Is Intellect A Safety Net?

This past weekend I was part of a 2-day training on how to speak publicly about suicide. I was in a room with six people, two other trainees and three facilitators, two of whom were also part of the unique group of "suicide survivors."  All five of us have very different stories to tell, different relationships to the people we have lost but the circumstances of why we were in that room together is what we have in common.  It instantly created an intimate bond that is hard to explain.

I have written and spoken ad nauseam about my mother's suicide including several previous posts in this blog.  I've got it down to a science.  As I've said before, my mother's life has become a series of ten or so bullet points about her trajectory in my retelling.  The more I have been forced and encouraged to delve a little deeper, the more I've realized that I'm doing her a terrible disservice.

After the first day in which we shared and cried a bit for each other, we were tasked with writing a 15-minute presentation that we would share with the group the following day, for feedback and constructive criticism.  We were given 6 guidelines and told to limit what our point was, based on the audience we thought would best suit us, to about 2 or 3 main themes.  The facilitators who I had interviewed with prior knew that my story was very complex and touched on topics including Holocaust survival, double-suicides, painful dreams, mental illness throughout the generations, the differences in how siblings grieve and so on.  As the day progressed I focused on some common themes and went with those.  Later that night when I finished writing,  I read it to my husband who said it was perfect and that my thoughts hung together in a way that made sense.

The next day, we plunged right in with our presentations.  The first was given by a woman, a statuesque and stylish 50-ish year old mother who lost one of her sons.  I had already spent the first day crying over her utterly devastating loss, but hearing it all in the context of a 15-minute synopsis was almost too much to bear.  She powered through and when she was finished, we gave her, and her son, the silence they deserved.

I volunteered to go next.  I had my words typed out in a 14-pt font but tried to avoid reading them verbatim.  I covered the basic themes and focused on disclosure, secrets, and knowing too much about this very complicated situation that has now pervaded 4 generations.  There were a couple of times when people jotted something down which I would learn in the critique.  No one was sobbing and I was surprised that I hadn't struggled with certain pieces of my story.  Not until I pulled out the below picture did I get a visible reaction from my small audience:

Obviously the person in the middle is me.  I am flanked by my stunning mother around the time she came to the United States and my daughter, whose eyes are the blue of my mothers.  That's an old picture of my daughter but we are all there, in each other, 3 generations of mothers and daughters.

The first thing people did was compliment my writing.

"I feel like I was just in a bookstore hearing you read from your memoir."  For me, it doesn't get any better than that, but, I sensed that for the two lead facilitators, both FANTASTIC and experienced women in the field, I had missed the mark.

They wanted to know where was the feeling, the "me" in the story?  And then, the mother who had lost her son, completely without judgement, said this:

"I think you use your intellect as a safety net."

Whoa.  Wow.  Holy shit.

I am under NO illusion that I'm any sort of "intellect."  Yes, I have a fairly decent vocabulary and I'm a pretty good wordsmith, but intellect?  I tend to forget the content of every book and every New Yorker article I've ever read.  I get the facts wrong in the re-telling.  Am I a deep thinker, searching for the meaning of life?  Do I sit in a wood paneled library, smoking a pipe, digging deeply into the language of Socrates or Stephen Hawking?  Hell no.

When I got home, I looked up the definition of intellect.  Here's the first in the list:

The power or faculty of the mind by which one knows or understands, as distinguished from that by which one feels and that by which one wills.

I feel deeply about almost everything in my life.  I wear my heart on my sleeve, am demonstrative with almost everyone I know, I cry at every perceived confrontation, and live my life with great passion.  For this one subject however, probably the defining topic of my life, I feel it in my head and not in my heart.  There are pieces of it that happen in my dreams that are devastating and I find that those are the toughest to write about and share, but other than that, it's the outline, the Cliff's Notes version of my mother's life that I can recite on demand.

There is absolutely no right or wrong in how we grieve.  I envy those who can feel the impact immediately and those who see signs that their loved ones are always present.  Perhaps one of the most important things I learned (and there were MANY) is that we need to honor the LIVES of the people we have lost, and not just focus on the nature of their deaths.  The one man in the group who I found to be extraordinarily soothing and, due to his own personal loss, is now a bereavement specialist, assures me that I'm not somehow broken, that I will get to the core of this eventually, in my own time.

Three Reunions

That's me on my first day of boarding school, a highly unusual place for a Jewish girl from Long Island to have ended up.  It was 1980 and I was 16, clearly with absolutely no interest in impressing anyone with the way I dressed.  None of my former classmates can remember what that number means but clearly I look very happy to be holding it.  And see that mole above my nose?  In my college yearbook picture the photographer found it so distracting that it was airbrushed out.  I guess that was a not-so-subtle hint that it was kind of ugly.  It has since been removed.

This coming weekend is my 30th reunion at the magnificent Berkshire School in Sheffield, Massachusetts.  I've written about the circuitous route that plunked me there in my size 16, purple Gloria Vanderbilt corduroys and floor-length purple down coat, landing in a world where people looked like this:

Our school didn't have wicker with pillows and it didn't look like a plantation, but it is still one of the most beautiful places I have ever spent two years.

Clusters of us have been there for other reunions, the last being our 25th, and every single time, every five years of catch-up, have left me beaming and in awe of what these people have become.  "Boys" in khakis with ducks on them have grown into bankers, realtors and hedge fund managers.  "Girls" in pink chinos are women with equally impressive careers living in fabulous homes, wearing, well, not wearing pink chinos.  The men who are holding down corporate jobs still get together to see concerts of the splintered Grateful Dead, and the women, those of us who didn't really know each other all that well while there, have developed adult relationships through visits, phone calls and facebook.

15 years ago I remember ducking behind a dorm to smoke pot out of a Coke can.  This year, without any pot smoking (for me anyway), I'll be singing Crosby, Stills and Nash Songs with a former classmate who gets more handsome by the second.  A year ago he was in town and while driving in his large and impressive SUV, we put on our old favorites and still sang in flawless harmony that gave me goosebumps.  My daughter and husband will hear me sing with someone for the first time and he's already told me how nervous he is.  If I look good that night, perhaps I'll use my phone to videotape it.

Those of us who have them will be bringing our spouses and children and I have this fantasy that my daughter will fall in love with the son of the first boy I every truly loved (he loved me back, "as a friend.")  I've already told her about him and how he's a little younger, but she said, "Well, he's not THAT much younger," and was totally open to the concept.  She's 10 and I think he's 8.  The kids will have an awesome time together, staying up extra late for a party on Friday night and then roaming around the school the next day, seeing the teeny rooms we shared with roommates we loved (well, I loved mine and I'm devastated that she can't be there this year).  I'll show my husband the town we used to go to, what has become very fancy-pants and as I say, used to consist of  a laundromat, Planned Parenthood and a Rite-Aid.  Now, there are sushi restaurants and boutiques that get mention in the New York Times.  Outsiders have discovered "God's Country."

In 3 weeks I'll be going to the 4th "Jews Gone Wild" weekend at the site of my old summer camp.  If you haven't had the pleasure, read this:  http://mylifeinthemiddleages.blogspot.com/2010/06/jews-gone-wild-phase-1.html 

In September, there's a third, yet ANOTHER 30th high school reunion of where I spent the first year and half of high school.  That's a different story for another time, but in so many ways, that is bound to be the most remarkable of them all.

Dine With The Kennedys or Drink With The Drunks

Walking into my weekly prison workshop I never know what might potentially trigger certain reactions in the inmates or what will lead to off-course conversations (always the best ones.)  From my almost 2-years of doing this, I know going in that in the course of 45-minutes, I will walk away with at least one moment that will impact me greatly--something that will stay with me for days, months and others undoubtedly for the rest of my life.

(For example, a few weeks ago a woman shared that her mother shot her up for the FIRST time when she was ten.  How the FUCK does one respond to this???  It was a large group that day and we were all stunned into total silence.  I have a 10-year-old daughter.  I was sick to my stomach and I literally have to shake myself out of the thought when it comes to me.  And yes, this woman, a very bitter one I might add, is an addict.)

In my last class we talked about labels--how we label ourselves and how others label us.  I've done this many times before and my ultimate goal is to have the women focus on their strengths and not the negative labels we put on ourselves or that others project onto us.  I go around the class and ask whoever is willing to share these negative labels, the ones affixed by others.  There are many common ones, "junkie," "bad mother," "bitch," "whore," but in this past class, one woman said "I'm a batterer.  I'm here for beating up my husband."

"Wow.  I've never met a woman who beats up her husband before," a young woman said.  I'm sure we were all thinking the same thing.

When you are sentenced for a crime with such clearly defined labels--felon, murderer, drug smuggler, pedophile--it makes it easy for our criminal justice system to define people, to put them in these little file folders and slide the drawer shut.  The women I work with are not there for such heinous crimes and I don't think run the risk of devolving into the categories above.  Many of them however, are repeat offenders, finding themselves back at the beginning like a game piece.

I asked the woman how she thought others saw her on the "outside," on the other side of the bars.  At that she began to sob, deep and gut-wrenching sobs.  The woman sitting next to her reached out and rubbed her back and the most I was allowed to do was get her some tissues.  We all gave her the space to cry, to release just a pittance of the pain she was feeling.

"You just hit the nail right on the head," she said.  I wasn't exactly sure what it was in particular that had touched her so deeply and I asked.

"I have a friend who always tells me I'm the kind of person who can dine with the Kennedys or drink with the drunks.  I'm everything to everybody.  When I have my makeup and nice clothes on, I am that person, and that's how people see me.  But when I look like this, people judge me as a bum, an addict, a bitch."

I asked her what her dream was, who she wanted to say she was.

"I want to own my own restaurant."

"Okay, so, why don't you figure out the path where you go from 'I'm a batterer' to 'I'm an ex-batterer,' to 'I'm a restaurant owner.'"  (Sometimes I amaze myself by these concepts that I pull out of thin air.)

She considered the way that sounded and smiled.  I shared my own recent label-change, and how great it feels to actually become who you dream of becoming even if just the saying it makes it feel closer to eventually becoming real.  I think I've realized, at this advancing age, that we really do have the power to redirect our paths, even if there are many labels to be modified along the way.  Maybe I helped to nudge that woman along her way, or maybe she will forever see herself as a batterer, but I know it made her feel something good, even for just a minute or two, that she might just hold onto.

Re-Branding Ourselves

Every time I change jobs (which has been quite a lot) I joke with my friend Mark that I'm going to change my entire look.  None of my new co-workers would know that I've never worn a headscarf, false eyelashes and a fake tan.  His first question is always "Who do you want to be?"

Somewhere I know I've seen Jennifer Lopez with a Pucci silk headscarf and huge gold hoops.  THAT'S who I want to be--the epicenter of "boho-gypsy chic." She's got a perfect radiant dewiness to her cheekbones that I've attempted to replicate about a million times.  Forget the abs and ass (for now)--I just want to look like her from the neck up, because, well, she wears a cross and that wouldn't go over very well with my father.

Not only would I never be able to figure out how to put on a headscarf let alone glue on false eyelashes, I wouldn't have the patience required for spraying or rubbing self-tanner in just the right way. The most I've managed is tying gauzy patterned scarves around my neck, so self-conscious that I haven't done it right in that way that says I didn't have to even try, that I end up taking them off halfway through the day.  On some days I've managed to achieve part of my desired look, but fall short in one detail or another making me look more like a wannabe than a natural.  I envy those people who just pick things out of overflowing accessory drawers and jewelry boxes, slap on some lipstick, all in under a minute and just become "them."  I want to be one of "them."

Recently, I've re-branded myself in an entirely different way.  I've decided that "who I want to be" is a writer while holding down a "day job" working directly with at-risk populations.  I've decided that who I DON'T want to be is a fundraiser accountable to an often ungrateful board or boss.  Just because I was good at it for a while, possess the skill set that made me successful at it, I wanted to become "unstuck" from the 18-yr career pigeonhole that I found myself.  At 47, I was really scared about making this definitive choice, mostly for financial reasons but more for the rejection that I thought I would experience by hiring managers who skimmed my resume and couldn't see the  logic in how my overall professional experience would transfer into work as a counselor or advisor to former gang members, women in prison and everyone in-between.  I put it out there, sold myself in great cover letters, and I have gotten three interviews for jobs that I see as my ultimate dream.  I've successfully re-branded myself in the course of about 3 months.  How cool is that?

My husband and I have recently starting watching a show called "Lockup" which gives a pretty thorough look into our nation's prisons.  Because of my ongoing volunteer work with female inmates, it has become added insight into our country's really warped justice system.  The shows that are particularly heartbreaking are those that focus on juvenile detention centers.  These are kids who are absolutely on the cusp of going in either direction.  You can just see in their eyes the ones who have completely given up and will undoubtedly spend their lives behind bars.  You can almost see an immediate time-lapse in their faces, project the image of what they will age into and how they will look 20, 30, 50 years from now.

The other night there was a young man who was about to turn 18, the age when you get booted over to the adult prison system.  He had made a couple of stupid choices but was absolutely determined to make it, never see the inside of a cell again.  He was expecting his second child (that's an entirely different subject) and wanted to be part of his kid's lives.  He had been in a gang, what I have learned in my work is an alternate family that you NEVER betray.  Kind of like the Mafia where if you snitch, you either up dead or in the Witness Protection Program.

In an act of what I think is total bravery, he had his gang tattoos professionally removed.  He no longer wanted to be identified with that world, no matter what the consequences.  At his hearing, his probation officer and court-appointed attorney held this up as his absolute commitment to changing his life and it's what convinced the judge to release him.  He re-branded himself.

I really don't want to be anyone but who I am at the core.  I like myself and have a tremendous amount of self-confidence.  That being said, when a woman in my prison group described me as a "hippie" and another said I was "funky" I knew, at least for that day, that I had done an awesome job of the re-brand.  In that same class when they asked what I did for a living, on a day when my first piece was picked-up by one of the most reputable on-line magazines, I stuttered and stammered as I answered, "I'm a writer."

My High Flying Bird

My best friend is a junkie. Crystal meth has tossed his brain into unrelenting chaos. It has jumbled his lobes and pathways into amorphous masses in need of a fix. It has made him think that a young mother and her child recently sitting next to him on a plane were secret agents and that a pig stuffed animal was a recording device. He sees people in his bushes and leads the four or so people he insists are following him on high-speed chases through suburban neighborhoods. He gets angry with all of us for not believing him.

My best friend is a junkie. I winced the first time he referred to himself as such, but once he actually started shooting crystal meth instead of just smoking it, he said the label was the honest one. He got some strange thrill out of using the term, adding this to his other descriptors: “homo,” “alcoholic,” “unlovable.” His endless number of friends knows his flair for the dramatic, the relish he takes in all of these terms, so adding “junkie” to the list just feeds into the self-loathing that he thinks is being deflected by such sweeping terms. Trust me, he knows how transparent this is.

After two rather glamorous rehab stints for alcoholism many years ago and about 10 or so years of sobriety, he doesn’t think he has anything left to learn from rehab. In reality, he doesn’t think he has anything to learn from anybody. He plays us all by pretending to listen to us, agreeing and commenting in all the right places, manipulates us into thinking that he really HAS done that last hit. Several of his best friends have dropped out along the way, exhausted by him and his energy suck, and others, like me, have been deluded into thinking that this time will be different. Have. Past tense.

The handful of friends and family still willing to listen and spin their wheels have just come off yet another week of the madness that ensues when he’s gone missing. The cast of characters is different this time, the friend pool having shrunk and different core members of his family getting involved. It’s new phone numbers to put into my phone, new e-mails, and new phone lists jotted down on a random piece of paper. It’s hours of recap, bringing each other up-to-speed, venting. It’s putting spouses and partners on hold for days at a time putting them through the same scene they’ve witnessed many times before. When my amazing husband and I had a bit of an argument, I realized that this was now seeping into my marriage.

The last conversation I had with him he was on his way to a sober living program, all bright and sunny and optimistic. He was meeting a friend who would take him there for his 2:00 check-in time. Unlike the last program he blew out of, I wouldn’t have to wait a week to speak to him. He could come and go as he pleased (I learned that this place was in the middle of the worst drug-using part of town so I had my doubts about why he should even bother) so he could talk to me that night to find out what it was like. When I learned the next day that he called his friend saying first that he had a flat tire, and then that the axle fell off his car, that he later called her back and said he was an asshole and a liar, and that he never actually made it to rehab, I knew, that yet again, we had all been played.

None of us heard from him for three days. I said to everyone that he wasn’t such an asshole as to not call at least ONE of us to let us know he was alive. His brother started calling the coroner, morgue, prisons and filed a missing persons report. He provided his license plate number and the necessary information to ping his cell phone and see where and when he last used his debit card. A friend of his went over to his apartment to check to make sure that he wasn’t lying dead on the floor. For the second time, I started thinking about the eulogy I would give, how I would edit “A Day in the Life” to make sure that that last iconic chord was loud enough to have the impact that he hopes it will. I thought of the call distribution list that I would dole out to the many strands of friends he has.

When he finally surfaced, he told his cousin that he couldn’t believe that we were all so worried and that he thought we would all just assume that he had made it to rehab. He somehow had “lost” his car in one of the worst neighborhoods in LA with everything in it including his cell phone and wallet, slept on the street for a night and walked 15 miles to get home. He said he just wanted one last high and he would go to rehab the next morning. This set me off into my first rage. This made me resolute in my statement that “I’m done. I’m out.” And I meant it. I swore I wouldn’t call even though I feel like there are so many things he needs to hear, my anger being one. So, I didn’t. I didn’t until his cousin asked me, as a favor, to call him with some phone numbers that were in his lost phone.

I had to think about it for a while. I didn’t have any numbers that would do him any good. His closest friends had already refused him rides to find his car and later refused to drive him to rehab. He could get on a bus if he needed to. I finally steeled myself, armed with the vitriol I planned on unleashing the second he picked up the phone. His machine picked up on the first ring so I sort of stammered my way through my discomfort and anger. The last thing I said was “I have absolutely nothing to say to you.” I hung up and instantly felt guilty.

I pride myself on being that ONE person who would never turn my back on him, the one who wouldn’t judge, the one who would always forgive. After he wasn’t heard from for almost 24 hours, I thought that for sure I had sent him over the edge, that all hope was gone for him and that he had killed himself in the most dramatic way possible. I know better than to think I hold that much power over anyone, so dropped that thought pretty quickly. Despite that, I called him the next morning and said that he knew I wasn’t the kind of person who could abandon him, and that I would try him again later. (His long distance service was shut off so he couldn’t call me.)

It was another full day of people trying to make contact, but a bit less frantically. When his brother called me last night and told me that my best friend, the junkie, had started selling whatever he has of value, I knew there was nothing anyone could do.

My best friend is a junkie. The lyrics below are from an Elton John song that he wants played at his funeral (I think a long time ago he wanted “Levon” but that seems to have changed along the way.):

My high-flying bird has flown from out my arms
I thought myself her keeper
She thought I meant her harm
She thought I was the archer
A weather man of words
But I could never shoot down
My high-flying bird

The white walls of your dressing room are stained in scarlet red
You bled upon the cold stone like a young man
In the foreign field of death
Wouldn't it be wonderful is all I heard you say
You never closed your eyes at night and learned to love daylight
Instead you moved away

Bunnies in the Sun

I recently bought a deck of “conversation starter” cards to use as writing prompts for my recent foray into being a writing coach. They each contain a question like: “What literary character would you most want to be friends with?”, or “If you could ask your hero one question what would it be?’’ and so on and so on. In working with teens it’s a useful way to at least get them thinking about how to best express themselves and a good way for me to get to know a little bit about them before we launch into actual writing.

The other night with my family we started pulling random questions from the deck, my 16-yr-old stepson editing out the ones he thought were boring or too obvious before bothering to read them. When he got to this question, it took us a lot longer to respond to than any of the others before it:

“If you could know one fact about every person you meet, what would it be?”

_________________________________________________

This morning in my prison workshop, I asked the women this question. Like my family and me, they gave it some deep thought. I didn’t lead them in any particular direction but stressed the word “fact,” something concrete.

The first woman responded in all seriousness by saying she would want to know their shoe size. Well, I guess it is a fact but not exactly what I was looking for.

“Really? Why?” I asked.

“Well, I have really big feet and I want to know if someone has a pair of shoes that I like if I can fit into them and borrow them. I’ve been looking at your shoes this whole time."

(For the record, I was wearing fabulous brown leather clogs, wide strap with an oblong gold buckle. End-of-season sale at DSW last year, thirty bucks.)

“Maybe you have a foot fetish,” one of the other women pointed out.

“Maybe. Probably,” she conceded.

I pointed to other raised hands.

“I’d want to know where they grew up.”

“What’s their nationality”

“How old they are.”

“What’s their education?”

We agreed that the person’s answer to this question would help determine if there was any common ground between them, either putting them on equal footing or completely at the other end of the spectrum.

“Here’s how my husband and stepson answered the other night. I think my stepson said it first but my husband was very quick to agree with him:

"WHAT IS THE WORST THING YOU HAVE EVER DONE?"

I realize that this isn’t exactly a FACT, that it’s very subjective, but I thought it was a fantastic answer to the question. I said to the women that for some it might be stealing a candy bar and for others it could mean killing someone, but, I think the answer can say a lot about how someone looks at themselves, the things they hold themselves accountable for, how they look at right from wrong.

I didn’t intend for them to answer the question, threw it out there rhetorically, but they started answering anyway.

“Well, I accidently let 10 baby bunnies out into the hot sun and they all died.”

Somehow, a few of us couldn’t help but chuckle. This woman was in prison for SOMETHING and I’m assuming that it wasn’t for killing her bunnies. She didn’t take the laughter personally. “I was watching tv, and I guess I left the cage open and they escaped. I even picked up some that were still alive and tried to get them to drink but they died anyway.” Of course it was sad and horrifying to kill your pets, but she couldn’t help but giggle with us while reinforcing that really, she thinks it was the worst thing she ever did. When the next woman answered with "drug trafficking" the bunny woman said she would switch places with her in a heartbeat.

A couple of women aswered with starting smoking crack, selling drugs, hanging out with the wrong crowd and evading immigration.

In listening to the conversation my answer came to me, at a moment in my life where the question resonsates for me for all the right reasons:

“I would want to know what their dream is for themselves. If they’re 3, I want to know what they want to be when they grow up. If they’re 70 I want to know if they have lived their dream."

Here We Go Again or Why My Life Can Never Be Rewritten

“So with the time we have left, tell me about your background, the key players in your life growing up.”

Fuck. Here we go.

It's been 5 years since I stopped seeing an amazing therapist who I had seen for years. I wanted to start seeing someone again, someone new, someone who would concentrate on my here and now, the snapshot of my current life first and then perhaps go back to my childhood where the seeds are clearly planted for who we are. (Also, it was very clear when my old therapist had attended a conference that introduced new techniques and approaches to therapy, and I basically had to stop when she suggested my current me go back to talk to my younger me as if she were sitting next to me on the couch.)

I guess that I was deluded into thinking that I could somehow stave off my somewhat unusual upbringing for several sessions, kind of slipping it in after a few weeks or so—“Oh, and by the way, my mother died in a double-suicide.” I spent the first 30 minutes of my first session talking about my string of job losses and layoffs and how that made me feel like a failure that has lead to some pretty strong self-loathing. I talked about some really bad financial choices I’ve made along the way. I talked about my wonderful second marriage and how there was no way I could get through any of this without him. I talked about my very deliberate change in a career focus and how my work with female inmates and at-risk pre- and teenage girls has always brought out the best in me and how I can’t possibly do anything else at this point in my life, how any other administrative job in fundraising is just a set-up to fail and quite frankly something that I have no more zest for.

This woman is lovely, mid-60s I would guess, very gentle and astute. Her office is very comfortable and I was happy to see an abundance of pillows which I’ve always used to cover my stomach while I sit on the couch.

“Do you have siblings?” she asked, pen poised over pad.

I listed my two brothers and sister in birth order, giving a sentence or two about each of them, emphasizing as always my brother Mark who has been there for me throughout everything.

“What about your parents?”

I did the usual mother/father dog and pony show. When I got to my mother’s suicide, and threw in the “double” part, she put both hands over her heart and shook her head in sympathy. I’m not exactly sure what I said to lead her to ask a question a few minutes later that no one has asked before.

“Was she murdered?”

Whoa. I realized that maybe because we hear so much about someone killing someone and then killing themselves that this could have prompted the question. But, due to a lot of circumstances surrounding their deaths, it is entirely possible that the man she died with could have somehow forced her into something that she wasn’t intending to do. Is that murder? Would that make my “script” change? Double-suicides are dramatic enough. I don’t need to throw in the possibility of some sort of crime although there had been yellow police tape in an X across the door to our apartment. I’ve thought about going to the NYPD where a wild goose chase only about 2 years ago lead me to learn that that is where any police report would be kept, but I haven’t thought much about it since.

“I think it’s really interesting that you’ve chosen to work with teenage girls and women who are somehow suffering.” I thought about this for a second and realized that again, no one, including me had really made that connection.

“I’m not sure I ever really suffered,” I said pushing back a little bit.

“Well, at 13 you were left alone with a very sick woman while your father moved 3,000 miles away.” I didn’t really feel as if she were trying to convince me that I actually “suffered” but maybe, as almost everyone who knows my story, she was trying to give me credit for what I had been through.

We had to end at that point. I feel trapped, pigeonholed by my narrative. I’ve had a really happy life but I always seem to get pulled back to an unfathomable event that happened 26 years ago. In many ways this may seem hypocritical because I write a lot about this (and there is a lot more to come) but I want to believe that my present setbacks have nothing to do with my history, that they are somehow a character defect based on other things and not a rocky past.