Get back to being right with the revolution.
I asked her name. He told me. She was somebody I knew. I asked if I could come back after Thanksgiving with my mom. He said if I got right, I could. He said that my leaving to see my family had been a mistake, and I would have to make amends for it.
“You can’t do this to her,” I said. “She’s just a kid. She doesn’t know she’s giving up her whole life.”
She was the same age I had been, eight years before. I was a wizened old woman of twenty-seven.
“Come back,” he said. “Forget about your mother. We can talk. That other girl doesn’t have to be involved.”
My mom, who I had not seen in four years because of Joshua, was dying. I reminded him of that. He reminded me that if I were a good revolutionary, that wouldn’t matter. “Anyway, remember what her husband did to you.”
How could I forget?
I have since, largely, forgotten.
He hung up. I remember thinking, very clearly, he’ll use her up the same way he used up me.
I wish I could say that thought is the thing that motivated me. I wish I could say that was the last time I ever talked to him.
I sat there and cried for another hour, until I had to get up to make my connection. Nobody bothered me. People cry in airports so often, it’s not much of a spectacle. These days they cry and shout into their cellphones just about anywhere. Back then, the crying and shouting were more localized.
Halfway to the gate, I stopped. I walked back to the phones. The young woman he’d replaced me with was a sophomore. Nineteen years old. I knew her name and where she came from.
I called her family.
“You daughter joined a cult in college,” I told them. “You need to get her home.”
I hung up. I ran for my gate.
I just barely made my plane.
We have this idea that healing comes as an epiphany.
We have it in part because epiphanies are narratively convenient. They’re tidy for a storyteller; there’s a break point, a moment when everything changes. An identifiable narrative beat. A point at which everything before is one way, and everything after is different. They’re satisfying. They provide catharsis and closure.
Frustratingly, in real life, you often have to go back and have the same epiphany over and over again, incrementally, improving a tiny bit each time. Frustrating for you. Frustrating for your loved ones.
It would be nicer if you could just have that single crystallizing incident, live through it, and get on with being a better human being who was better at humaning.
It’s comforting to the afflicted to think we only have to make one change, and we can better. Boom, all at once. Wouldn’t it be nice if roleplaying or primal scream therapy or rebirthing therapy or a hot uninhibited fuck or a midnight confession or a juice cleanse or a confessional essay or a cathartic piece of fiction really could heal all the old damage just like that? In one swoop? Wouldn’t it be nice?
Sure.
Of course it’s nonsense, like so many other narratively convenient things we learn about from stories. But like so many of the things we learn about from stories, it’s useful nonsense.
And epiphany isn’t going to fix us. Maybe nothing is going to fix us. But recognizing the damage might help us route around it. Which isn’t nothing, you know?
The truth is that you never get to stop dealing with the damage. You might get better at it. You might find a lot of workarounds and you might be happier—or even happy, inasmuch as happiness is a state and not a process!—but happiness doesn’t just happen. And it doesn’t happen instantly. But incrementally, with a lot of constant effort and focus.
I was small, and the people who should have taken care of me didn’t. In some cases, they didn’t take care of me because they were awful people. In some cases, they didn’t take care of me because they had their own shit going on.
I get that. I have spent most of my life with my own shit going on, after all.
One of the things with having your own shit going on is that, first, it blinds you to other people’s problems. It’s hard to have empathy and remember that, as the saying goes, everyone you meet is fighting a great battle when your attention is all taken up by being on fire right now. It’s hard to find the energy to be calm and kind and to consider the divergence of experience of others when you’re exhausted and trying to keep your own head above the waves and you’re swallowing salt water and you have no idea where you are going to find the energy to keep kicking.
Another thing about having your own shit going on is that until you get some perspective on it, that shit feels enormous. Like the center of the universe. And it kind of is, in that nobody who is excavating a pile of trauma like that has the energy for anything else except shoveling. But it becomes so all-consuming that it’s easy to forget that you—and your trauma—are not the only thing on anybody else’s mind, or even the most important one, because they’re all really busy thinking about their own shovels.
They have their own shit, their own trauma and crisesdeadlines-taxeshealthproblemssoreteethfamilydramatoxicneighbors you name it eating up the lion’s share of their own attention. And that’s fine, is the thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. Your problems are your problems, and their problems are their problems, and that’s the way it’s actually supposed to be.
But when you’re dealing with that much trauma, and it’s that raw, boundaries are another thing you wind up sucking at.
Recovery, I guess I’m trying to say, makes narcissists of us all.
So when I’m freaking out now about what people think about me or what they think is going on with me I remind myself… I don’t merit more than a passing consideration in most people I encounter’s day. They just don’t think that hard about me.
Thank God.
People got their own problems.
I certainly got more than enough of mine.
I saw her once more, even though I never planned to go back to Chicago. She came out to see me after her parents let her out of the treatment program they’d had her committed to.
She came to my mother’s house, where I was living. Working temp jobs. Never staying longer than a week because after a week, people start to loop you into the politics and then they expect you to get involved. I was in therapy, because my dying mother made me.
Biggest favor she ever did me, in hindsight.
She stood in the doorway looking at me when I answered, framed in the greens of the yard. She studied my face. We were both a little better-fed than we had been.
And then she said to me, “I don’t think you can fully appreciate how much I hate you.”
I smiled as if she had accepted my offer of tea. “Oh,” I said, feeling the swell of self-loathing in me like a rising magma dome, “I think I can, most likely.”
Before I digressed, what I was pointing out was that it doesn’t happen fast, the changes. It happens slow. It’s an unpicking. The Gordian knot is more of a problem when you’re in a hurry and you don’t have any tools—assuming you want the string to be useful for something when you’re done unpicking it, which I’ve always thought was the problem with the Alexandrian solution.