It’s not as if I hadn’t suspected this. There was that whole child abandonment thing, after all. But in my head, there were reasons and excuses for this. And now, for the first time, I saw the truth—the real reason they could not love me, had never loved me. I believe that they hated themselves too much to love me; their sadness made them too selfish to see me at all. The reason I hadn’t been loved had nothing at all to do with me or my behavior. It had everything to do with them.
I tried this new idea on for size. “My parents didn’t love me,” I muttered to myself, quietly, then louder: “My parents didn’t love me.” It’s a tragic sentence. It should feel like a shot to the gut. But instead, it had both resonance and stillness. It happened. It’s true. And it’s okay. There are people who love me. I will be cared for. And I have my capable self. Everything is going to be fine. Holy cow. This shit is for real.
I arrived at my front door having barely registered how I got home. On repeat: My parents didn’t love me, and it’s okay.
Maybe I’m cured, I think. Maybe it truly is this simple.
CHAPTER 18
For five whole days, I was happy. Normal. When Joey mm-hmmed at me, I realized he was probably busy, and I went to talk to the cat instead. When I made a mistake in a freelance project and my editor pointed it out, I just fixed the thing and we moved on. I was cautiously optimistic. Some sources say it takes three to five years to feel substantially healed from C-PTSD, but I have always been precocious. Maybe I knocked all my healing out in three months.
The fifth day was Saturday. It was our anniversary weekend, but Joey was too swamped with work to do much. It was his first year teaching middle school math—a Herculean task, as it turned out—and he was often busy and distracted. He was appropriately sorry and disappointed, but he said I should go have fun with my childhood best friend, Kathy. We’d celebrate later.
Kathy still lives in California, but she was in New York on a business trip for a few days. We hadn’t seen each other yet because she’d been working a lot, too, and last night she was too tired to meet up. Today, she said she was finally ready to hang—but she’d invited other friends, people I’d never met. “We’re going on a soup dumpling crawl,” she said. “Jared says he knows all the best spots!”
“Is Jared Chinese?” I asked.
“No, he’s white.”
“Really? You think a white dude knows the best spots in Flushing?” She shrugged diplomatically, didn’t say anything.
When I showed up on Roosevelt Avenue, Kathy and her pals were recalling monumental burgers and bulgogis of yore, and I realized that this was their thing, food crawls. They’d been on so many together before. I’d never tried any of the restaurants they mentioned, so I had nothing to contribute. Jared said he knew about this incredible hole-in-the-wall with great lamb broth that we could try, too. “Oh, I also know this great place in the food court that has this really stinky, pungent, delicious seafood stew that I’ve never had anywhere else,” I added, but everyone ignored me, so I shut up. The worst part was that Jared actually did know all the good spots. I only knew Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao, but he knew about Joe’s Shanghai and Shanghai You Garden and a secret place with unique egg tarts, and the basement boiled lamb soup was very tasty. But instead of my mood improving with each delicious bite, I got more and more irritable.
When they left for their second dessert, I said I had a stomachache from too many dumplings. I headed home, and when Joey asked me how it was, I said it was fine, but that I was too tired to talk. I picked out the dumbest movie I could find on Netflix, and even though I wasn’t hungry, I ate the leftover lamb noodles while Joey made a lesson plan beside me on the couch.
On the sixth day, Sunday, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, all elbows and angles. I didn’t want to let my bad mood persist all day, so I went to a morning exercise class. The stretches felt good and the squats put out my fire, but they didn’t quite extinguish the smoldering ashes of my irritation. Fine—let’s try another tactic. I went to a nice outdoor café and ordered a croissant and a beer. I sat there in the sun, listening to the birds sing. I tried to be present and grounded, to take in as much pleasant stimulation as possible. But the beer just made me sleepy, like a grumpy cat woken from an afternoon nap. Finally, I went home and collapsed into bed, where I started sobbing. At first, I was mostly upset because I didn’t know why I was upset. Everything was fine. Nothing was wrong. And yet I still felt like I was full of a purple angry porridge—everything was so mixed up and sloshed together that I couldn’t begin to pull out a single thread of why. I tried breathing. I tried counting red things. Then I looked inward. In the sludge, I found a thread of resentment, a bone-deep belief that nobody really cares about me. Aha. After ten minutes of deep breathing and digging, I deduced that I was probably mad that Kathy didn’t schedule any alone time with me during her visit.
Yeah! Shouldn’t best friends always carve out some girl gossip time when they visit from across the country? But honestly, this really wouldn’t have even bugged me that much if Joey hadn’t also brushed off our anniversary. If he really cared about me, we’d have done something fun this weekend instead of him working.
I kept stirring the porridge. Now I was angry at myself for being needy and upset about something so stupid. This was all my fault. Kathy is enormously generous. It’s okay for her to bring her perfectly fun friends around, and now you made yourself look like a spoiled brat in front of strangers, critiquing Jared’s totally valid dumpling assessments. And doesn’t Joey tell you he loves you every day? How much love do you need?
I interrupted myself to laugh bitterly. I guess EMDR didn’t cure me after all, did it? I spent my whole last session trying to trust that I was loved, and yet here I was, letting waves of shame and regret lap over me like a depressed starfish.
Still. Amid the muck and grime, there was a small glimmer of awareness: It was ridiculous that it took me sixteen damn hours to figure out that I was upset and four more to ascertain why. Why didn’t I figure this out sooner? Could I have wasted less time and spent less energy being upset if I’d identified my feelings and moved on? I could have told Joey about feeling irritable last night. I could have let him comfort me. We could have tried to talk about it or made new anniversary plans. If I’d acknowledged these feelings earlier, I could have asked for the attention I wanted. But instead, I felt that hollow, dry, fine feeling. The same feeling I had when I talked about knives to my throat. The same feeling you get when you have to stop crying, pick up the rag, and finish cleaning up the soap. The silent, soundless expanse.
Maybe you can hide in the desert after all.
I may not have United States of Tara levels of dissociation. But it’s now clear I do have my own kind of dissociation, tamer and perhaps more dangerous in its subtlety, because up until now, I’ve been able to ignore the fact that it even existed.
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