house rules, by rachel sontag
i’m glad revisiting this book if only because some version of “I can’t ring the doorbell that’s not allowed” has been happening to me my entire life, and only in the last few years have I started to be able to pick it apart.
[“-pite having acknowledged that we needed each other, we also needed to move on, and every conversation, every visit, brought back a slew of memories we were trying to forget.
One night the seminar was given by a specialist who was pointing out the difference between children who’d been abused and children who’d been neglected. Neglected children felt invisible, as if their presence had no bearing on anyone or anything. Abused children felt all too visible, as if they were the center of everyone’s world, because they had been the center of someone’s world, the recipients of an abnormal amount of attention.
I thought about my own ridiculous attachment to what others might be thinking of me. When I chose a seat on a bus, I often thought the people I had not sat next to were taking it personally, that they’d assume I’d avoided them because of their race or their weight or their age. Thoughts like this churned and reeled in my brain until I talked myself out of what I knew was a particular form of narcissism.
And it wasn’t just with strangers; it extended to jobs and relationships. The idea that I could not quit an assistant job because everyone was depending on me, that my boyfriends would be devastated without me in their lives. I had an incredibly inflated concept of my effect on others, a misconception that trapped no one but me.
One night, a friend dropped me off at the apartment I shared with six random people on Ashbury Street. I had forgotten my keys. Because it was after ten o'clock, I refused to ring the bell. I climbed back into my friend’s car and told her I had to spend the night at her house.
“Well, didn’t you ring the bell?” she asked.
I told her I wasn’t going to ring the bell. It was after ten and I was in the wrong. She assured me that my roommates were probably awake and, even if they weren’t, one of them would come to the door and go back to sleep. It wasn’t that big of a deal. Instead of ringing the bell I did several laps around the house, trying to determine if anyone was awake or if there was an open window I could climb into. My friend was getting annoyed. When I got back in the car I said I’d rung the bell and no one answered and could I please just sleep on her couch.
“How many times did you ring the bell?” she asked.
“Trust me. Enough.”
She didn’t trust me. She insisted on getting out of the car and ringing it herself, until I broke down in tears and begged her not to.
“Why’d you lie?” she asked.
The tears were really coming down. I just wanted to curl up on her couch and go to sleep. It was a Sunday and both of us had to work the next day and I was dressed in shorts and hiking boots, which meant I would have to borrow work clothes from her. We sat in the car for a while. She was annoyed and I had shut down. All I knew was she didn’t get it. She didn’t get that I was in the wrong and I had to pay the price. I didn’t get just how much of Dad’s thinking I’d accepted as my own.
“You can sleep on my couch. You can sleep on my bed. It’s not that. It’s just so stupid that you can never be wrong, Rachel.”
“But I am wrong,” I said. “And now I can’t go home.”
“Shit happens,” she said. “You’re not gonna ruin anyone’s life.”
I hadn’t seen it like that. I had come to know my fear as martyrdom. I went back to Erika’s, crawled into her sleeping bag on the couch, where I lay awake until one in the morning. Then I put my hiking boots back on, walked to my apartment, and sat on the porch for a good half an hour before I rang the bell.
“No worries,” was what my roommate said when he came to the door in his bathrobe.
For days I avoided going home when my roommates were around. I’d convinced myself they thought I was negligent and selfish. I’d opened the door late at night for them, but it seemed an entirely different situation when I was standing outside without my key. I, who was larger than life. I, who would ruin their night, leave each of them awake for hours, lying on their backs thinking of me, hating me, knowing how irresponsible I was for forgetting the key, how selfish I was for waking them up. Overcoming the internalized belief that I was at the center of everybody’s world, that I could ruin somebody’s life, was my biggest battle.
And yet, talking about boyfriends and classes and jobs, Jenny constantly said, “They don’t hear me,” and “They don’t see me,” and “No one even notices I exist.”
She yelled and cried and threw fits. It was something I envied, her capacity to make noise, her desire to be seen, her determination to communicate how she felt. I had remained and continued to remain silent. When I was hurt, when I felt wronged, when my friendships and relationships depended on my speaking, I shut up and retreated inside myself. Now I was trapped by what had once saved me.“]
