Permission, Courage, and Telling My Story

There have been so many changes in my life in the last year, really in the last six months, especially on the career front. This year alone, I have worked for three different employers, with an end of the year scramble that made me dizzy with a mixture of fear, excitement, and hope. But it was mid-October when things really got interesting.

I was at my desk at job #2 for the year, when I was just beginning to figure out that this particular job wasn’t going to be the long haul, career home job I had hoped it would be. I was already job searching, miserable with a boss that knew nothing about marketing, management, or people skills, and watching people quit by the dozens around me every day. I had started only three months earlier, and I had never seen a workplace go downhill so fast.

My cell phone rang, and an out of town number popped up, and I answered a little excitedly, hoping it was a response to one of the dozens of jobs I had applied for. Instead, a voice I vaguely recognized responded to my hello, almost in mid-sentence before I could put two and two together. It was a vendor calling me, but she thought I was still behind the desk at my last job, a failing startup in San Francisco that I had been relieved to escape. I had spent months there watching several wealthy men fight and break promises (and do little else) for months. I finally got in a few words edgewise and was able to explain to her that I was no longer with the startup and couldn’t help her with the event she was calling about. She paused, and expressed disappointment.

“I so enjoyed working with you Kim,” she said, “you did a great job.”

I thanked her and prepared to hang up, but she continued.

“I really hope you are doing something you love and have always dreamed of doing.”

I was almost stunned by her words. First, they were so genuine, she really meant what she was saying, and secondly, it hit me like a punch to the stomach. Even if things at my current company weren’t unstable, even if I was in the perfect marketing job—was this what I dreamed of doing when I was little? Was this what I dreamed of doing every night when my thoughts were racing and I couldn’t sleep? No. All I ever wanted to be was a writer. When I can’t sleep, I am thinking about my book that still isn’t written, and about my blog that is gathering dust. 

I thanked this vendor who will likely never know the events she helped inspire, and then hung up the phone. I was in tears at my desk. I felt hopeless. I felt like every job I was taking was a mistake, every decision I was making was taking me further away from what I wanted more than anything. Most of all, I had made the decision to move us across the country, far away from everything, to this place of opportunity—California, and what had it gotten us?

I made my way to the office restroom and spent a good half hour crying. I reminded myself that very few people I know are doing what they always dreamed of doing. We all have to earn a living. I told myself that, as a recruiter recently reminded me, there are more f-cked up workplaces out there than there are normal ones, and you just don’t know how it truly is until you are there, until you are inside and working there. I took a lot of deep breaths and tried to give myself a break about everything.

I got back to my desk, and as I working on some social media posts for work, I clicked over to Facebook to find a link I needed. I was on my personal page and scrolled down, and stopped on a posting on an author’s page that I followed.

One spot left for my One-Day Writing Workshop.

I was frozen. For a minute, work was forgotten, everything was forgotten. The words stared back at me. This wasn’t just any writer, it was Joyce Maynard, a writer I had long admired. I had always toyed with the idea of going to a workshop like this, but didn’t have the confidence, or usually, the money.

I clicked the link to check out the details, whispering to myself, please don’t be too expensive, please don’t be too expensive. The page came up. It was expensive for us, for this time in our lives. But, it was local. It was 18 miles away. When would I ever have a chance like this again? I needed this right now. I needed to go and find out if this dream I had was crazy or if I should keep plugging away. The only way I would ever know was to go somewhere and get honest feedback from a writer I trusted and believed in.

I called my husband, and through tears explained that I needed to do this, I knew we couldn’t really afford it. He was alarmed that I was so emotional, and agreed immediately that if I needed to do this, to do it, we would figure out the money somehow.

The date of the workshop was November 3^rd, and we had to submit our essays beforehand. To say I was a nervous wreck didn’t even begin to cover it. There were six other women attending the workshop. I was so afraid to put my words out there, to have Joyce and these other women read them and think I was a horrible writer. I was afraid I would read their words and compare mine and know immediately that I was not cut out to do this.

To be honest, over the past year, I had been asking myself why I was putting myself through this torture. No one said I HAD to write. It was just me doing this to myself. It would be a lot easier to let this dream go. I had to work- that was a have to. If I was supposed to be a writer, I would have been discovered or I would have figured out a way to make a living doing that by now, right? I had started thinking that maybe it was time to just let go.

What I wanted from this workshop was some kind of answer for myself. I felt stuck. And if I got a positive answer, I hoped to find a group of women that I could connect and continue with after that one day. I prepared myself for the worst. I wasn’t prepared at all for what I got instead.

I turned in my essay at the last possible moment. A few days later, all the essays were posted online so we could all read each other’s work before the actual workshop. I did feel humbled by the other women’s work, and I didn’t know what to think about how my work would be perceived. The workshop was memoir-focused, but Joyce had also encouraged writers of fiction to attend. Many of the other women had submitted works of fiction.

One of my biggest struggles with my writing is also what to write. I have avoided my story (as in writing a memoir) because I just didn’t know who would want to read it. I am not famous, I don’t feel I have accomplished that much, although at times, I do feel I have a story to tell. I have started a novel, but I have struggled. That’s the other part of me feeling stuck with my writing, and the other answer I wanted out of this workshop.

November 3^rd came and as nervous as I was, I made it to Joyce’s house in one piece. She was incredibly warm and inviting, and as the other women arrived, my nerves eased a little bit. Regardless of the answers I got about my writing, I at least began to feel I was among friends. 

We began by going around the room and introducing ourselves and talking about why we were attending the workshop. Joyce let us all do this, and just listened carefully and said very little and took notes. When we had all finished, she went carefully around to each one of us and responded.

When I introduced myself, I talked about feeling stuck, about not knowing if this is what I was supposed to do. I told everyone about the day at my desk, and being the person who took the last spot at the workshop, and how I had dreamed of being a writer. I explained that there was a book my mother had kept for me that chronicled every year of school, with my school photo pasted in it, and a few memories jotted down below it. And every year, underneath that photo where the book asked, What does Kim want to be when she grows up? The answer was always: writer. Every year, from kindergarten on up. I explained about my hesitation to write a memoir, and my biggest hesitation of all—my mother. I didn’t want to put her through any more pain, she had been through enough. I remember Joyce hesitating for a moment when I said those words. But I had continued and soon it was time for the next person to talk.

When Joyce got around to responding to me, she got out of her chair. She hadn’t done this with anyone else, so I was a little taken a back. But she got in front of me, on her knees, and she told me she was doing this because she wanted to make sure that I heard her and remembered what she was about to say.

She told me there were so many things that held us back in life—money, work, everything else—but this was MY STORY and that I had every right in the world to tell it and not to let anyone or anything stop me. She told me I didn’t have to protect anyone, especially someone who did not protect me. She said that if my mother was in the room, she was sure she would be touched and moved by her story, but that would be her story. This was mine. 

I can’t repeat her exact words, and I can’t ever express the passion with which she said them, because I was crying. This release of permission she gave me, I can’t explain it. I felt I had part of my answer. A huge part of it. 

As I got to know the other women that day through their work and their own personal journeys, it amazes me how we all travel through such hard places to get where we are. I felt so fortunate that I had landed in this particular group of such compassionate, giving women. Everyone was so supportive and thoughtful.

Joyce worked through each woman’s piece, one by one. With each piece of work, I was learning more and more, and I was nervously awaiting my turn. My essay was the last one Joyce reviewed. Her critiques and the input from the other women at the workshop gave me my other answer. I need to keep writing.  The positive feedback I got from Joyce and these women was a huge turning point for me. I was so emotional, and it was almost hard to leave Joyce’s house that night. I didn’t want that connected, creative feeling to end.

The good news is, it hasn’t. The women from that workshop have been amazing, and we all stay in touch and have met once and have another meeting in January. I feel so fortunate to have this group of supportive, positive, amazing, talented women to share and grow with. We are all each other’s biggest fans, and can openly share anything and everything about our writing with each other.

I am forever grateful to Joyce for opening a door for me that I very nearly let shut. It is still a battle to carve out time for writing, but I am making myself do it, especially with my writing group’s encouragement. But I wouldn’t feel the confidence and I wouldn’t have the direction I do without Joyce kneeling in front of me that day, passionately making sure I heard her words.

And really, how many times in our lives does someone do that for us? Really make sure we hear the words that make all the difference—that can change our lives?

If it happens, be grateful. Listen. Don’t take that moment for granted. Take the words to heart. Do what you are meant to do.

I plan to do just that.

It might take a long time, it might not work out like I’ve planned, and I am sure it will be ten times harder than I can even imagine.

But, this is my life. 

I am a writer. It is what I was meant to do.

I will tell my story.

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Here Before

Usually when I am at some sort of crossroads, when I am struggling or hurting, the words are everywhere. I can write and write, no matter how tired or busy or how little time I have. But, that hasn’t been the case for the last four months. It has been almost physically painful to write, and I haven't been able to find my way out of whatever writer's block or obstacle I am up against. I have worried that I am too far gone this time. But really, I can’t be any more far gone than I have been before, can I? There are too many good things in my life now that I never thought I would have. Too many right things. Too many things that should make everything easier.

This time of year always sneaks up on me. Even though fall is my favorite season, this time of year – heading into the holidays, has always been hard. Even though I have a husband who loves Christmas with such passion that he reverts back to a six year old’s excitement over every ornament, decoration and Christmas movie on television, it can’t erase over 30 years of this being a really horrible time of year for me. I honestly love this time now, as we have our own traditions, and I don’t have to make excuses to avoid going home (and feel guilty for it) or feel like the most single person in the world (as the holidays can really make you feel). But I think there is something to the fact that my body, soul, and spirit learned to start preparing for hard times around September, and somehow I haven’t “unlearned” that yet. I get more emotional over everything, and think too much about everything, and in general, feel a little more of the weight of the world on me.

It started in September, when everything I read and heard on the news and from my friends just started weighing on me. Just the unfairness of life. Just hard stories and hard times and sadness that seemed to be outnumbering the goodness and kindness in the world. I kept telling myself I was just seeing things that way, and I was honestly getting scared for myself. We have been under so much financial stress for such a long time it seems. That will wear on a person. That, and family stress and every day stress, and just life has seemed, well, so heavy. I worried that, like addiction and other life-long battles people have to fight even once they are recovered, my depression was always going to be something that I had to keenly be aware of, sitting in the corner beckoning for me when I feel this way. At times, it felt as if I was fighting not to be taken in. I think we all have low moments, and I know I have had enough on me to justify feeling overwhelmed.

A few key moments stopped me in my tracks. The first was on the drive into work a month or so ago. I was already emotional that morning, and traffic was backed up on my regular route, and I had to take some back roads as I neared my office. I got a little turned around, as I always do with my lack of direction, and as I pulled up to a stop sign, trying to figure out which way to turn, a homeless man sat on a tiny patch of pavement between me and the oncoming lane of traffic. He held a small cardboard sign, with messy letters in black magic marker that read: Dreaming of Tacos and a Clean Pair of Socks. He was looking off in the distance and the pain on his face and that sign…well, I lost it. I was sobbing in my car, soon serenaded by multiple car horns pleading with me to move on. It just broke my heart that someone wanted such simple things and didn’t have them. The next morning, I tucked a pair of my husband’s socks into my purse, and went the same route to the office, but the man was no longer there. I cried again. I see so many homeless people here. Every day. And my heart is torn every time, and especially when I see elderly people or when I know someone is mentally ill and lost in a world that has discarded them. But this man’s simple sign has stayed with me. I have tried to remember that and be so thankful for all that I have. I have punished myself for feeling down when I am NOT by the side of the road begging, and I will sleep in a warm bed and have food tonight.

The other key moment came just a week ago. I was at work, and got a call on my cell phone from a sales person, trying to sell a conference sponsorship. She was trying to reach me, but in connection with the company I last worked for. When I explained that I no longer worked there, she responded, “Oh, Kim, I hope you are doing something  you love to do, something you’ve always dreamed of doing.” I sat silent. She and I had worked together briefly at my last company, and she let me know she had enjoyed working with me so much, and was glad to see I had moved on (my last working environment was not a very positive place to work). And while my new job is much better, much more geared to my work strengths, and while I make a good salary, what she said made my stomach drop. It was such hard timing when I have been struggling to write a single sentence for months and at times have given up on my dream of ever publishing a book. I want so badly to finish my novel and just try to get it published, and to just really feel that first and foremost, I am a writer. I know that can’t happen all at once, but I have always felt I was working my way there. Lately, I have felt like it just isn’t going to happen, like I am losing something, a part of me, a key core of who I am. I know I am so lucky to have a job in a time when people don’t. I know we are lucky to be paying our bills when others can’t. It is just so frustrating to be working so hard and turning over what feels like every cent to just cover our asses—barely—and it’s not even doing what I love- what I really want to do. But, that’s life. I know it. This is no surprise. It is just harder right now for some reason.

I feel time ticking by right now, it feels like the clock is speeding up. I had to check my age on a form recently, and I have a birthday coming up in a few short weeks. I will be 44. FORTY FOUR. How in the hell did that happen? And how did I LET that happen, without going after some of these dreams sooner? How did I let depression rob me of so many years? I know I didn’t “let” that happen, and that second question kind of answers the first, but it hurts my heart all the same. I know I still have time. I am constantly telling people that it is never too late. And it isn’t. It just feels that way right now. I just want to make up for lost time, and go grab everything I want to do, and do anything and everything that makes me feel better, and worthy, and hopeful about the world, and most of all, myself.

One thing that helps, so much, is this. 

This is the end of my day every day. My dog Bear. This face in the window. There are no questions or worries here from this sweet boy, just love. It amazes both me and my husband just how much love you can feel for a dog and how loved you feel in return. On my way home from work, when I honestly have cried a few tears for reasons I can’t explain, when I need to feel needed and worth more, and need to know that I am making my mark and a difference in the world somehow, I pull into my driveway, and Bear somehow knew five minutes before that I was turning on our street, even though I never arrive home at the same exact time. He looks out the window and waits. He sees me walking up to the door and explodes into a happy dance and pulls to get to me so much that my husband cannot hold him back until I have put my bags and purse on the kitchen table to turn to him. There is such joy in me just being there, just arriving, after only hours away. It seems small, and maybe even silly to those of you who aren’t dog lovers, but I can tell you that there are days when that moment is everything. 

It's a small sign that in a world of weight and sadness and lost and forgotten dreams, that there is boundless love waiting for me, just behind my front door, and somehow, I am doing something right.

 The beautiful painting featured in this post is called "The Fisherman's Wife" by Scott McLachlan. More of his work can be viewed here.

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Places We Have Lived

I lived on my own for the first time during my freshman year in college, occupying a two bedroom apartment  in a not-so-great area of town near campus. (I have huge regrets about not living in the dorm that first year, but that’s for another post). I was so ready to start my life away from my parents, away from my father, away from my past struggles, away from the things that I felt defined me. I had no idea that so much more was ahead of me that I was not equipped to deal with. The shaky foundation of my family proved to be poor preparation for the next stage of my life. I had no idea.

Everything I saw ahead of me for college and especially that first year fell apart within the first semester. I was already dating the man I was certain I was going to marry, that I had met just before the end of my senior year in high school. He was also my first love, my first real relationship. It was innocent and burdened-- lovely and flawed. Looking back, we never stood a chance because I had no idea who I really was or why I had so little faith in myself. I had not yet begun to define or heal the wounds that were taking a little more of my happiness every day. I had planned on a lifetime with him. We didn’t make it to Christmas.

Having been an honors student in high school, I thought I would repeat that success in college. I never worried about my academic abilities, and had no idea how emotionally trying it would be to sit in a huge lecture hall of hundreds of students I didn’t know, trying to figure out where I fit in and why nothing seemed to make sense. The weight of it all was smothering me. Nothing I thought I could depend on was lasting or working out. It all fell apart so fast.

I wasn’t equipped to deal with such independent choices, a serious relationship, or living on my own, and I certainly wasn’t equipped to deal with losing it all in a matter of months. All the things I had looked forward to, the things I had banked on that were my light at the end of the tunnel, were mirages. At the beginning of my life as I saw it, I had lost everything.

The worst part was that people judged me so harshly. I was viewed as this unstable girl who fell apart after her boyfriend left her. In part, that was true. It became a joke in the circles I had traveled in, my classmates. I was laughable, ridiculous. I will never, ever forget how that felt. I was so confused and felt so alone. The words others said, many of them people that I had come to regard as close friends, still ring in my ears at times of doubt, this many years away from all of that.

I am sure it was a foreign thing as a young person who had grown up in a stable, supportive family to watch someone like me disintegrate…or worse, seem fine one day and a wreck the next. We were so young. No one is supposed to be wise and enveloped in the capability to see the big picture and the real reason behind such things. I know all of that now, but it still hurt and took me so long to understand. I had a few close friends during college, one I had known in high school, another I made during my freshman year that were the exceptions and somehow had that wisdom. I am forever in their debt for the support they gave me during that first year and the years after at that time in my life.

When I go back in time in my mind, or when I reread a journal page as I am rearranging a bookcase, in the same way a song or a scent can transport me back to a singular moment…the place I lived during that first year in college is as clear to me as the four walls I am looking at now. I can see the marked, scuffed wooden floors, the metal blinds that made constant noise when I had the windows open, the bathroom with the black and white checked tile that crawled up the walls, the two small steps that led into the kitchen from the backdoor that I must have walked up and down a thousand times. The pink phone that hung on the wall in the hallway, and the countless nights I sat in the floor just below it, twirling the cord in my fingers, talking to close friends that I missed desperately who were far away at other campuses. The pieces of furniture that a teacher and friend gave me to help me make my start in the world. The way the sheer curtains in my bedroom blew in the breeze at night and floated above me as I laid awake.

I cannot believe the perfect still pictures I have in my mind of that little apartment that was nothing extraordinary, except that it was a beginning for me, and a place that honestly, to this day, brings a physical pain when I think back.

I started a tradition then, quite by accident. When I was moving out of that apartment once my lease was up, I had just finished putting the last small items in my car. I had cleaned and scrubbed and was taking one last walk through to make sure that I hadn’t forgotten any detail or left anything behind. I remember it was getting dark and I just kind of froze. I remembered that a year before, I had walked through this empty apartment in such a different place in my life. I was full of hope, so ready for the next chapter. I was so excited about every doorknob and window screen because they were mine. Now, as I stood in the hallway, I started to cry, to really weep, over all that I had lost. Over all that had transpired in one year of my life. I lingered in every room and made a note to remember all the happy things, the first moments of the life I had imagined, the despair I felt and the tears I cried in those rooms. It was such a huge thing for me to lose that first relationship, and I said goodbye to more than just a rented apartment, I said goodbye to a huge part of my innocence and hope.

I stood in my bedroom, next to shadowy marks on the floor left behind by my brass bed. I said one simple last goodbye, walked out the door, turned the key for the last time and took a deep breath. I made a decision right then to try and leave all that sadness locked in that place. To let it stay there and somehow suffocate in the tightly closed rooms, with nowhere to escape. It was silly and dramatic, but it helped that young, lost woman that I was put one painful chapter behind her.

Without ever planning it, I followed that same ritual everywhere I lived after that. After everything was cleaned and packed, when the sound of my footsteps echoed in empty rooms, I would take that final walk through and really remember everything- the good, the bad, the minutes and moments—all of it. I would do my best to say—That was me—here. That’s done. Onto the next place in my life.

The only place I didn’t do that was my childhood home. I was so ready to fly away when I left—and there was plenty to want to fly away from. Maybe it was because I knew I could come back to that house from time to time, but even when my parents announced they were selling the house and moving to another state, I had no desire to go and say goodbye. Maybe that was a mistake, because there are things that I still haven’t made peace with. Maybe I needed to shut it all away in the rooms of that house like I did the other places I lived later in life.

Today, a picture caught my attention on Pinterest, and I clicked through to find the story of this piece of a house in the middle of a field that had intrigued me. A woman had mourned the necessary loss of her childhood home, and all the dreams she had tied to it. The house, along with other buildings on the farm, had to be burned down for safety issues after years of deterioration. In the ashes, she remembered how she, as a child, was certain she would return to this house to raise her own children. Her memories moved her to erect a monument of sorts in the same spot where the house once stood. I so connected with her relationship to a place, a home, and the hope that grew inside it. 

We all walk through the rooms of the places we have lived in one way or another I guess. The places we have lived become a part of who we are, what we were, and what we remember. 

As I sit here tonight in a home that I know is filled with love, I have found the hope I had when I first walked through the halls of that tiny apartment in North Carolina in 1988. I could have never known how many years it would take to get back to that place of hope. Every place I have lived, every address change, every risk, heartbreak, and choice has led me here. 

I am finally home.

Please visit the site for "If We Lived Here" and Paula Rebsom’s work by clicking the photo below, which inspired this blog post.

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Chasing Memories

A few months will go by and I will realize that the images haven’t invaded my mind—a sort of remission. It’s a relief and then a reminder. Some sensory thing will bring it back to me, a misstep on concrete, looking over a railing in a shopping mall and feeling the familiar stomach drop, or brushing against peeling paint on a window sill. Then, I am there.

It was summer, I was 7 or 8. Annoyingly, the specifics of some parts of that day are lost to me…my exact age, the city we were in, the name of the hotel. I want to know, I want to physically go back there for some reason. But I can’t. The rest of the details, for a span of probably 10 minutes or so, are terribly clear. Vivid. I wake to those details many nights, sweating and with my heart pounding visibly through my nightgown. There have been several nights when I have had to get up and change the sheets after waking to find I have been sweating terribly for most of the night. I wake to a damp, hot and cold cocoon, and peel myself out of it. The last two nights have been that way.

It is ten minutes of my life. But it won’t leave me.

My mother, father and I were on a vacation somewhere. I am fairly sure we were at a beach (maybe Florida?). I think we were there for a short time, maybe traveling with my father while he worked somewhere. I remember wearing a yellow bathing suit, and that our room was small, but opened to a balcony. Our view looked straight across a courtyard to rows and levels of rooms and balconies just like ours, a mirror reflection of middle-income weekend-getaway style. Many floors below (maybe 8, maybe 10?) and to the left, a turquoise swimming pool shimmered and made reflections on the ceiling of our balcony- little glimmers of light thrown from far below, beckoning me to the water.

The TV was on, I was bored, nothing was out of the ordinary. I heard the familiar clunking sound of the cooler being opened, and then my father immersing his hand into the icy water and melted ice, finding one of the colder cans of beer in the bottom. My whole life, anytime we have stayed in a hotel, and long before mini-fridges were the norm in each room, my father’s first order of business was to fill the large orange Igloo cooler with ice at the automatic machine to chill the innumerable beers he had just purchased somewhere nearby.

So, today was no different than any other time, any other trip. My memories of my father almost always include a beer in his hand, for years and years, a Pabst Blue Ribbon can. That image, that red white and blue logo and lettering, is part of my childhood. What is odd is that he hid the effects so well. My estimation is that he was almost constantly buzzed or drunk—all the time. But, he wasn’t a stumbling, jobless, word-slurring drunk. He had somehow managed to conquer the tell-tale signs for the public. At home we saw longer stretches of inebriation and violent outbursts, but to be honest, over my whole life living in the house with him and my mother, and for the many years I tried to go home for holidays and have a normal life, more often than not, he seemed fine. If someone dropped in to visit, nothing seemed amiss. The flipside of that, though, was that we could all be sitting around the dinner table and something…nothing… would cause a reaction from him so unexpected, so shocking, that the rest of the evening blurred afterwards for me.

So this day, in this hotel, was just that way. There were no loud voices, no provocations, just all of the sudden the air in the room was different. He was different.

I was sitting on the bed in my bathing suit, watching TV, and in what seemed like a split second, my father had picked me up off the bed by my wrists, and spun me around. He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t upset, he was actually laughing.

What might have been normal father-daughter interactions were always laced with trepidation for me. Today, in particular, I noticed his grip on me was weak, faltering. It turned a light hearted moment into one of me assessing how close he was spinning me to the glass door and the corner of the nightstand.

He then carried me out onto the balcony and before I could think or protest, flung me over the railing of the balcony, dangling me, eight or so stories up. He was laughing and joking with me. At first, I struggled, but then became paralyzed with fear, especially as he seemed oblivious to the danger of the situation.

He pulled me up over the edge, back onto the balcony, and looked puzzled at the expression on my face, and my tears. He began teasing me for crying. He was still laughing, and looked absolutely shocked at my reaction. My mother was standing near the open door of the patio, but said nothing. She had a distant, faraway look.  She never said anything. To me or to him.

As if to prove it was all in fun, my father scooped me up again and again, repeating the same steps, holding me over the railing longer and longer. I scraped the back of my heels against the peeling, painted concrete, trying to somehow climb backwards onto the safety of the balcony. I looked down and tried to will the pool to move underneath where I was hanging, instead of the patches of grass and sidewalk that were directly below me. I felt his grip slipping a few times, and I was terrified he was going to drop me, let me slip away.

Each time I was finally back safe in the room, I was a wreck, and crying loudly for my mother to make him stop—pleading with him-- telling him he was scaring me. In his drunken haze, he was just more confused. In my mother’s life-saving veil of denial, she couldn’t be in that room. She was there, but not there. It wasn’t happening.

Those last two sentences did not come easily to me. Over the years, I remembered that episode in my life with so much bitterness. I remembered a drunken, uncaring man who saw his little girl terrified and wanted to keep scaring her. I saw a mother in that room who didn’t care and did nothing. Those statements are both true and untrue. There is reality and then there is the whole picture.

As it is with all occurrences like this from my past, I have no one I can go to and say—“do you remember this? Can you tell me more about that day?” These things simply didn’t happen in the world my parents live in. My father, in truth, can’t remember a lot of things in his alcohol-soaked past. My mother may remember somewhere in her lost soul, but she can’t let herself.

All of this realization came after years of therapy, and in particular, one night in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Washington DC. It has been over a decade now since I sat in the floor of the self-help aisle in that bookstore and pulled book after book off the shelf about living with an alcoholic parent. At that point, I wanted to understand my father more, I was trying to solve the mystery of it all. I had just started admitting the reality of my life to myself. I wanted to know how my father came to be this person, and what kind of person it was making me.

What I found instead was words on a page that described my mother in such intricate and perfect detail that I was frozen in that spot. Her denial, her absolute inability to look back and help me piece things together. Over the years, I had tried desperately to shake answers from her, questioning her, reminding her of dates, holidays, what I was wearing on a particular night—trying to jog her memory to give me the answers to all the whys I had for so many incidents. She would reply with a blank stare, a confused expression, and finally exasperation that I was “misremembering” or worse, making up things.

It had haunted me. Was I crazy?

Did I imagine these nights, these outbursts?

No, I hadn’t. And as I read the words through my tears that night at Barnes & Noble, I knew that what I was reading was true. No one could write about what I was living with such accuracy unless it was happening to others, unless it was real, unless one thing led to another. My father was an alcoholic, my mother was a typical spouse of an alcoholic. I was also on my way to becoming a statistic. Depression was ruling my life at that point, I had broken down more than a few times. I had been in therapy, but I hadn’t been honest. Secrets were a way of life in our house, and they were kept with an unspoken promise. I hadn’t told anyone the truth of my life, the truth of it all. The main reason I hadn’t was that I felt I was somehow the reason for it all. I had always felt that way. I felt if I had been a better child, a better daughter, my father wouldn’t be the way he was, and my mother wouldn’t be the way she was. If only I had been better, our lives would have been different.

That night in the bookstore was a turning point for me. Many more years of therapy, truth telling, and realizations lay ahead of me. If I had known how many, I might not have kept going. It was a long road from there to here, just to understand days like the one in that hotel. And I do understand it, I do. But it still haunts me.

Tonight it hit me that I have so much uncertainty in my life right now, and I feel so out of control. Maybe the reason this dream has visited me the last few nights is that feeling of being out of control was so present in that moment. Maybe it is one of the first times I remember feeling that way. Maybe the two are connected.

Maybe not.

In my dream, all the details of that day are the same except the end. In my dream, he loses his grip, and I am falling and falling…it seems like forever. And just before I hit the ground, I wake up, gasping for air.

A part of me wishes I could remember where it all happened so I could go to that hotel, find that exact room, and step out on that balcony. I want to look over the railing and sigh with relief that it was only a floor or two up, not a long drop at all. I want to realize that he hadn’t put me in as much danger as I thought, that I was just being a child, being scared, seeing things as worse than they were in my mind. He didn’t nearly let me slip away. I always wonder if that would put this memory to rest once and for all.

But like so many things in my past, so many similar memories, I won’t get that type of closure. I would likely get something worse- that it was all just as I remember it, just as scary, just as bad.

I would just be chasing memories, going in circles, getting nowhere. There is nothing deeper in that ten minutes than what I know it to be. I believe I am at peace with that, but for whatever reason, that day still has a hold on me.

And I will be here, waiting, until it lets me go.

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