Movies I Watch on Repeat II: Recovery Edition

This one needs a little more 'splaining, Lucy, because it took me a while to understand exactly why I was so drawn to these movies.  I've never been in rehab.  I don't think I've ever been addicted to anything illegal.  But I've longed for escape, escape from the pain and fear that were instilled by my family from childhood, and I get it.  I understand what it's like to never want to feel like that again, to not care what you have to do to avoid it.  I've chosen to stay in relationships just so I would feel loved --- even though I was being abused on a daily basis, I would have done anything to avoid being alone, to avoid hearing that voice in my head:  No one will ever love you.  Where does that fall on the irony meter:  A women's studies major in an abusive relationship?  You have to laugh!  You have to laugh or it swallows you whole.  So I smile now, because it's ridiculous, and it's been decades now.  I know now that I'm not unlovable.  I know that because I love myself.  I don't need anyone else to do it for me.

All that to say, I know what that feels like, to do anything at all not to feel.  Before I pinned that down (through a whole lot of self-reflection and counseling and work, yes I say that a lot, WORK), I just knew that I loved these movies.  They spoke to me on a cellular level.  So here's the list, and again, I'll keep the spoilers as light as I can.

Drunks
This movie is split into two separate plotlines, centering around an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.  The main character Jim, played by Richard Lewis, is a recovering addict, who is setting up for the meeting.  He's something of an example for the rest of the attendees, but halfway through the meeting he bolts, and immediately starts drinking his way through the night, moving through progressively harder drugs.  This is intercut with footage of the stories told at the meeting by the attendees about their lives and how they got to this point in their lives. 

I watch this one about once every six months.  Jim's descent into complete horrifying drugged stupor is pretty intense.  The other stories are pretty awful, but I get a lot from their self-reflection and how they realized or were forced to realize how far they had fallen over the edge.

I have a Demotivational postcard someone gave me as a joke at work that says, "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others."  In some ways, that's how I feel about these movies.  If I don't do the work, if I don't watch my motivations and make sure that I'm not lying to myself about why I do the things I do, I could easily slip down that rabbit hole and disappear.  I know it could happen.  If I want to be who I'm meant to be, I have to be careful.  I have to be vigilant.  That's part of the attraction.

It's also what I always hoped my mother would do.  I can see her in these stories.  I know what her home life was like growing up.  I know how she was treated.  I can see it in how she treated me, in how she acted, in her behavior every moment I was growing up.  And she knew I could see it, and she hated me for it.  Nobody likes the truthtellers.  (That's another blog post altogether.)  And I always hoped she would realize how her background affected her, and try to do better than that.

But she didn't.  She chose as her mother did.  Wall it up, and move on.  She never dealt with the past, left it in a huge mess in a room in her mind, to fester and leak out into her dealings with her family every day.  She didn't realize it, but it poisoned everything around her.  Including me.  As William Faulkner said, "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."

Rating:  20 viewings, but a big impact.

28 Days
Not to be confused with 28 Days Later (an excellent zombie film), this film centers around Gwen, played by Sandra Bullock, a trainwreck of a woman.  In the first few minutes, she shows up wasted and an hour late to her sister Lily's wedding, stumbles through the ceremony, at the reception dances directly into the wedding cake, then steals a limo to go find another cake, crashing the car into a house. 

Like I said, trainwreck.

After being placed into rehab for 28 Days (hence the title) in lieu of jail time, she proceeds to judge everyone and everything around her, correcting pronunciation, rolling her eyes at the chanting of the serenity prayer, refusing to participate in anything, and trying to find drugs immediately.  Her boyfriend visits and slips her some drugs, she uses, and her counselor sets up a transfer to jail.  Still in denial, she insists that she could stop using if she wanted to, saying she's a writer and they all drink, she likes to have a good time, she's not an addict, that's for those other people.  Out of stubbornness, she throws the drugs out the window, then tries to shimmy down a tree to get to them.  After injuring herself, she realizes the extent of her addiction and breaks down. 

The rest of the movie involves her journey as she throws herself into treatment, participating in everything, trying to gain back everyone's trust, and reaching out to Lily for help in talking about family issues.  One of the scenes that will always, always bring me to tears is when Lily talks about wishing she had helped Gwen when they were younger.  Using her newly found knowledge from the program, Gwen says, "Well, I never asked for help, so."  Lily replies, "But you needed it, didn't you?" 

Everyone needs help in this world, at one time or another.  Of course I was raised to believe that I didn't deserve help, and so I couldn't ask for any because no one would help me.  You're reading this; you've probably already read something earlier so that's already a given.  But even if I did get the courage to actually ask for help, I faced a huge wall of resistance.  My mother would flip out, giving me all of the reasons that there WAS no help to give.  No money available, no time to do what I was asking for, no way that it could be done.  If it was something I valued, but it didn't line up with presenting to the world the image of her as a perfect mother, it just couldn't happen.  Impossible.

So I learned.  I learned not to ask, that help didn't exist.  And I worked around that void for decades. 

I had to start small, and ask for little things before I could believe that it would work.  Any setback was a huge setback, and I had to start from zero many times.  But eventually I was able to ask for help without feeling like a huge imposition, like I was asking too much, taking up too much space, being greedy when I should be giving instead of taking. 

One of my friends said something a long time ago that reframed the situation for me.  She asked me if I liked helping people, and how it made me feel.  I said I loved helping people, and it made me feel good, and useful, and like I was needed.  She said, why would you want to keep someone else from feeling that way?  Wouldn't you want to allow someone else the pleasure of feeling that way if you had the chance? 

Digression again.  That's just one of the pieces of this movie that meant so much to me.  Watching these characters deal with their past, and learn from their mistakes helped me figure out how to do that myself.

Rating:  300 viewings, at least.  I could probably recite this one, easily. 

I don't know that I'll ever fully recover from the childhood I had.  I'll probably always be in recovery.  But these movies gave me hope that I wouldn't have to use food or books or other people to hide from my feelings about my past forever.  Instead, I could move through my feelings and step up into a new life, one where I could acknowledge where I came from, but live as myself without letting my past dictate who I would become.

Movies I Watch on Repeat: Dysfunctional Family Edition

Stories have always helped me survive:  books, comics, music, TV and movies.  When I became financially stable, I immediately invested in a VCR and cable, and started recording movies at a prodigious pace.  Back then I knew something was wrong with either me or my family, but I didn't know what, and I didn't know what to do about it.  But even then, I was drawn to certain kinds of stories, and I'd watch these movies over and over.  


I'll be posting about Truth Tellers and Recovery movies in upcoming posts, but for now, here are my favorite Dysfunctional Family movies.  (There may be some spoilers, but I'll try to keep them light.)

Drop Dead Fred
This looks like a light-hearted comedy at first, and it's chock full of slapstick cartoonish humor.  Phoebe Cates plays a young woman whose childhood imaginary friend shows up in the flesh and starts causing havoc in her life.  Rik Mayall is hilarious as the imaginary friend, and it's easy to get caught up in the humor of it all.  But the more we learn about her relationships with her mother, her husband, and herself, the more we understand how much she needs her friend and the gorgeous mess Fred makes of everything around her.  It's probably a stretch to characterize him as destructive as the Indian goddess Kali, but he's at least on the same family tree.  Sometimes the only way to grow something new is to burn it all down.  That's something I've needed to use more than once in my life, and I've watched this movie dozens of times to help me relearn it. 

The movie's accurate depiction of a narcissistic mother's relationship with their daughter is really accurate, creepily so.  Of course your mileage may vary and all that, but obsession with appearances?  Check.  Use of guilt as a lever?  Check.  Threaten with loss of only valued possession?  Check.  Passive aggressive blaming?  Check and mate!  So many red flags you could build a factory around them.  Showing these so clearly was massively illuminating to me.  Life is never this clear, but it always helps to have an example to draw from. 

My rating:  About 60 viewings

Ordinary People 
Ah, the gold standard for That Movie about a Narcissistic Mother, or, Isn't She Mean and a Horrible Mom.  I love this movie, I really do.  There's not too much to say that hasn't been said, but I love the accurate picture of therapy - the frustration, the annoyance, the focus on self, the desire for a quick fix that will make everything better.  Conrad's eventual acceptance of himself and his mother for who they are, not who he wishes they could be, is hopeful, and his dad's acknowledgement at the end is so powerful for those of us who never had that privilege.  

My rating:  Probably 30 viewings

Bed of Roses 
My goodness, this was a surprise for me (and please ignore the inaccurate framing - This is not a romantic comedy, end of story).  I think I picked up this dvd because it was a double-set with Pump Up the Volume, and watched it when I had nothing else to watch.  Mary Stuart Masterson plays Lisa, a successful businesswoman with exactly one friend, a no-strings boyfriend, and no life except for work.  She receives a present out of the blue and meets a wonderful guy who sweeps her off of her feet, except she doesn't understand how that could happen to her.  We learn through her reactions how damaged she is, and it doesn't help that her new guy is moving too quickly.  So many children of narcissists don't understand what it's like to be in a normal relationship; we flinch at every loud noise, we apologize every time there's a misunderstanding, we leave the room at the whisper of a conflict.  

At the same time, we don't understand niceness.  If someone's nice to us, it's a trick, they must want something from us.  If we're not being trapped or used in some way - for money, or sex, or something - we don't know how to handle it.  If there isn't a blow-up or a passive aggressive manipulation happening, we're suspicious.  Lisa's reaction to a normal family Christmas says it all; everyone's so nice and welcoming, the house is so full of people she doesn't know, they're all hugging and talking and laughing, and you can see her flinching at every noise and getting more tense with every moment that passes.  People think that when you step out of an abusive situation, you're cured.  You'll suddenly feel better, like the fever has broken, and you're ready to act like everybody else.  It's not that easy.  You have to relearn basic human interactions, or, if you were raised wrong, learn them for the very first time.  This takes a lot of hard, frustrating work, and this movie gets it right.  

My rating:  40 viewings, at least

Ulee's Gold
I caught this in our independent theater when it came out in 1997, and I went back that same week twice more.  Peter Fonda plays Ulee, a beekeeper whose son is in prison for a robbery.  When Ulee gets a phone call from his son's partners in crime, he has to jump through hoops to rescue his daughter-in-law and keep them at bay, all while taking care of his two granddaughters and tending his bees.  At the same time, he's coming face to face with his failings as a father and grandfather, and trying to change how he approaches his family to close the gaps he's created between them.  

I can't tell you how amazing it is for me to watch someone look deeply at their life, acknowledge the mistakes they've made, and attempt to change their behavior based on that knowledge.  It's something that children of narcissists rarely get to see, nigh onto a unicorn.  

My rating:  This is becoming meaningless, because I have watched them all SO MANY TIMES.  But probably 40.  

Oh my gosh I'm looking at my handwritten list and I didn't even include

MURIEL'S WEDDING
I guess it was just too obvious.  I'll do the rating first.  This one's not meaningless.

My rating:  500 viewings.  And I'm not kidding.  

Where do I begin?  There's so many scenes I could dissect.  Just a few:

• Muriel tries to gain her father's respect by getting a job interview.  Her father completely negates her accomplishment.  (The first time I brought poetry home that I had written, I was completely excited.  Writing was something I could do!  I showed my mom, and she frowned at me, and said, I guess that's okay, but you need to clean up your room.)
• Muriel escapes into her room and her music and her mirror, dreaming of a time when she'll be the chosen one.  (I've been there, completely dissociating from the real world by dreaming of a new boy walking onto the school bus and sitting with me, choosing me, not anyone else.) . 
• Muriel's "friends" make fun of her clothes and her music, and tell her flat-out that they don't want her to hang out with them anymore.  (My best friend one summer was suddenly my second-best bully in school that fall.)
• And that's just the first fifteen minutes or so.  Whew!

Muriel gets what she wants.  She gains the notoriety and respect from the popular crowd.  But then she suffers a real loss, and she learns what that notoriety and respect cost her.  She grows.  She changes.  She becomes more herself, and stands up to her father, who is forced to realize what he's done.  

Again, I saw this three times in the theater.  I wore out the videotape.  I have the dvd.  This movie has sustained me in some really dark times.  She did it; she got out, she built a new life, she changed who she was and apologized for what she'd done wrong.  She figured out what really mattered to her and became stronger for her experiences.

I watched all of these movies over and over, just hoping that I could, too.

"Why Do You Want to Rehash the Past?" Three Reactions to My Process

I've done a lot of work to get to where I am today.  I'm not done.  I'm not done.  I'm not done, and I don't expect to ever be done.  I'm still angry sometimes.  I'm still sad sometimes.  I'm still working and working and working on building myself back into the person I was always meant to be.  I'll never have that happy childhood that others had; I'll never have that secure base John Bowlby talks about, and I've got a lock on a lot of the horrible stuff Alice Miller talks about in her books.  I've accepted that, and I go to counseling twice a month, and I write and I read and I process and clearly I've hashed a lot of it out because I can write about some of these experiences without devolving into white hot rage the way I used to all the time.

And I can talk about them with other people, people who have had similar experiences.  Talking is how I process, so this is really helpful to me.  I also process through writing, which is one reason this blog is so helpful to me.  I'm also writing to tell the truth to other people, and help in any way I can.  If someone else reads these words and feels less alone, I've done my job and served my purpose in this plane of existence as I see it.  But it also helps me to make sense of what I've been through.

I've had varying reactions when I talk about my family with people I know, and it's interesting to me how they play out.  Most of these people have had issues with their parents, but I also noticed it when I've talked about difficult interactions with almost anyone.  Let me be clear, I am not judging here.  I know everyone has different ways of handling these issues.  But I do find it fascinating how different people handle these difficult subjects.  Here are the main reactions I've seen:

Type A:  This person does not want to talk about it.  Period, full stop, end of conversation.  I get the feeling that these folks are just unwilling or unable to self-reflect at all.  Sometimes they've been damaged by others and refuse to think about themselves at all, sometimes they are self-medicating to the point of self-abuse, sometimes they don't want to feel anything ever again.  It's tough to get deeper than the next five minutes, and easy to see that you'll never make any headway with them.  Glossing over is probably a really good summary, because they don't seem to have heard anything you've said.  

Type B:  This person is okay with you talking about it at first, but they get progressively uncomfortable the more you talk about it, or as they talk about their history.  "Isn't this just dredging up old memories?"  "Doesn't this hurt when you think about all the old feelings of the past?"  When I asked one of these folks about what was making them uncomfortable, she said that she felt like she was back in the situation, and she was feeling the emotions that she felt back then.  She was getting angrier and angrier every moment that she talked about it.  I'm not a counselor, but I asked her if she could separate herself from that moment in time, and see her parent's ridiculous motivations through today's perspective, with the knowledge she has now.  That seemed to help her and she's been easier about talking with me since then.  But another woman has stuck in this same stage and unless she initiates the conversation, I steer clear of the topic out of respect for her.  

Type C:  This is my style, where delving in and really processing with someone else helps immensely.  It makes things clearer for me, it defines terms, it makes things go deeper and opens them up to the fresh air.  Talking to someone and exchanging ideas is a creative process, and you learn so much from the other person's perspective.  

Everyone has their own way of processing, and far be it from me to prescribe the One True Way of dealing with stress and trauma.  I'm always interested in how different people process things, and it'll be interesting to see if there are more categories as time goes on.

Broken Friends and Judgement

Growing up, most of my friends were broken, or at least a little bruised around the edges.

I don't mean that as a value judgement; I was really broken myself.  But it was more hidden for me than for most of my friends.  They had divorced parents, or had suffered trauma.  One of my friends from camp was a foster kid, in and out of different homes in the big city.  I could barely imagine her life, let alone relate.  

E was being abused by her dad.

T was traumatized by a sexual assault and later withdrawn from school entirely.

My friend D lived far away, and was severely abused by her family, and later diagnosed with multiple personalities.  

B, the previously mentioned foster kid, had grown up way too fast, and was having sex with her much older boyfriend at fifteen.  

A's mom was much like mine:  narcissistic, controlling, angry all the time.  

These aren't value judgements.  I loved my friends, even if they were only my friends for a little while, or off and on.  Most of the time it was distance that kept us apart.  Sometimes they would become friends with someone closer, and I would slowly be phased out of their world.  Other times, they would form an alliance against me, and use my confidences to make fun of me and gain currency with their newfound friend.  

But my family looked perfect to them.  My parents were high school sweethearts, and had been married for almost twenty years.  I'd lived in the same house since I was nine.  Both of my parents worked, and we had more than enough income to live on.  I had pets and siblings and played sports and was in advanced classes.  More than one friend straight up said as much to me:  You've got it made!

It was something I'd thought about myself.  Why did I gravitate toward these types of friends?  

Now I know.  Instinctively, I knew that I was just like them.  I knew my family was broken, and that I could only seek refuge with other broken kids.  I knew that I would only find comfort with other people who would understand what I was going through, who felt my pain and anguish, who would understand what I was saying when I said, I have to get OUT.

I was crying out to the wilderness that no one understood me, that high school was awful, that my parents just didn't understand, and they heard me.  But even I didn't know the full scope of the problem.  I didn't know that parents were supposed to help you, they were supposed to lift you up, they were supposed to listen.  

To this day, when I watch a tv show, or even a commercial where a parent is truly parenting their child, sometimes I start crying.  I don't know what that's like.  I know what it's like to want that.  I know what I wanted when I was a child, and I've done a lot of work to give myself that feeling from within.  But if I'm in a good space, and my husband [who shares similar familial issues] is watching with me, I usually turn to him and say, "Hey, is that what real parents are like?"  He just laughs and says, "Huh!  I wouldn't know, but that's what I've heard."  And we laugh.  

Because making him laugh makes me feel better.  And it's funny because it's true.  

Not all of my friends in high school were broken.  Those that had good parents and happy childhoods were worshipped, wide-eyed, and studied like rarities.  Sometimes I felt like I was on uneven ground with them, as they just walked in the world not flinching or expecting bad things to happen at any moment.  I had a few boyfriends like this who I dropped with no real explanation, because I couldn't understand why they were with me, a clearly broken person who didn't deserve them.  (If you're reading this, sorry!)  

But the thing that makes me angriest about my lovely, complicated friends is how my mom reacted to them, and what she would say to me later.  I'm gonna have to bullet this because otherwise I'm going to type so angrily that nothing will extinguish the flames from my computer.  Deep breath here.

• My mother will never self-examine enough to understand her own motivations.  I'm doing more work here to understand her than she will ever do.
• She wanted to keep me isolated and dependent on her for everything, to keep me all to herself.
• She was constantly projecting all of her insecurities on me and everyone else.  Everything she didn't like in herself, she projected into someone else and criticized them for it.
• Any time I had friends over, she had to treat me like a beloved daughter to preserve her public image as a doting mother.  To put it mildly, this was not something she liked to do.
• She enjoyed putting me down, and this was just one more way to do it.
• Any time she had to treat me like a beloved daughter in front of other people, as soon as no one else was around, she would immediately cut me down so I wouldn't get too big for my britches.  That's a direct quote.

So.  Once my friend left, I would get an earful.  "You sure do know how to pick 'em."  "She isn't very smart, is she?"  "I don't like the way she does her hair.  Doesn't her mother care about how she looks?"  "That friend of yours is weird.  Why does she dress that way?"  "Is her mother divorced?  Well, I guess she can't help how she's being raised, but still.  She could have been more polite."  

When my friend B came to visit, my bedroom door latch had been broken for months (why bother fixing it just for me?).  The door accidentally closed on her, and she had to climb out on the roof to ask someone to come and let her out.  For months, I heard about the "Fiddler on the Roof" and how weird she was.  During that same visit, our septic tank clogged, and I had to spend two days digging out the septic tank because my parents both had bad backs and they couldn't be bothered hiring someone to dig it out.  Instead, their fourteen year old daughter was tasked with using a shovel to dig a hole in the ground five feet deep, eight feet long, and five feet wide.  But yeah.  My friend was the weird one.  

These days, I still gravitate toward the people I think are different in some way.  I can feel it in how they act, and sometimes we talk about our experiences.  I'm not often wrong about it; it's a wistful type of radar, but one I'm glad to have.  It's nice to know who will understand where you come from, and what you really mean when you say, "I couldn't stay in touch with them anymore.  I had to get out."

Starving to Be Seen; or Why I Can't Walk Away From a Good Conversation

Let's talk patterns.

I went to summer camp after ninth grade, one of the few things my parents paid for without question, probably just to get rid of me for ten days.  It was transformative; I made friends immediately, and after camp, I wrote long letters to at least fifteen girls.  Only four or five wrote back, and only one continued writing through the rest of the school year. 

At my high school, I had a small group of core friends, but I never fit in to the larger class, and even those friends didn't seek me out very often; I was someone they hung out with if no one else was around.  I would ask them to go places, or if they needed a ride.  I was always more enthusiastic than anyone else about doing something together.  

Every year, there would be someone new at school, and I would make friends and get to know them.  For the first month or so, we'd be inseparable - Ali, Chris, Cynthia, the list goes on.  Then they'd find their place in the school and I'd see them occasionally, but really the friendship was over.  They'd found their real friends and didn't need me anymore.  

In 10th grade, I was a page for our state's legislature, and for a week, I was dropped into a cross-section of teenagers from across the state.  After the week was over, I wrote letters to  about ten of them.  Most of them didn't write back.  One boy did, and I built an entire imaginary relationship with him until I received a letter where he boasted about vandalizing mailboxes and I realized he wasn't the person I'd imagined.

When I started college, I loved the intellectual, late night conversations that usually started over coffee and sometimes cigarettes, discussing philosophy, literature, politics, whatever, and led to talking about personal ideas and histories.  Full disclosure:  These were (usually) guys who I (usually) ended up sleeping with.  Looking back, that was probably their objective, but I was a pretty easy target in those days.

In my twenties, in the infancy of the internet, I placed a personals ad on yahoo online and emailed with a number of guys on and off for about a year.  Chad held my attention; he was smart, funny, and thoughtful.  He was careful about his feelings, having lost his fiance to an illness two years before.  I respected that, but a few months later I had a road trip planned to his city, and I wanted to meet him.  He demurred, and I couldn't understand why; it didn't make any sense to me.  We never emailed again.

I could tell more stories, but I think you've probably got it by now.  I can't let go.  For years I thought it was my failing --- why was I so different from other people?  Why did I hold on so tight to people who really didn't value me?  Why didn't I know that normal people didn't care about me as much as I cared about them?  Why was I so broken?

It took a long time for me to put the pieces together.  I was asked a question by my counselor:  "Wasn't there anyone in your life when you were young who reflected you back to you, who really saw who you were?"  I had to stop and think about that, think about my past and all the years growing up in my parents' house, all the years of bullying at school, all the teachers and classmates and babysitters and hairdressers and ----   

You can see I'm digging pretty deep here.  And coming up empty.

My mom saw only competition.  A reflection of her faults.  Someone to blame.  Someone to hate and abuse.  

My dad saw someone to keep in line.  A source of labor to be cultivated.  A threat to my mom.  

Both of them were highly motivated to keep me from seeing my strength, my power, my abilities for what they were.  If I knew who I was and what I could do, I could get away, and they wouldn't be able to blame me for their problems anymore.  They would have no outlet for their bad feelings, their abuse.  

Now it's clear to me, clear as day.  My whole life, I was literally starving for connection.  I was dying for someone to see me.  Of course I wrote letters to anyone I met who showed me any kindness!  Of course I created whole relationships out of thin air just to pretend that I was connecting with someone, anyone at all.  I was dying inside, shriveling up, shouting and pounding on the walls from inside a hollowed out tree, staring from behind my own eyes as person after person looked at me and saw nothing but what they could get from me, what they could use me for, what they wanted to see.    

I know now that I wasn't broken; I couldn't have been more wrong in how I posed the question.  Why did I hold on so tight?  I was holding on to keep myself alive, to keep from dying until I found someone else to talk to, to squeeze out the last bit of food before I starved to death.

These days I know I have connections with others who see me --- maybe not many, but a core group who accept and like me because, not in spite of who I am.  I will always have a hard time handling that stomach-dropping situation when you realize you like them more than they like you, but that's part of life.  It's just lovely to know that there's a conversation just around the corner, and I can have a snack whenever I want.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Around 2000, I decided things weren't working for me.  There were a lot of pieces to this, including an underpaid, frustrating job leading nowhere, a town with few eligible men, and, at the core, an optimism that somewhere, someone would value me more than where I was.  I needed a change, I kept telling myself.  Somewhere else would be better.  I wanted to try new things.  I wanted things to be different.  I wanted ME to be different.

The picture in my head was amazing.  I would put all of my stuff into storage, and keep a home base at my parent's house.  Without rent stealing all of my money, I would make my savings last a really long time, and I would visit all of my relatives and friends up and down the West Coast, going where I wanted when I wanted.  I was sure I could pick up work here and there to make ends meet, and get a temp job if I needed to.  I didn't need a normal life.  I could check out and do what I wanted instead of being like everybody else.

When I think about the picture I had in my mind, it feels like the road trips I used to take during the summers in college.  My friends or boyfriends would drive with me across the state to visit or go to a far away concert in the boonies or hit every thrift shop in a hundred-mile radius.  We'd pool our coin jars and make snacks for the road and drive all night playing mix tapes all the way.  It was warm and summer and we were free to do what we wanted.

To be honest, I also wanted another chance to have actual parents.  I thought that maybe now that I was a grown-up, I wouldn't disappoint them as much as I did when I was a little kid.  I knew more, I was smarter, I could help them more.  Maybe they wouldn't hate me, and I could get to know them and they would like me.  I thought that if they just heard me, if we could talk more and I could explain better, they would see who I was and they would finally understand me.

You can imagine what's coming next, like a frickin' freight train.  Work and friends gave me a great going away party; I put my non-essential stuff in storage.  I moved into a room in my parent's house, and immediately launched on a road trip to visit my uncles a few hundred miles away.  And it began:  The visit was amazing, but my car decided to have an intermittent overheating defect during the trip.  After I got back, there were no more long trips in case it happened again, which eliminated most of my plans.  I wanted to bond with my parents, but they were gone most of the time doing their own things, leaving me alone in a house haunted by childhood trauma and hiding places.  I'd watch tv, get on the internet, read, then hang out when they got home.  I found myself zoning out a lot, killing time.  I started collecting mysteries by a couple of new-to-me authors from thrift stores and soon had about fifty books piled around my single bed from childhood, where I stayed most of the day.  I thought about trying to find a job, but the air in that house froze me up, and I couldn't even remember my plans, let alone figure out what grown-up me would have done.  

The word spiral barely covers it.  It only took two months to go from a fully functioning adult to completely depressed immovable pile of sludge.  I finally broke down sobbing when I got my renewal notice for my car tabs and didn't have the $70 to pay for them.  I'd been watching my checking account slowly disintegrate piece by piece, unable to figure out how to "just get a job" as I'd imagined before I'd landed in my hometown.  As usual, my mom was her understanding self.  "Well, I just don't know what you want!"  <deep sigh>  My despair was making her uncomfortable.  Thanks, Mom.  But I knew how to translate into her language.  "Mom, I just need enough to cover the tabs.  I'm going to look for a job back in Bellingham."  "Well, I can give you enough for the tabs and some gas.  I think it's a good idea for you to get a job.  I just don't know why you had to quit the old one!"  Yep.  Why doncha pour just a little more salt on that one, Mom.  I held my tongue, took the money, and got out.  

I moved into a spare room in a friend's apartment and stayed with them for a couple of months until I unfroze a little.  I eventually got another job, apartment, and my life back together.  I felt like I'd been through a fire of some sort, burned it down to rebuild; I was furious when I realized some people hadn't even realized I'd been gone; hadn't missed me around town.  It still feels like it was a hell of a lot longer than two months.

I'm sure my parents still don't understand what I was doing there.  I wanted to connect with them in a way that I never had been able to before, that I'll never be able to.  I wanted to know them as human beings, as people.  I wanted them to see me as something other than the Role Of Daughter Will Be Played By....

I wanted to be seen.

When I finally realized they would never be the ones to see me, I was able to move on with my life and stop looking back.