I decide who I am

dispatch #3

Aug 11, 2021

Hi there friends,

I want to start with a note of thanks. Last week I added optional paid subscriptions to this newsletter. It was terrifying and vulnerable to ask for money for my writing, to ask for new ways of support. Thank you for being here. I have been so blown away by and oh so grateful for the sign ups (both free and paid…welcome, I am so happy you’re here), the notes of encouragement, and the ways you’ve shared and commented on my work. My therapist told me to practice replacing sheepishness with dignity around my writing. I am still a sheep, but I am striving towards dignified sheep.

Thank you. I am grateful. I feel you with me each time I sit down to write.

You’ll see in the next few weeks that family is on my mind a whole lot as I navigate some conflict, some remembrances, and some new depths with those closest to me. A public panic attack last week on the subject still has me reeling. What happens when we don’t play the roles we were assigned to play before we could consent to them? I am not sure yet, and fuck is it scary. As my mother said on the phone today, “Family is a weathervane, it swings with the wind”.

My first bonus essay for paid subscribers comes out next week, be sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss it!

[Image Description: An angled photo of part of the center of a rusted iron cross, shot from below. The rust is all textured color. Red, brown and green. Behind the cross, out of focus, you can see the tops of trees and a blue sky.]

Seven weeks ago yesterday my father and I fought over the phone. I am not sure who hung up first but I know we both did. I had been speaking loud, hearing the tremors from my throat that surface when I am saying the hard but true thing that I have kept in for too long. That I will not take responsibility for his reactions, for the shape and volume they take. That I will not repeat my pattern of making him happy at my own expense. That I am allowed to have, in this incredibly hard year of illness and loss, my limits. It is painful to be ornamentation in the newly-built life of someone you love. It is hard to wait in the wings, to be expected to march out onto the lit stage smiling on cue, when anger is curling up your spine. I used to be a good actress, but I’m not anymore.

You don’t have to go far to leave. When I was a kid my dad worked a lot. He worked away from home, long hours, building a business. While he was gone, I became my mother’s. We built a language and a world only we could understand. When he came back, it was too late. I was too fully formed to be the moldable thing he wanted me to be.

But that didn’t stop me from pretending. I worked hard, I married the man he approved of, I smiled, I kept quiet when I did not agree, I took the blame. I held it, I held it, I held it all. I held so much for my place on the outskirts. I squashed my anger so small that I couldn’t even remember that it was there. I tried to be this beautiful, shiny, uncomplicated thing. But I am not that. I am a dark thing. I am a reckless thing, a fierce thing, a battering ram of inconvenient emotion. I am many things that my father will never understand. I am many things that I am still learning to understand.

I was raised in the panopticon of carbon-copy suburbia, an actual Levittown. Hardworking, mostly white, people aspiring to obtain and then maintain a prison of possessions, to outdo each other with the latest model. The kid on the honor roll, the greenest lawn. Shallow, petty things. Human things. Like the set of a play, in the right light these lives could enchant, but from all but one angle, they were paper thin. They had no form, no meaning. Just a dying system finding one last stronghold to thrive. Blue collar people trying to escape the things that society thinks about blue collar people. Try to maintain the illusion of going somewhere, being someone. Puppets point at each other but never up at the puppetmaster. God is off limits.

Family is hard. We are so vicious with the people we love because it’s easy to be. They hurt us the most. A cage can be beautiful and still be a cage. Freeing myself from the expectations of my family feels impossible, still after all these years. I keep uncovering new layers of what I have been told to be, what I have been told not to question. I do not need to drink to be someone’s idea of palatable. I do not need to be thin or intelligent or well-dressed or successful in some narrow sense. There are no parts of my story that I need to be ashamed of. I do not need to be kept safe. I do not need to be kept quiet. There are so many things I know how to be, but not myself. On some level I still want to be approved of. I try to jam approval into the space labeled “love” and it almost fits. It almost fits. Almost.

I am so sick of having to be approved of to be loved. There is a veil of perfectionism that I am still trying to drag from my body. A Peter Pan shadow I sewed to my heel before I knew what it meant to be bound to something. I have hurt myself so much to chase perfection in so many ways I can never reach. I am angry that the expectations put on me are more for the benefit of other people’s comfort than my own. I am angry. I am so, so angry. I am angry too that my first reaction to my rage is to discount it as invalid.

It took four weeks and three days for the silence to break between my father and I. The peace that has been extended is fragile, tentative. For maybe the first time, I am not rushing to mend it. We are both stubborn and proud. Boundaries are something new to my family of origin and I don’t know how or if they can be a part of something so established after all these years. But I’m willing to try.

I love my family, but I am not theirs. I cannot belong to them and survive it. But I can make a family. I can hold it in my hands and marvel at the shape it takes, something new. The ceilings will be high so that we can all stand to our full height within it. I can see in each moment what it is becoming, what it no longer is. Who I no longer am within and beyond it. It can be mine and it can be beautiful. I remove approval from the spot where love should fit. It’s scary to see the open space, but it’s hopeful too.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?