Snooze Button
I was still looking for a home at age 33, so the offer of help moving, all-expenses paid, to Columbus, Ohio, was irresistible. Trauma-bonded with Seattle, which is 1,300 miles from where I grew up, I needed a way out again—this time due to a divorce as opposed to reaching the end of my ability to handle being shrink-wrapped in isolation in my family of origin (the FOO). My former best friend, who is not emotionally safe at all but very good at rescuing people without letting them know it’s for her own purposes (brownie points with Jesus, I think), made the offer. I accepted because she had also gone through a divorce from a guy who looked like the perfect one in the pair just trying ever so hard but actually did none of the pursuing and—direct quote from him—“did not think any of our issues had anything to do [him].”
She knew all about the judgment of surface level dynamics that lead even church family, claiming to be tighter than FOO, to distance and reject a woman already going through slow-release, invisible-to-outsiders abandonment in the one relationship that is supposed to be a covenant of love and honor. She knew all about batteries-not-included friends, too—the kind who don’t pursue or seem to value the depth and commitment we both longed for but didn’t ourselves seem to know how to provide. She knew all about the scorched-earth hell that is modern dating. I also accepted because I needed rescuing. I didn’t know how to need anything else—which is probably why I chose a spouse who only had martyrdom to offer me. I also accepted because I was trained by my FOO not to expect emotional care or genuine affection in exchange for being myself ever in life.
To my credit, I did not accept right away. I was at least trying to learn my lesson from the first time I did this whole fleeing-the-homeland kind of thing. What if I’m just running away again I asked myself. You made this spreadsheet of things to run away from myself said, pulling up the matrix of cells containing every conceivable reason to leave the place I’d fled to 13 years earlier, and every conceivable reason why I’d never be allowed to return if I did. Ah, I told myself, so this is a pattern. I pointed to the cell containing Reasons You Can’t Leave and dragged my finger down the entire column. See here how these are not actual reasons not to leave? See how these things have nothing to do with Seattle, just like Seattle had nothing to do with why you moved to Seattle from Colorado? This fact is clearly a reason to stay.
But then the leaky, drafty basement we’ve all agreed to call Seattle leaked and draft for three weeks straight again. (Before I moved from the sunniest state in the country to rain city, I thought that, if you really didn’t see the sun for nearly a month at a time, no one would live there.) Also, divorce. Also, Seattle’s social climate parallels its weather: I had to abruptly leave my church, the only community I’d had the first five years I lived in Seattle, and in the nine years since that happened, I have not been able to find my people. I had been so not able to find my people that I still felt new, and therefore compelled to apologize for my existence everywhere I went in a city I’d lived in—chosen to live in—for thirteen years. Part of that is a me-problem, obviously: I haven’t ever been able to make up my mind between the pain of loneliness and the pain of being around people long enough to make some of them friends. I also have a gnarly problem with commitment that was as stealth as it was nasty; I didn’t know I’d been having this problem since I graduated from high school until about last year. But part of that is definitely a Seattle problem.
So, the Midwest! They probably don’t have a reputation for being friendly for nothing! Might that also be where they keep the chivalry and genuine concern for others’ wellbeing? I crossed my fingers and started taking all my earthly wares to the post office in shifts. My then husband didn’t notice or say anything if he did. As my 24 boxes made it across the country in waves on my friend’s dime, I second guessed every decision I’d ever made to get me here, my mid-30s, getting divorced, having no clear career direction to speak of and so hungry for connection I was moving 3,000 miles to be in the same city as someone I called my best friend, but who if I was really honest with myself—and here’s something I was never permitted to say out loud—scared me. (I was never allowed to say that because *I* was the scary one, according to my former best friend. She’d been so abused her whole life by everyone that, if someone didn’t walk on eggshells around her, they were perpetuating the abuse and being scary. No conceivable way *she* could be the scary one.)
But I felt like I had nothing more than I did when I was 18 years old except less time and more wounds. And now, at age 36, that longing I’d judged as super pathetic in everyone else to go back to being a kid full-body hit me. There was not only no structure, regular exposure to people around my age and a clear path forward so you didn’t have to somehow create your own magically, but it was also farther away from the end of the world. My friend had a structure in Columbus. She had a community she could invite me into, a new husband who had lots of single friends, a great job. Could I finally have those things someday? Maybe Columbus was my Mecca.
Also, really, if I’m honest—which my mom I think inadvertently trained me not to be every time she asked me where I was or when I’d be back or if I had a ten-year plan for my life yet and then acted like the truth wasn’t good enough—I stopped being happy in Seattle about four months after I fled there to get away from Colorado, where I hadn’t been happy since I was three and a half years old. Even digging through my past—literally, I keep every damn piece of paper someone gives me with a kind word on it, and many that don’t, including the notes my friends wrote to me during class, origami’ed all cool, and slipped into my locker during passing period so I don’t forget someday—I couldn’t find the origin of my discontent. So I assumed it had to do with Colorado itself and left just a smidge after the soonest moment I could. Trundling off to Columbus would be different how, exactly? Wasn’t I just doing that thing where I run away (without telling anyone I’m thinking about it and then it seems super abrupt to them) when I’m unhappy again? Where did I get the idea that home was somewhere other than wherever I was?
Oh, yeah: the FOO. “Black sheep” doesn’t quite cut it for how I would describe what it felt like to be me in my family; profound alienation might be closer. From all other members of my FOO and, it took my 30 years to realize myself. I picked up by about day 1,278 of life that it was Not Okay to be myself. It wasn’t just that no one was interested; it was that my mom was anxious but didn’t know it herself, my dad thought his home should be his sanctuary (so: peaceful at all times—I know, right? Why did he bring not one, not two, but three children into it, then?), and it was my job to manage all that. Or, failing that, the least I could do was contort as much as I needed to in order to accommodate everyone else, always have a plan so no one ever needed to help me with anything, and otherwise apologize for interrupting my parents’ lives and (the much graver sin) being who I was instead of what they wanted. I put up with the feast of behavior-based feedback and performance-related questions and the famine of connection or actual relationship for 18 years, ingraining the habit of never asking for anything and feeling insane enough guilt anytime I expressed emotion that I banished all feeling words from my vocabulary. I don’t remember thinking in high school of myself as angry person—I remember teeth-grinding anxiety, endless days filled with nothing I actually wanted to do, and constant stepping up to lead and take responsibility at school, in my friend groups, and extracurricular activities and wherever else no one was taking the reins but needed to.
My transition to college was so traumatic it wouldn’t surface in my consciousness as traumatic until 19 years later, when I somehow calculated that I’d been struggling with purposelessness, entry-level jobs (every one of which I hated), and trying to build a meaningful life for myself for 19 years. I’d gotten on the track called Do What You Don’t Want To Do Now So You Can Have What You Really Want Later when I was probably eight, but it has turned out to be a treadmill: my life nearly thirty years later was filled with nothing I actually want to do except the things I look forward to as escape. Recently, I learned the word for what I’ve started to worry might be my problem: anhedonia. But not before I moved to Columbus. When I did that, I was still under the impression that happiness could be found outside oneself even though all the success gurus and mega leaders and superpeople winning at life are trying to say otherwise. But I have this thing where I just assume people are BSing me all the time. Maybe because I’m not really telling the truth most of the time, which is because I don’t think I can because of childhood conditioning and adult reinforcement.
The main reason the decision to move to Columbus or not was so hard is because I especially didn’t trust my former best friend to mean what she was saying. I think even if she wasn’t really scared or saw me and herself accurately, I’d still be wary of her words: she has really high hopes for things but they don’t generally work out and she spins them like failure was actually her real plan all along. I think she truly does not see reality clearly. But she’s constructed a ten-mile forcefield of eggshells around her that I don’t see a viable way to point these things out to her. Regardless, I decided to move and once I made the decision, I expected things to get easier, less Chinese finger knot in my core and more meadows of space to breathe. It didn’t. Maybe I just have to get there. Get through the logistics, get out of sinkholeville Seattle and to my new and first home, I told myself. Or maybe, myself replied, the Celtic knots your intestines are in is because the person who should be fighting for you is the one who promised you at a wedding altar before God and 150 people that he would. And you are not worth that to him. Your mistakes are too great, and he surrounds himself in them, bathing in them as he swims away from you and any ways he might possibly be hurting you so that you wonder, if not your FOO nor your spouse, what kind of hero would have to find their way to this planet to love you.
I guess I’m not surprised that choosing to celebrate crumbs once again in my life didn’t make anything easier. But I wasn’t expecting this kind of hard: just like in 2008 for Pop, my parents called me two weeks before my flight to Columbus to say that, if I wanted to say goodbye to Nana, my last grandparent, now was the time to do it. I went two rounds with a pros and cons spreadsheet even though I didn’t have time for that—I never have the kind of time it takes me to make any decision whatsoever—and then a third to assuage the guilt for the decision I already knew I was going to make: take my chances and wait until the visit I already have scheduled in a month. I knew there was a chance I would miss her—if I’m honest, I knew there was more than a chance.
I knew that I would not get to see my last grandparent’s last days. I knew she still remembered me. I didn’t know if they’d told her these were her last days—my guess is that she’d probably been waiting for this moment for the last eleven years since my grandfather died, but maybe that’s just me projecting. Maybe my whole life is just me projecting. Maybe I’m actually not that important to my grandmother and I’m only the star of the show in my head. After all, it’s not like she pursues me. She just guilts me when I don’t pursue her. Or triangulates with my mother whenever she sees something “concerning” on Facebook as an excuse to get my mother not only to worry about me but remind me that Nan would “love” to hear from me.
Maybe she would. I’m sure most of my family loves it when I do all the relational work. That way, they don’t have to do any work and the don’t have to be responsible when things go wrong. It’s a great deal for everyone but me.
No, I need to take care of myself and get to Columbus. I can’t delay. I’ll see my grandmother in a month. Or I won’t.
I didn’t. I landed in Columbus during a polar vortex and my last grandparent died two days later. I don’t know about her last days because we don’t talk about anything in my family. My mother likes privacy, I guess.
So when people in Columbus wanted to talk—at church, out for walks around the neighborhood, in line at the grocery store—I wasn’t ready. The Midwest really does earn its stereotype for being friendly—and it really brought out how not friendly I am. Maybe this is why I don’t have friends as adults, I thought to myself. As much as I complain about how hard it is to make friends after the structures of childhood are all gone, maybe I actually don’t want them.
But did these very friendly, chatty people want friends, either? As I walked through the haze of hey how are yas and lovely weather we’re having ehs from strangers, I couldn’t help wondering if everyone was just doing what I had been trained to do—say the right thing, which is the nice thing or the thing that gives me the emotional experience the want to have because that’s definitely my job—times a thousand even if they were BSing all of it. Danger! Danger! Someone’s saying something nice! It’s probably not sincere. It’s not like I thought just about Midwesterners. I just didn’t realize that I thought this about everything—including the stereotype that Midwesterners are so friendly—until I encountered so much friendliness in one place. And was completely put off by it.
Do I prefer the mentally unstable, never-know-when-something-from-ten-years-ago-is-going-to-get-thrown-back-in-your-face, never-apologize, make-everything-about-personal-trauma-but-accuse-others-of-rehashing-their-recent-pain-too-much ways of the friend I moved here to be with? Did I really just sacrifice living the rest of my life free of guilt that I chose not to say goodbye to Nana when my parents told me it was time knowing I would not get another chance for a person who is too mentally unwell to recognize just how unwell she is? Is it really that I’m taking so long to mature that I didn’t see the warning signs in this friendship or in the relationship with my former husband? Or is it maybe that I saw them all along and chose to put off doing anything about them?
Some people’s problem is that they don’t recognize red flags. Others are that they see them and don’t stop. Mine is that I see them and think I’ll deal with that later. This is not quite the same as ignoring them and definitely different than missing them altogether. This is putting everything off until a “later” time, when somehow, I’m magically wiser and stronger and have more resources. This is hitting snooze until you’ve warn unhealthy grooves so deep into your relationships that you can’t tell which direction is hell and which direction is health. Or until your beloved grandmother dies with all your goodbyes still inside you. Or until the alarm stops but the danger hasn’t remotely cleared.
After/Thought Literary 