I’ve become the adult I needed as a child.
Back in college, I was a huge fan of this new show called Grey’s Anatomy. Its lead character Meredith Grey spoke often of being dark and twisty, qualities I identified with but had trouble spotting in the glorified soft-lit medical soap opera. Oh, her parents divorced and she had abandonment issues? How quaint. I rolled my eyes as she pouted and attracted scores of dudes with nicknames like McDreamy and McSteamy.
Darkness
This piece isn’t meant to detail all of the horrible things that happened to me, but suffice it to say I experienced my first trauma as a child younger than my daughter, and it was sexually abusive. I did not have a childhood beyond that point.
I have the memories and my family has the photos, but I don’t think anyone who ever knew me described me as a happy child.
I’ve said it before, and even my mother described me as a “little adult” from birth. So let’s talk about mental health. To survive what happened to me, my childhood mind wrapped those memories up tight and tucked them away, so I could move forward. This was also made easier by the fact that my family moved around the same time, so I left the physicality of those memories behind.
I grew up in a new place, and filled up those spaces in my mind with new thoughts and memories, but there was always a lingering darkness. I was afraid of adult men almost my entire childhood but I couldn’t articulate that fear or name the reason for it. I also struggled with a simultaneous desire to be in the constant presence of adults, for safety.
My family teased me at gatherings for sitting in the corner of a room, reading a book and keeping to myself, rather than playing outside with the kids. I grew overwhelming anxieties for reasons I didn’t understand. Going to school every day gave me a stomachache. Watching the news and reading the paper gave me an ulcer. The world was a very bad, very scary place to me since the age of five and I didn’t know why. I couldn’t remember and I didn’t have the words.
Without the memories, or the words, I discerned that the world was a bad and scary place for me, because I was bad. I knew I was different from everyone else and I knew that it was bad. My siblings played happily, without care and seemed adept at socializing. I think I only turned out somewhat normal because I grew up in a very small community so the people around me from kindergarten to graduation remained stable and mostly the same, so I was able to form relationships around routine.
Suicide
The first time I grappled with suicide (there would be several) I was thirteen years old. The combination of my internal darkness and the awkwardness of puberty turned lethal. By this time I had begun actively repressing things that were hard or scary. I learned that through a combination of repeating phrases in my head with exhausting physical strain I could banish thoughts. I’d fall asleep, after sobbing silently (a skill I taught myself young and has been quite handy as a young mother), repeating the phrase “You don’t feel. You don’t feel. You don’t feel. You don’t feel. You don’t feel…” until I truly couldn’t.
I filled journals with similar repetitious phrases.
Everything inside me was weird and broken and wrong.
The events leading up to my first suicide attempt came about due to another lethal combination: my internal darkness plus my devout religious beliefs plus peer pressure.
I learned that my parents’ union wasn’t a blessed partnership that had come together fatefully, but a hasty legally binding ceremony that only slightly validated my birth. I was the result of a shotgun wedding. This is absolutely not a big deal now. But back then most of my close friends had parents 20 years older than my own, which in retrospect did seem odd. And most of my friends were second, middle, or younger children in their families. My family life at the time was strained. My young mind and heart gathered up all of these factors and came to a singular conclusion.
I was the sole reason for everyone who I loved’s misery. Without me, my parents would have fulfilled their dreams individually and my siblings, well they’d have never been born. But maybe they’d have been born to a happy family, one better off than ours.
I had to go.
My attempt was unsuccessful, with further dampened the dark places in my mind. I was so bad, so wrong, I couldn’t even kill myself right.
Bullying Myself
I was able to hide my shaky mental state throughout high school through some sort of magic concoction of intelligence, cynical wit, and sheer busy-bodied ness. You would never have guessed how much I hated myself. I was involved in clubs, sports, volunteering, student legislation, leadership and I kept regular jobs. I told everyone my goal was to get out of that small town.
I just wanted to get away from myself.
University frightened the ever loving shit out of me to my core. But I’d created a hard persona, who wanted to be independent and was vaguely ambitious? The darkness pervading in my mind kept me from wanting anything truly for myself; I knew deep within myself that I was different and bad and that I didn’t deserve the life reserved for those special sort of people who seemed to have it all.
I knew it the way I believed I wasn’t really worthy of salvation, or to be someone’s wife or my worst nightmare — having to be someone’s mother. I could not stand to think about someone having to look up to someone as truly awful and lonely as me.
Through much of my young adulthood I was my own worst bully. This is a pattern of thinking that I’ve struggled to work through still.
This pattern of thinking looked something like this:
- I would decide what (or who) I wanted to be like
- I would participate in some action
- Mentally I would be terrified and paralyzed with anxiety and fear the entire time
- Even though I was terrified I would bully myself mentally throughout the action “A smarter/stronger/prettier/better Jenn would….”
- Afterward I would feel relieved that I had survived, or that was it over. Or overwhelming and debilitating shame.
- And then I’d criticize myself endless at every perceived failing during the action.
Very rarely in my young adulthood did I bully myself through any sort of “growing experience.”
I kept putting myself through experiences hoping for some sort of release but I ended up more often than not with more memories that needed active (and exhaustive) repression.
A Series of Traumas
I’ve written before about how I had stalkers in college and how was I was raped my freshman year. I’ve also mentioned a physically abusive relationship. What I haven’t addressed was my complete inability to handle male sexual attention. Being traumatized as a child about your sexuality, but not remembering why you are like that makes every sexual experience a dark and twisty one, right up in your face.
I’ve tried to be a proud, sex-positive, modern woman about my sexcapades but truthfully my history is more like magically hoping the next guy cured me of whatever was dark and wrong in my mind. In me.
ut it never worked, so afterward I had to deal with overwhelming embarrassment over this naivety about true love conquering all or some bullshit, and then just straight shame that I kept going through guy after guy.
I sexually traumatized myself in college trying to find something outside of me to fix what was broken inside of me.
That’s not to say that people weren’t available to help take advantage of me. There was a boyfriend I can confidently say raped me on several occasions. At the time I felt like the worst girlfriend on earth for not being attracted to him in those moments or for lacking some sort of sexual je ne sais quoi.
I dove head first into drugs and alcohol for the next few years. I participated in a lot of dumb, risky behaviors because why not? Everything was bad, including me and I was probably going to die young I was convinced.
On one spring break in Las Vegas, completely wasted, I stood on the balcony of an Imperial Palace hotel room I shared with friends and stared down at all the drunk people dancing to obnoxious pop music from the Harrah’s circus club thing. I wondered if any of them would even hear the thud of me falling. My friend came into the room and embarrassed, I quickly stepped down from the ledge.
Until I met my last boyfriend in college, there are entire chunks that are a blur of blackouts between class and work. Until I started missing class entirely. The ones that couldn’t keep me occupied at least. Any sort of working or workshop class I’d attend. But those auditorium sized lecture classes became a sort of torture forum for me.
As it turns out, the place I’d been banishing my thoughts to was starting to crack. If I wasn’t fucked up or distracted (like during a lecture) horrible thoughts would start to trickle in with no way for me to avoid them–and absolutely no way for me to process them. I regressed to a five year old and broke out sobbing like a lunatic in lectures a couple of times and that embarrassed me enough to never return.
I failed out of university after my first senior year.
The unraveling
What I didn’t understand about being traumatized a child, is that until the child has had a chance to process their trauma (usually with the help of an adult), they don’t grow. They definitely don’t move one forward in a healthy sense.
Every additional trauma I encountered thrust me into a mental place of the five year old girl. With no vocabulary or tools or knowledge to help herself.
That explains why, when faced with the volume and enormity of my emotional and sexual trauma load, I regressed to five year old Jenn and was paralyzed.
It’s important to understand that at this point in my adulthood I’d told very few people about my inner self and the traumas that had happened.
Well that’s not entirely true. I’d written an op-ed piece about being raped for the college newspaper when I was on staff, in a rage about the then editor-in-chief’s remarks during a meeting about girls lying about being raped to get away with being whores (paraphrased). I completely traumatized myself by doing that.
For long after that I was approached by either women, confessing their own traumatizing assault stories, or by men, apologizing to me about what had happened. One night, a group of dudes recognized me from my story (we printed photos with op-ed’s so my smiling face appeared next to my story…kind of bizarre in retrospect), and exclaimed, “YOU’RE THE RAPE GIRL! Let us buy you a drink!” Which I definitely took them up on that because I think it’s the only somewhat monetary reward I received from the experience.
Other than that I told friends some things but not everything. At the ordering of the university, I had to take summer school courses to get to good standing where I could (possibly) graduate the next year–AND I had to go to both academic and mental health counseling.
I was deeply ashamed of my failures, after all I was an intelligent and vaguely ambitious person who had authored many important pieces in the school newspaper and had very angsty LiveJournal with a decent following.
I used my shame as motivation and was able to buck up in school (graduating a year late) and participate the school’s other mandates. I became obsessed with my academic counselor and I told her everything. She is a goddess and I love her to this day. My mental health counselor was a meek piece of work. I mostly felt like she was getting some sort of sensitivity-porn-type high from me retelling (and reliving) my emotional and sexually traumatic experiences.
She was the “How does that make you feel?” type of counselor I felt like was about as useful as talking to a wall. Hmm, how do feelings make me feel, given that I’ve been using all of my internal strength to hide them from myself for oh, the past 16 or 17 years?
At least I said somethings out loud for the first time. But she made me very bitter on mental professionals as a whole for a very long time.
Oh, also, she encouraged me to join my university’s volunteer sexual assault response team. And me, being newly sort of motivated, and also an idiot, did it. And continued to re-traumatize myself for my last year of school by helping newly traumatized victims and exposing myself to their pain.
Pregnancy
Through a new start and earning my degree I managed to scrape together about a thimble full of self esteem and moved to Las Vegas with my sister to begin our adult lives.
That plan unraveled quickly and in no time at all I found myself alone (my parents and sister moved back to Washington state within a year), working a job I hated (retail) and pregnant by a much younger guy who was supposed to be a fling on my way to success.
Sorry if you thought I was always a badass mom to Mila, but our relationship started off with the darkest period of my life.
I resigned myself to the only fate I could imagine: surely I would die in labor. I couldn’t possibly raise a healthy human. I prayed my child would be a boy, and that he would be like his father and not tortured by darkness.
I prayed for a quick and painless death.
It’s not very popular to mourn your pending death while everyone around you is elated about the tiny life you’re bringing into the world so I tried, really unsuccessfully, to hide my misery. I took long walks, and filled pages of my journals up with doom and gloom and a lot of tear stains. I slept as much as I could. I tried to avoid talking about my baby at all costs, refusing to have any baby showers, for fear that any attention would reveal my nihilistic views.
I didn’t understand how this could happen to me.
Okay, confession time. I did relish the sort of perverse sense of fear I spread through the young mothers in my birthing class. The instructor asked me to stop asking so many questions about death because it was “too distracting” and “scaring the other mothers.”
Mysteriously, I survived. Just like women have been doing since the beginning of time. Although you’d think I’d be a prime candidate for postpartum depression, thankfully I was passed over for that condition.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m the most god awful person without sleep, and my daughter waited nine long months to sleep through the night. But other than that, I was blessed with a healthy, happy, adorable baby girl.
She was impossible not to love. I never figured myself a nurturing or motherly type, but I couldn’t not care for her. Maybe it was genetic, at least at first it probably was. As sleep returned, and sanity, my child awakened something in me that I had never experienced in my life: my own capacity for which I could love another person.
Typical parenting stuff, but it completely changed my world. I vowed that this brown eyed blob deserved the best fighting chance at life, and despite her parentage, I would do whatever it took to propel her forward.
The busy-ness of being a young mother (sheer exhaustion) kept the darkness away for a time.
Single parenting
A few years later when my relationship inevitably fell apart, I took it really hard.
On one hand, I felt a freedom I hadn’t felt in a long time. I could take my child back home to Washington where my friends and family lived, and pursue something different.
On the other hand, I felt I had already failed my child in the worst way possible — one half of her family structure and sense of stability was now missing. This failure to protect her sense of self and emotions tore a gaping hole through the core of me.
A perfect place for the darkness to regrow.
Against my better judgment, and trying to regain some semblance of a life, I began dating again. The first guy I dated post-domestic partnership was a Navy guy, who often sided with the overt sexist reasoning of my boss and the men in the culture I inhabited as a technical writer for a government contractor on a Department of Energy site. Complaining to him about work sucked. He made me feel like a silly blonde, a thing I knew I wasn’t. But he, he was a nuclear submarine pilot, and very impressed with himself. And bald.
When that was over, one of my close friends talked me into dating her ex-brother in law. Big mistake. HUGE. In that relationship my low self esteem tortured me for the first two years. I allowed someone to not be faithful, to treat me way less than I was worth, and to be wholly unavailable. Because I thought replacing the missing “good man” in my child’s life was more important than me wasting my life wishing for the mythic perfect partner.
Until I didn’t anymore.
A turning point
Working at &yet didn’t magically make me a better person. In fact, being hired at &yet turned me into the most insecure, anxious person I’ve ever been. Surrounded by talented and well-known people in an industry I respected but didn’t understand made for a mostly paralyzed Jenn.
My insecurities bled into everything I was doing at that point. The inside of my head was a cacophony of second guessing my every thought, every move. The nastiest voices criticized me mercilessly and wildly speculated as to what people thought of me, every aspect of me.
This team was one I respected and admired so intensely that the stakes felt high and the pressure I put on myself was keeping me from being effective at anything. I still kept a confessional and highly emotional blog, and after one particularly dejected post, my teammate and mentor Adam reached out to me. He offered to introduce to me to a counselor friend of his.
I remember a strange mix of feelings reading his message: embarrassment, relief, my past bitterness toward mental health counselors. I archived his message with eyes full of tears.
Some time passed and the thought that my child is basing what she understands about adults, and thus the world, on her experiences watching and learning from me, gnawed away at me.
I did not have basic tools to teach her.
What are you supposed to do in a fight? (I didn’t know because my parents didn’t fight in front of us.) What do good professional relationships look like? What do people mean by boundaries? What am I teaching her about the relationships I have in my life?
I’d become a responsible, clean, sober adult who cared for her physical needs, but I was clueless as to how I could help her become a good person, a solid adult.
I messaged Adam back.
Counseling and progress
I was skeptical about counselors but I trusted Adam. I say this with one hundred percent certainty — going to a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy trained professional saved my life.
My counselor started with the tough stuff: addressing the darkness, the trauma that had happened to me, the subsequent build up of feelings—without requesting the gritty details. She helped me realize that all along I have been a person with worth, deserving of love and respect.
Being a parent helped me to heal in that I was able to look back at my childhood self with the deep intensity of a mother’s love for a child, and tell myself from an adult place the things I needed to hear as a child.
Imagining my child, my greatest love, having to endure the things I did as a child, and as a young woman, broke me entirely on several occasions. But the heartbreak and the grieving were completely essential for my regrowth.
Addressing my trauma, validating my experiences, and giving me vocabulary and tools to deal with being triggered gave me a firm foundation on which to stand when dealing with feelings for the first time in my life.
I also found the empathy I needed to be able to forgive myself for a lot of things I felt warranted me a miserable existence. Forgiveness is the only way forward.
I had found my footing.
It took a lot of work, but I came to understand that I was not bad, wrong, or weird. Well, bad weird. I own being good weird.
That was half of the work. Situational depression (from which I regularly suffer) reared its ugly head during a dark period in the end of 2014 when I was being stalked. It was at that point I began taking anti-depressants.
It felt like I woke up one morning and someone had turned the volume all the way down on all of the negative, nagging voices. I was finally left to live in my mind and think my own thoughts, which could still contain anger, worry, or sadness — but not at an overwhelming clip.
Medication (which I was a huge asshole to my close friend Eric about for a long time) balanced me out in a way I never imagined possible. I went from pharma-skeptic to life-long believer.
What now?
I went through my first healthy relationship, and consequent breakup. And though I was sad, and felt sadder than I had in a long time, I never felt myself slipping into darkness. It was a legit, clean sad. The newness of such an intense feeling grasped me for quite a while.
I moved across the country, determined to take steps toward having more of an influence on my own fate. But my intention was to take baby steps. I moved the New York, with a steady job, and my team as a second family support network. When I was laid off in October, I lost one and a half of those things. With my team in shock and mourning, I realized I needed to work on a new support network. (Not that the network of friends I’ve made at &yet is gone, it’s very much the opposite).
This is all to say that I was not prepared for that one-two punch of moving and then loss. But I didn’t collapse, I didn’t even cry. My worse nightmare ended up not even being really a nightmare but a nudge forward. And still, the darkness didn’t come.
The closest thing to shame I’ve felt is guilt over not knowing what I should pursue next, aware that opportunities are ripe within my grasp. Ooh, and that one time I had to borrow money between unemployment checks from my dad. Meh, but that’s not even shame really, more of could you book a car to take Mila to the airport so we don’t have to ride the subway at 3am type thing.
I even went a little overboard while my daughter was out of town and ended up lying on the couch all New Year’s Day through a combination of blackout drunkenness and PMS, feeling like I was the worst mother of all time. (When my child was in another state, completely adored and cared for, and I was home safe in my warm apartment streaming HBO Now and eating delivered breakfast foods like a spoiled tear-stained brat). I felt the darkness, the child in me, creep up in some of my thoughts.
Thankfully by the end of the evening, I had regained my senses and realized that I’d just made a mistake in maybe the most responsible way possible? And forgave myself and moved on.
My adventures in mental health have led me to become the adult I needed as a child, and the person my daughter needs now.
I’ve achieved a few items on the list of tools and questions that plagued me in terms of teaching Mila to be an adult, and a good person.
I understand that I’m not the best mother alive, but I’m a fucking boss when it comes to being Mila’s mom.
We do this thing, and we’ve done it ever since I read THIS BOOK and I know she is sick of this game but I really want it to stick.
Jenn: Why do I love you Mila? Is it because you are pretty? Mila: Nope. Jenn: Is it because you are smart? Mila: Nope. Jenn: Is it because you are kind? Mila: Nope. Jenn: Is it because you are a good listener? Mila: Nope! Jenn: Well why do I love you then? Mila: Because I’m me.
That’s all that any of us wants, right? To know that we are loved, not for our work, our occupation, our appearance, our personality, our network, or anything we could possibly do or achieve in this lifetime — but simply because we are human beings, worthy of being loved.
And nothing will ever change that.