My Psych 101 autobiography: a life in five short pages.
I come from a poor family. My parents were both alcoholics, one an uneducated blue-collar laborer and the other a self-educated artist. One of my earliest memories is of a time my family lived in a rented house in Tampa, where I slept on a stack of mattresses in a front room. It was beneath a window that I gazed out of every day before drifting into a nap or sleeping at night. It was through its screen that I saw a man stabbed to death while waiting in his car at the stop sign of the street we lived on. Another car had pulled up behind him, the driver of which jumped out, walked to his open window and reached right through it with a blade that slit his throat. To this day I cannot rest near an open window, although I drive with my windows down almost always.
From Tampa, we moved to a trailer park in Gibsonton where my brothers and I ran around in our underwear on the streets every time it rained. As this was Florida, one can imagine we spent much of our youth half-naked and wet from head to toe without a care in the world that we were so.
In the trailer park there was a young man who lived alone. He had a dome glass table clock and a pair of binoculars he let me look through whenever I wanted. There wasn't much to see through them, only the surrounding trailers and a vegetable patch across the way. What I remember enjoying most about his home was the pocket door to his bedroom. Slid into the wall, it made the trailer open to all. Slid closed, there was another world unrevealed to anyone but me. I don't remember him in it, and I cannot remember his face, but I remember that closed door and the blonde paneling of the bedroom interior and how I've loathed such paneling ever since.
From the not-so-big city my family moved to the wee-small town, taking our trailer with us. We were then on a farm, a five acre tract my parents had scraped enough money together to purchase and keep us going by growing our own vegetables and tending our own animals. At one time, I had fifty rabbits of all colors and sizes. Beautiful, gentle creatures, but susceptible to a particular worm that is spread by flies and nested in the rabbit's brain to slowly eat it alive. I lost them all in one season. Before my fifty hares, hand raised from birth to adulthood, could reach the end stage, my uncles and their sons showed up with beer and guns. They made a sporting event of hunting down the terminally ill, letting them out of their cages and frightening them into a mad dash. This should have played as foreshadowing for the way my father's family would behave toward us upon his death, but what I knew at the time was that the rabbits I'd so tenderly loved let out a high-pitched scream as they ran for their lives.
A handful of years later, as my father lay in state for viewing, his always drunk brother John threw himself upon the open casket, sobbing, kissing the dead man's corpse full on the mouth. His brother Jimmy came to my mother as she stood with my brother and me and asked when we were leaving our home, as the place was "rightfully" his now that his brother was dead. There is nothing in the world thicker than blood, except perhaps your kin's own pointed, little heads.
We were constantly on the move after that, mostly from my father's family. Everyone wanted a piece of his estate and no one was willing to understand that there was nothing to be had. So we fled and ultimately discovered anonymity along the Continental Divide. On the backside of Pike's Peak was an old gold mining town, only silver not gold was left for mining and tourism funded the livelihoods of most of the ghost town's inhabitants. It was there in Cripple Creek, Colorado that I developed my first taste for the future. I wanted out of my poverty, in both literal and emotional senses. I wanted the college education no one in my family before me had. I wanted to leave the trailer park and the deviant behavior of my blood ties behind for good. At one time I thought my only way out was death and although I prayed for it ardently, God's answer to me was resounding in its silence.
Chasing dreams of wanting to be a writer and an actor, I went off to college far from my family and any world I had ever encountered before. St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas was both a blessing and a curse. I'd been a wallflower, a withdrawn girl who hid beneath baggy clothing and no make-up or jewelry for fear of being noticed. St. Ed's was a blessing for all the obvious reasons. Until they followed me to Austin, it was far from my dysfunctional family. It was a world of academics (the one place I had always been comfortable in was the interior of a book). I was no longer the only misfit in my immediate world - there were many of us. And it would be the first time in my life that my skills (as a writer, as a stage manager) were noticed and exercised and rewarded.
But where St. Ed's broadened my horizons, it also put a bright shiny light on the limitations of my own emotional reservoir. Rather than liberated, I felt utterly exposed by the very cultivating necessary to make a character whole. Ultimately, I failed as an actor because I could not confront the emotional landscapes acting required. Not only did I fail acting, but I failed school because the longer I stayed, the more demand was placed on developing relationships that I was not prepared to open myself up to. Although I dated men infrequently, I was decidedly asexual. In my lifetime, both men and women had only ever betrayed me. Women were exemplified by my mother, who loved me as best she could but was so riddled with her own complexities that she could not comfort the wounds of my childhood any better than she could confront her own. Beginning with my father, I knew men to abandon me. He died at an early age, and was followed by a succession of men my mother loved, or thought she loved, men who all eventually disappointed her and her children, desperate for a postiive paternal figure. So I chose to be intimate with neither, and in so doing removed myself from the necessary vulnerability of developing relationships until time itself demanded more from me than I was willing to give.
In my third year at St. Ed's I fled to the U.S. Navy where I thought I could start life anew. My family had moved to Austin to be near me, and I thought the Navy would take me to far-away places where I could be as anonymous as I longed to be. My career was short lived, though, as the diagnosis of diabetes pre-empted any plans I may have had for living and working in the obscurity of the uniformed services. I became a civil servant then, relying on Uncle Sam to take care of my medical requirements via a stable if small paycheck and a big benefits package. Unfortunately, this sense of stability fed my fear of moving forward in my life, and I was just as stunted in my emotional growth as I'd ever been.
In the midst of this, my mother had once again moved to my town - now Orlando, Florida - to be near me and eventually I lived with her to take care of her as she endured on-going treatment for lung cancer. After three long years she at last went to sleep without waking. A few months later I found myself a blithering mess in my doctor's office. He asked if I was open to psychotherapy and I will forever be in his debt, for although it was rough going, psychotherapy truly saved my life.
Initially, I did not know how to speak - I simply did not know how to articulate what my thoughts or feelings were when the therapist asked a pointed question about *me.* I had no image of *me* as I had always run from that concept. But in therapy, I was poked and prodded into finally acknowledging my own existence. It was by far the most painful journey I have ever undertaken, but it was life changing and positively the best thing I could have done for myself. I became acutely aware of my family dynamic and my own dysfunction within it. As a result, I chose to divorce myself from my family by becoming sober, by continuing my evolution from empty entity to informed member of humanity, and ultimately, by believing in the worth of my self. Years later, when I met my husband I knew instantly the merit of all my self-discovery. He was a man of absolute integrity, something I'd never known in anyone before and, I dare say, I never would have given him the opportunity to know the real me had I not done the legwork of therapy prior to meeting him. We married five years almost to the day after our first date. On that first date he asked, "What do you want out of life?" It was a question I'd never been asked before. After a minute's thought I replied, "I just want to be happy."
Five years into our marriage, I still regard the moment of our nuptials to be the most profound of my entire life. For me, it was the culmination of a lifetime spent wrestling with disparity, of tossing around in the muck and grime of circumstances and choices ill-suited for a thriving life, and coming through it in tact. Part of making this commitment, for me, meant approaching forgiveness of all transgressions in my past. In order to love this one man as I now loved my self, I had to let go the visceral pain of having been hurt by humans and their utter lack of insight. I had to open myself up to hurt again, but this time with the constancy of self-worth and the value of a healthy relationship.
Commitment is something I could not have made a dozen years ago, prior to therapy. Back then I could not even say the word "commitment" without stuttering. How could I commit myself to something or someone when I was so uncommitted even to my own life? Today, commitment is essential to my being. It is what I face both the present and the future with, for without it I feel I would collapse into the very being of emptiness I've striven so hard to overcome.
I do not know what the future holds, but I know I want to be a part of it, which is a far cry from where I began.
