(This was originally published on Emily Books’ awesome blog. )

When I was 24, I took mushrooms at a party in a seedy part of Hollywood and got it on with a bunch of strangers in a hot tub. There’s nothing inherently wrong with mushrooms + strangers + hot tub + heeeey, but the situation was wrong for me, because I wasn’t really enjoying myself. My focus was on putting on a show and making other people happy, not myself. And these were spectacularly gross people—anyone else could have seen that, tripping or not. But the craziest/saddest/worst part of the whole evening wasn’t that I was faking moans for people who couldn’t have cared less about whether I was enjoying their drunk fumblings, it was that I ran into someone from high school in the hot tub. Do you understand? I was naked and tripping and groping and being groped and through the fog I heard someone say, “Hey! It’s John from CHS.”

 The hot tub incident came towards the end of a time in my life, between ages 12 and 24 approximately, when I was really into being performatively crazy. The thing people say about young women who flaunt their sexuality the way I did is that they’re like that because their dads were dicks. I know that isn’t the case for everyone, but it was for me. My father, as I’ve chronicled here, here, and here, was a dick. Though he was successful, erudite, and often quite charming, he also taught me to hate myself, mostly by calling “stupid” and then calling me “crybaby” after I started crying because he called me stupid.

 I didn’t consciously decide to turn into the kind of person who ended up naked in strangers’ hot tubs, but when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I must have subconsciously thought, “I’m not worth much to my dad, but maybe I can find a way to be worth something to someone else.” I wanted someone to love me and tell me I wasn’t terrible. I wanted to be distracted. So I started doing whatever I could to get some validation and attention, mainly dressing like a “slut” and being promiscuous, torturing guys who liked and loved me, and chasing guys who were sure to affirm the terrible things I thought about myself.

(Un)happy Halloween

I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to write anything, but in between my all-consuming yet always last minute class planning and student paper reading, and my related, useless, empty-headed-wall-staring, or drinking, I still found a little time to think about this project. What I mean to say is, I thought about it without meaning to while staring at walls or strangers on the subway.

I didn’t want this project to be cathartic because I don’t think the need for catharsis is a reason to write, and I don’t like reading work that’s reaching for it. However, I seem to have achieved some in a round-about way. Since starting it, I am less attached to my narrative about my parents, a little less “poor me.” I never thought about my parents much, but now I think about them even less, and when I do think about them, I don’t feel much. It’s like I don’t need to think about them at all, and while I’m sure that  sounds fucked up to some people, I kind of think it’s a good thing. I didn’t ever need to think about them, but it certainly happened, often through subconscious connections, or maybe a need to “work something out.”  The fact that they’re not bubbling up as often must mean that I don’t need to understand what happened between us as much.

This means I can do a better job of focusing on them, and on my original intentions. (Maybe.) Not that I want to make a point of leaving myself out. I normally write fiction, and I’m finding this world really interesting, so I don’t actually want to stop writing about myself. And even if I did, technically, I realize I’ll still be talking about myself no matter what.

I was telling a friend about this project on Friday night, which was pretty random, because I’m not talking about it with anyone, and if I were going talk to someone, I’d have thought it would be a writer friend, which this guy was not. The reason I told him about it was because we were talking about our own lives, our false starts and distractions. He’s recently married and finding it very hard to stay put and stay faithful; I’m in a totally committed relationship but scared of actual marriage. I brought up what I’m doing here because what happened to my parents seemed relevant to us. I thought maybe we could learn something from them, so I told him what I’m discovering.

As I was talking, I realized that I’m forging a new relationship with my mom and dad. Not so I can “find a way to miss them,” as I wrote here way back. Not so I can do anything specific, or for a particular reason. But by virtue of examining their lives while I am also examining my own, all the time, to the point of exhaustion (nothing new there), I’m starting to think about them as if they were my friends; I wonder and worry about their relationship, and find myself commiserating with them. How does anyone get this shit right? If my friend and I are talking about our relationships, they must have been talking to friends or strangers as well and trying to figure it all out. Did they freak out or falter? Did they see things happening and wish they could stop them, but just watch them happen anyway? Now I feel that they were me. That I am each of them. All that stuff. Well, they’re lives were actually very different from mine—by my age they had two kids and owned a house, which is cray-zay. Maybe they didn’t have the time or ability or inclination to obsess about their lives the way I do. But I can’t help but imagine them with the narcissism of the generation they helped spawn, and so I assume that they did. Their relationship died a long death, and they had plenty of time.

My mom and aunt, terrorizing their Chicago neighborhood. My mom’s at the back, quite aware of her cuteness.

My parents, hugging in the snow.

My mother and I. I was…3? 4? 5?

My father’s family in front of their new American home in Minnesota. My dad’s the skeptical young guy on the left.

Meghan O’Rourke suggested that grief can be isolating because our culture is “nervous around death.” We don’t have rituals that govern it, or a shared language to discuss it, so it’s hard to even know what it means to grieve. I know she’s right, but only because that’s what I’ve witnessed or been told. That hasn’t been my experience at all. 

It is true that many people don’t have access to rituals other than the standard trifecta of wakes, funerals and burials. And for people such as myself, even these have little meaning because they are usually framed by a religion like Catholicism, which offers me nothing I want to take. I’m not sure what I might substitute that would have more impact. Probably something private and isolating.

I recently participated in a bunch of these rituals, and being in a place where it was okay to grieve actually made me feel isolated. My boyfriend’s grandmother died last week, so we spent Sunday at the wake and Monday at the funeral and burial. He and his family would have been sad no matter what, but an additional gloom hung over the events because the one-year anniversary of his father’s death was the following weekend (yesterday), so not only were people remembering why they were there almost a year ago, they knew they’d be back in church again shortly.

Of course, no one expected me to be worked up at these events—I was just there for support. But I still felt really distant from everyone. And it’s not like they were all bawling. A few people cried, but there was nothing serious. There were moments, particularly at lunch, where everyone was joking and enjoying themselves. It was a level of grief that I should have been able to get with. But I couldn’t.  My heart wouldn’t budge. When I sat in church, in the funeral home, and at the grave, I could not pay attention to what was happening. I could not take in the significance of those moments, although I understood it, and I remembered that I’ve always felt that way, even when I was related to the people who died.

You Can Ring My Bell

I saw the shaman on Friday. I’m not ready to refer to him as my shaman. I don’t think I’ll ever be/kind of hope I never am.  Is talking about your shaman better or worse than talking about your therapist? I’m not willing to find out.

It was a pretty low-key interaction. I told him I’d felt better after the last session, and it’s really true. I feel lighter, more positive and confident. It could be totally psychosomatic, but I’m still confused about what happened and not totally ready to believe it, so you think that would work against me. Also, I’ve done a lot of trippy, alternative things over the years and nothing else had any sort of immediate, positive effect. This wasn’t the first time I’d had evil entities removed from my being/aura. It wasn’t even the second! But it was the first time I felt that it “worked.” The German woman who performed those cleansings years ago seemed perfectly competent, but clearly she was asleep at the wheel if she managed to miss my dead brother. It wasn’t a total wash, though. She did look at a picture of my psychotically possessive boyfriend and see that he was cursed, which was really helpful and illuminating.  This explanation for his crazy behavior seemed as reasonable as the others I’d heard or come up with.

12 years old. I had an appetite for destruction. Ice cream, not so much.

When I started this project, I thought my main struggle would be with the availability/unavailability of information—there are only so many letters, memories, etc. But that hasn’t been a problem. The real problem, I’m discovering, is what I’m doing with the information I’m getting. If I want to learn about my parents and understand them, I have to be open to learning about and understanding them, and it turns out that I’m not. I’m stubborn, and I’m attached to my story and my impressions of them. I’ve already decided that their marriage was bad, that they were unhappy. So when I come across information that tells me otherwise I experience an intense, physical cognitive dissonance. My brain hardens. My screen goes blank. Every cell of my body says “Nope.”

I’ll try out phrases like, “My parents were really in love, at least for a while,” which is something that their early letters seem to suggest, and it just sounds ridiculous, like I’m making it up. But what if I made my version up? Or what if both options are correct? Either way, I’m either actually interested in doing what I said I wanted to, or I’m not. If I’m not willing to really learn something or change my ideas, I might as well just cry into the pages of a composition notebook in the privacy of my own bedroom and mind.

I’ve got two theories about this, which are evolving, or maybe devolving, pretty quickly. One is that there really is some rewiring that needs to occur for me to change my mind. It’s a big shift. The other is that finding information that contradicts my assumptions is much more painful than finding information that supports them. Because you know what? If my parents were happy, in love, having fun, accomplishing what they dreamed, or even more than that, it’s sad that they fell out of love, or that life’s complications got the best of them. It is sad. It is so really fucking sad and when I think about it I am filled with grief, and a little bit of terror. I think that’s why I resist the shift in perspective—that would give me something to mourn. I’m still not mourning their disappearance from my life, but sometimes what happened to me doesn’t seem nearly as bad as what happened to them, or between them. I HATE that this happened to them, and I hate that it can happen to anyone. At times, falling out of love, or waking up in the middle of a life that you didn’t want, feels like the saddest thing I can think of.