incest
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Childhood was a house where I learned the weight of footsteps. I knew who was coming by the complaint of the floor. I knew when to become small. The wallpaper kept its little flowers. Morning arrived, offensively ordinary. I was sexually abused. I write it plainly because I spent years making a thicket of language…
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Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”Anyone who has tried to heal a family wound knows how inconveniently alive the past can be. We bury it, and it comes down to breakfast. We forbid it to speak, and discover that our children have learned its language.Long before we had scientific names…
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For a long time, I thought peace would arrive as a feeling. I imagined that healing would eventually make me calm. My body would stop bracing. My mind would become quiet. I would wake up one morning and discover that the internal weather had finally cleared. It seemed reasonable. If I could understand myself well…
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Some families pass down money. Mine passed down fear. Addiction. Violence. Abuse. Broken marriages. Children who became victims. Adults who became victimizers. People who disappeared into drugs. People who hurt children. People who spent their lives trying to survive what had been done to them. For a long time, I thought this was simply what…
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We have become a civilization obsessed with taking care of ourselves, and somehow we have become remarkably bad at living. Every feeling requires a name. Every discomfort requires an explanation. Every difficult season requires a diagnosis, a boundary, a retreat, a podcast, a bath, a journal entry, or three business days of “protecting our peace.”…
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Every family has a door nobody talks about. It may be painted over. It may be hidden behind a bookcase. Everyone may insist there is nothing behind it. But the children know. They know by the way certain names are spoken. By the sudden silence at dinner. By the joke that isn’t really a joke.…
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On the question of fear, ask yourself: Do I fear change? Most people believe that they fear change and I suppose that’s true. What I have learned is that my deepest fear now is staying unchanged. When you think about staying exactly as you are for your the rest of your life, doesn’t that scare you?…
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Recovery from childhood abuse is a long, winding, badly paved road. There are stretches where you think, I’m finally getting somewhere. Then suddenly you hit a pothole you didn’t know existed. A memory surfaces. A feeling you buried twenty years ago walks into the room without knocking. And then comes the part nobody talks about…
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The problem with keeping secrets is that they’re alive. We like to think that our secrets can lie quietly in our minds, as inert as dirt, but we’re wrong. Secrets aren’t just our creations…they’re our creatures, beings with wills of their own. They grow. They reproduce, as we form new secrets to support the old…
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‘You weren’t born to be anything you want; you were born to be something quite specific.’ —Martin Shaw, Smokehole Somewhere along the way I was taught that freedom meant becoming anything I wanted. Build yourself. Reinvent yourself. Curate yourself. Keep every door open until life itself becomes one long hallway of mirrors. But God has…