City, wait for my real life to start. Everyone around me seemed fine with the waiting. Content. They seemed to know how college applications worked, how it all worked, what they would do next and how and when. I did not. I couldn’t figure out how they weren’t climbing the walls.

I hate calling it boredom because it felt bigger than that. Everything was right THERE and I could see it but I couldn’t touch it yet. That anxious energy had to go somewhere. So I smoked cigarettes. I drove around at midnight blasting the RENT soundtrack and Bob Dylan, and Paramore. I wandered around Walmart when everything else closed. I looked for anything that matched the intensity of how I already felt inside.

My parents drink. My older brother drank and smoked. They thought that if they let me have a drink at home, supervised, it would lose its allure. Take away the forbidden and the desire goes with it. Normal logic. The problem was I didn’t want one drink. Drinking in movies was never the point — the drinking was where the adventure started. You drank and then something happened. You danced, you stayed out too late, you had a story to tell after. Drinking alone in my room or with my parents at the kitchen table did nothing for me.

Except give me the spins in bed.

Which I liked.

I didn’t understand why yet. I just knew that the ceiling moving was the first thing that had ever matched how I felt on the inside. Not too much. Not too sensitive. Finally, briefly, the right amount of everything.

People always talk about hating the spins and needing to lay still when they got them. Maybe that’s why I liked them. I could finally lay still because I still felt like I was moving. I lay in bed and deliberately moved my head back and forth and back and forth so that I could feel them as much as possible.

I did have nights out with my friends doing exactly the same things I did on my own, because there was nothing else to do. But even with people there it never felt like enough. It never felt exciting or adventurous enough. Anytime there was any risk involved, drinking, going to a party where there were college kids or any kind of debauchery something inside of me lit up. Always full throttle. Always wanting to push things as far as they could go. Have an adventure.

I make a lot of lists in this book, it is one way that I calm my brain when it is swirling and chaotic. It is a craft choice I am choosing to lean into. I hope that, along with my other writing, it helps others whose brains love the simplicity of a list. It helps me see a bigger picture better than long form paragraphs.

So here is a list from the Mayo Clinic of common characteristics of an addictive personality:

• Adventurous or thrill-seeking - Yup.

• Attention deficit disorder diagnosis - Not until my 30’s but also, yup.

• Comfort with secrets or lying - I wouldn’t say comfort, but of course I lied, this one feels more like a normal teenager thing but who knows.

• Desire for immediate gratification - Always. Even now. No patience.

• Difficulty in accepting responsibility - Also something I am still working on.

• Difficulty with self-regulation - I do get very emotional, very quickly. It halts my ability to think logically. A spur of the moment deep conversation or argument and all of my knowledge and supporting facts go out the window. My brain just, stops.

• Ease with risk-taking behaviors - Sought them out with abandon.

• Early childhood trauma - A trauma I haven’t unpacked yet, and am not yet ready to share. But I wonder here about the early instances that started my need to mask around my family.

• Exposure to drugs and alcohol - My parents drank. My dad had beer every night. I thought that’s what you did. My mom didn’t drink much until I was in high school/college. It seemed necessary for my dad’s evening and then like so much fun when they were with their friends.

• Family history of addiction - both sides. My grandpa’s family were actually rum runners (his words) during prohibition.

• Impulsivity - I let a friend of a friend who had gotten a tattoo gun practice on me on his kitchen table when I was 16. It says Dharma Bum. I don’t hate it. But I cringe at the choice now.

• Mental health conditions like anxiety and depression - I’ve been anxious my whole life. It would be impossible to know if I were born that way or if it was a result of constant masking.

• Neuroticism or high levels of sensitivity or nervousness - We’ve already covered my sensitivity. I also have reflected on times I have become obsessed with certain things and done them to a point of destruction. In elementary school I discovered my mom’s cuticle remover tool, not a clipper, the one where you scrape them off. I would use it until I had scraped through the nail leaving deep crevices that would need to grow out. Not once but over and over until I lost the tool.

• Obsessive and compulsive behaviors - See above.

Also from the Mayo Clinic: “Not everyone with these traits will develop an addiction. Having some or all of these does not foretell a person’s fate. Personal decisions, support networks and other genetic and environmental factors affect the likelihood of addictive behaviors emerging.”

That disclaimer is really important. As a mom now I am working on how to use this knowledge in how I raise my daughter. My husband and I have not worked out a plan for when or how we will talk to her about this but we know we will. We are working hard to build emotional intelligence in her in a way we only learned after addiction and through years of therapy. We are still working on that ourselves.

But those teenage years are what worry me the most. Those years right before college when you have to start loosening the reins. Giving enough freedom to let them practice independence and, yes, failing, before they leave the house. I know myself. I know the impulse will be to overcorrect and try to give her every piece of advice and help that I possibly can and to spot any and all red flags and protect her from it all. But teenagers also don’t respond well to smothering so the boy in the plastic bubble approach probably isn’t the way to go.

I can only use what I know to observe and impart. Really make sure that I see her, listen to her, make sure she knows she can come to me with anything. Be as involved as she’ll let me. Be there when she falls. No matter what I want to do differently from my parents there is one thing I want to do completely the same. No matter how I fell, what I did, what I didn’t, they have always been there. Driven to New York City spur of the moment multiple times to pick me up. Dropped whatever plans they had to move me out of an apartment and always let me come home. That matters.

Thank you so much for reading. The next Everything is Gray essay is Rain Soaked Silk. Also check out my my other newsletter, Mess and Magic — a little lightness about the present day.

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🎵 This issue’s song: Chasing Cars — Snow Patrol

I was tempted to use Pretty Vacant by The Sex Pistols for this one. But this is the song that inspired this essay so that seemed more important. Pretty Vacant comes later anyway.

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Three to Five

When I was in high school, I went through a very common career goal phase. I wanted to be a marine biologist or whale trainer at SeaWorld. Free Willy is still one of my favorite movies of all time, and Jesse was one of my first crushes. I have shown it to multiple classrooms of students; it holds up. SeaWorld itself, not so much.

In the early 2000s, researching things on the internet was still pretty new, and honestly, we all felt like action movie hackers anytime we typed our question into Ask Jeeves. If you don’t say “I’m in” anytime you successfully find your information, what are you even doing? What comes next comes at a time when I had already developed some pretty strong views of myself and my hobbies/interests. Dance and color guard were weird and wrong and not “real sports”; theater was cool because my cool brother had done it, but theater people were weird. Reading is super cool BUT also annoying because you do it too much. I did not even know my way around our small town because I read in the car, but also it was difficult for my parents to punish me because sending me to my room was just sending me to my books. Also, I dressed weird. But back to whales and continuing to bash my head against the wall that was the quest for approval from my parents.

I thought it would be a good idea to get a head start on my marine biology education, so I started gathering information about whales and printing it out to create a binder of information for me to study. I was creating my own textbook, if you will, and I was really proud of this. I didn’t need to wait for college; I could study at home and be ahead of everyone else when I got there. Isn’t that every parent’s dream? Eventually, I wanted to show my mom what I had been working on, thinking she would be impressed with my initiative and see how serious I was about my future. If you are internally squirming because you can sense what’s coming, you are wise. I had not yet learned my lesson and proudly presented my binder to my mother, and I would like to reemphasize the newness of internet browsing and Microsoft Word. The nonchalance with which she dismissed my work and left the room still makes my face burn. The response of “It just looks like something an elementary school student would make” to my wide-eyed “Isn’t it cool?” The lump in my throat. The confusion. The utter uncertainty of what that meant about my level of intelligence and where to go from there. All the pride that I had felt in thinking that I was doing something good was replaced with shame and embarrassment. I was obviously, once again, behind somehow.

That interaction still burns inside me. It hurts that she completely disregarded the work I had done. That there was not even a hint of admiration for the fact that I was attempting to use the resources I had to further my education, to prepare myself for college. As an adult now, it hurts even more that her response could have been instead to work with me on how to make it better; I clearly didn’t know how to do it differently, or I would have. Instead, thinking of it brings me shame, and I stopped trying to learn or become a marine biologist.

Here’s something I’ve had to hold onto while writing this: studies show it takes somewhere between 3 and 5 positive interactions to cancel out a single negative one. And we don’t even need the studies to know that — we all know it. We remember the one cruel thing someone said at a party ten years ago and have completely forgotten every nice thing they ever did. I have to keep this ratio in mind when I write about my parents because the negative interactions I’m describing here were real and they mattered and they shaped me, and my parents are good people who loved me and were doing their best. Both of those things are true at the same time. Everything is gray.

I don’t think that we have to tell our children that everything they do is perfect or even good. In fact, I think that is wrong. I do think that we have to acknowledge a few things about how our reactions to our children shape their view of themselves. For a long time, our parents are how we gauge whether we are doing the right things in life. By the time I was in high school, the lesson that I had learned was that no matter what I did or how I chose to spend my time, something was wrong with me. What this resulted in was me just stopping. Basically, I ran out of ideas. I didn’t know what to do anymore that would be acceptable. I wasn’t willing to put myself out there anymore because it was embarrassing, and it hurt when I got a negative reaction. This started way before extracurriculars. This one’s going to hurt.

Picky Eaters

The amount of negative interactions that fall under this category for me would require an unfathomable number of positive interactions to counter the damage that was done and that I am still struggling with today. This is not parenting advice. This is not advice about how to get your child to try new foods, sorry. This is a continuation of an essay about shame and making your kids feel stupid and ashamed; don’t do it.

I know now that my picky eating phase was completely normal. Almost all toddlers go through it, usually as a way to practice utilizing their own agency. Having some control over their choices. Typically, kids grow out of this on their own. Unless, of course, they react to shame the way I do, which is to shut down and stay as far away from the bad thing as I can. My dad hated it. He hated it and took it as a personal affront to himself and my mother. Mealtimes were a battle. My dad’s struggle with my eating was different. He didn’t want me to try new foods because he wanted me to eat a balanced diet; he wanted to avoid embarrassment. This made the issue even more complicated because it wasn’t enough just to try the new foods; I also had to like them. One fateful mealtime, we were having steak, STEAK, how can you not like steak?!?! (I still do not). He put a little bite on my plate and when I refused to try it, he got more and more angry and more and more determined that I would not leave the table until I tried it. I finally caved; by that time, it was a cold, chewy, rubbery dog toy, so I gagged and spit it out. As he got up, he leaned down close to my ear and yelled, “You are not going to be a freak your whole life!” and stormed off. I sat still, shaking. I knew there would be no happy outcome to that situation and was just trying desperately to be able to leave the table.

Later, without any further conversation between us, he would recount stories of these struggles with my cousins while they all had a good laugh at my stubbornness (try this food or go to bed at 5 pm? Goodnight). It took me until my late 20s to start the process of trying new foods. It took meeting my husband and feeling totally comfortable with him, with a level of trust that I had never experienced. I had to experience what it was like to try new foods in front of someone over and over and over again with a positive or neutral reaction. Only then was I able to start eating a healthy balanced diet or feel comfortable ordering more than a cheeseburger off a restaurant menu. My husband spent so much time secretly cutting up vegetables so tiny I wouldn’t notice them and adding them to meals only to tell me later that I had eaten them. Shame is powerful. Shame is dangerous. Children are not resilient; they store it all up and apply the lessons learned from their shame to their life in a survivor-style attempt to never feel that way again. Now I’m 37, and as I write this, my chest is still tightening with anxiety, my breathing is shallow, and I know I will need to do a breathing exercise before moving on with my day.

This is essay 2 in Part I: Everything Felt Wrong. The next one is called The Spins.

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I’m writing this book in my Brooklyn apartment at 5am while my husband works downstairs and my three cats ignore me. My parents are in South Carolina. My brother is there too. None of them know I’m writing this yet. When they find out, they’re going to have feelings about it.

Here’s what I need you to know before we start:

I had a good childhood. I come from a family that loves me and stood by my side through some truly stupid shit. Part of doing the work of sobriety is going back through the moments that made you — not to assign blame, but because you can’t understand yourself without them. My parents were just winging it the same way I’m winging it now. It was their first time doing any of it too. Truthfully, they rocked it.

This is my story, told from inside my own head, which is the only place I’ve ever lived. Your mileage may vary.

Sad Lost Puppy

My family did not talk about emotions or what was happening in our lives. It just seems like we existed in the same space but never really checked in with each other. I don’t actually remember ever talking to my family about what was happening in my day-to-day life, especially in middle school.

What I can tell you is that something important happened during the summer between 5th and 6th grade. It was some kind of fundamental shift or growth that I missed out on because I spent the summer alone, on my back porch, reading Harry Potter while all my friends did something completely different. Something so different and so life-changing that when we went to our first day of 6th grade, they had stopped speaking to me completely. They were all in agreement about this, and no one told me ahead of time. I am not being dramatic or exaggerating when I say this because it is exactly what happened. It was very confusing and scary and absolutely mortifying. For the first week or so of middle school, they ignored me. At lunch, I sat at an empty table next to the table where all the girls who used to be my friends were sitting with new friends. I had never met these new friends, but they had all already met and somehow formed new friendships without me. Yes, a separate, empty table, all by myself, no idea why I wasn’t allowed to sit with them or when we stopped being friends. Then at recess, I followed them outside like a sad lost puppy following a few steps behind them as they walked around and talked. That’s apparently what recess was now, walking and talking, certainly not playing. Eventually, I ended up learning that I could get a permanent hall pass to the library and therefore spent most days on the couch reading my newest obsession, historical fiction about the Holocaust (yes, I’m a delight).

It would have been nice to have an older sibling or friend to give me a heads up about how things were going to change as I grew. How people, especially girls, were going to change and evolve too, why they became bitches. But I didn’t, I mean at one point (either middle school or high school) my mom handed me The Life Cycle Library for Young People. Published in 1969, I can only assume it was given to her by her parents and was also the extent of her sex education. Needless to say, it did not quite jibe with what I was seeing every morning before school on MTV and VH1. It did little to explain any of the other habits and trends of dating for a young girl in the late 90s-early 00s. I did wind up making new friends. But this trend of me finding out what was cool or how things worked after everyone else seemed to already know continued. It continued to be mortifying.

But when you are bullied, when your closest friends cast you out and always seem to be in possession of knowledge that you can’t seem to figure out, when your peers all seem to surpass your understanding of the world and you are constantly that lost puppy playing catch-up to understand what the fuck you are supposed to say, or do or wear (and constantly doing all of those things wrong), you are bound to reach a breaking point. Mine came somewhere in junior or senior year of high school; let’s go with junior year. This is when I discovered Teen Vogue and a world outside of Summerville, South Carolina. I spent most of my time in my room reading. I began to read two very different things both with lessons that forever changed my approach to myself and my life. One, again, was Teen Vogue. The clothes that the girls in my town wore were wrong (sorry girls, but they were), and on me, they looked especially wrong or I just didn’t do them right; either way, for me, they were wrong. Pearls, Polo shirts, anything khaki, anything Vera Bradley or Lily Pulitzer, Sperry’s boat shoes...please god just burn it all. But boho chic with a hint of the now grown-up and in college Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen attitude, yes please. A little Sex and the City? Ok! Did I wear stilettos to high school? Sure did. Did I get made fun of still? Sure did. But this time, I was fucking proud of it because I finally knew why I was getting made fun of. It wasn’t because I was behind and didn’t know what the latest trends were, it was because I was AHEAD. I was wearing what the fashion students in New York City were wearing, motherfuckers, but go on, enjoy your overpriced Lacoste shirts.

So, fashion finally figured out, I also read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Scoff if you must, but that book did something for me that was so necessary and life-changing that I will forever stand behind its value in the world. It taught me that there were people in the world who valued intelligence, whose entire existence could rely on the need to SIT AND TALK. Talk about life, about books, about music and emotions. Not sports. Not Jesus. But everything else under the sun that is important to the rest of humanity. I learned that traveling and meeting people who live differently than you do can be educational. It can shift your perspective on the world and, most importantly, that shifting your perspective on the world is the only way that you can ever live in the world. The only way that you can coexist with people who do not fit into the little boxes that you are told we are all supposed to fit into. That those people are beautiful and wonderful and valuable, just like you. You, who also do not have to fit into those little boxes. This was also when the movie Rent came out and that was also monumentally life-changing. Rent told me where to go to find my people. Teen Vogue said New York City for fashion and career. Rent said New York City to meet artists and musicians and the fucking weirdos that Kerouac was talking about when he wrote, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

I moved to New York at 19 and found my people — the ones who wanted to sit and talk about everything that mattered, who didn’t care what you were wearing as long as you had something to say. But here’s the thing I didn’t figure out until much later: it wasn’t that I had finally found the right group to belong to. The weirdos in New York didn’t accept me despite my differences — they made the whole concept of fitting in completely beside the point. Nobody was keeping score. Nobody cared. There were no rules to decode because nobody was interested in rules. There was conversation, and books, and people who thought deeply about things, and it turned out I had been training for exactly this my entire life without knowing it.

The girl on the library couch wasn’t broken. She wasn’t behind. She wasn’t doing it wrong. She was building something — quietly, alone, one book at a time — and all those years of not fitting in, of retreating into her own head, of being the sad lost puppy following people who didn’t want her? That wasn’t falling behind. That was the head start.

This is Part I: Everything Felt Wrong. Next Essay:

Three to Five

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🎵 This issue’s song: Amish Paradise — “Weird” Al Yankovic

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