First week of January, 2024
What is the first thing you remember? And is it actually your memory, or did you see a picture and hear a story and fill in the blanks? I can hardly remember anything from when my parents were together, from when I spent half the week as an only child and half as the youngest of three. But the first four years of my life are a murky mystery. I have a couple memories from when I was five, but these are the kinds of memories backed up by pictures and stories -- not ones that I truly know are mine.
Did you know that intrusive thoughts can disguise themselves as memories? Memories that come unbidden, that overstay their welcome, that send you back to a place of shame or fear.
Recently, I’ve had a memory popping up -- it’s a great white shark that rockets to the surface and clamps its jaws around me. This memory is from when I was very little -- it might very well be the earliest thing I can remember. It might have been the first time I felt real fear.
I was about three or four, buckled in my car seat, and it was the summer. My dad always smelled like sunscreen in the summer, and my mom always complained about the varicose veins in her legs. I can’t remember where we were going, but we were on the highway. It was either I-90, I-91, or I-84.
My dad sat in the passenger seat of the car -- It was a Ford Taurus station wagon. And now, I have to pause to go on a tangent about the car. Trust me, it’s important, I think. To maybe give you some context.
Back in the days when I lived in a double income home, we had two cars. They were both Ford Taurus’, my dad’s was green and my mom’s was blue. I thought they were cool as heck. I always wanted to name them, but never felt like any of the names I came up with quite fit. They had these cool trunk seats that folded up and faced the back. I loved riding back there when I was old enough to not need a car seat. It was so much fun to watch the cars turning around me, to take in all the neon signs and concrete and brick.
One day, though, my mom told me I couldn’t sit there anymore. That no one could sit there ever again. This triggered quite the tantrum -- I couldn’t sit back there and listen to Silver Apples of the Moon and pretend I was a princess riding in a chariot. I couldn’t watch the geese flying into the horizon and wonder about when they’d stop. I couldn’t sit back there with friends and watch the world whoosh by.
When I asked her why, she said it was because on her way home, she’d seen a horrible accident. Someone had been rear-ended, and the whole back half of their car looked like an accordion.
“What if you’re sitting back there and that happens? How could I live with myself?” I think those are the words she said. I can’t be certain, because that’s not how my mind works, but I’m pretty confident that was it.
As I went to sleep that night, I thought of being buckled into the trunk seat, a tractor-trailer turning off the highway to where we waited at a stoplight. It wasn’t slowing down off the ramp, and it collided with our car, and my little body was crushed between car parts, shattered like the glass around it. I wondered what it would be like to die. I wondered what it would be like to see my body like that. To be a ghost, hovering over my broken form, watching my mother lose her mind and scream scream scream. How I would be responsible for her pain, how she would have to live the rest of her life without me and carry a hole in her heart.
As an adult, I realized that these were intrusive thoughts. For me, intrusive thoughts mostly come as images. I guess this is just one of the ways the human brain is quirky and unique -- for some, it’s mostly words, for some it’s images, and for some, it’s a mix. These thoughts come with intense emotions -- namely terror and shame.
In this instance with the whole getting turned into a scrap metal and human sandwich, the intrusive thought was all hypothetical. It’s so much worse when it’s a memory because it’s something that actually did happen.
To recap: I’m about 3 or 4, my mom and dad are driving with me in a car seat in our station wagon, and we’re on the highway. Great, on with the story!
I’m crying. I don’t know why I’m crying. Sometimes a girl just has to cry. I might have been over-tired, might have needed water. I probably had a good reason, but maybe I just wanted attention. Regardless, my mom’s attempts to soothe me with her voice did not work, so she asked my father to turn around to investigate. I was sat directly behind my father, and he moved his seat up so he could have more room to turn his body around and look at me. I kept on crying all the while.
Maybe he took too long or maybe he just couldn’t do what she wanted him to, because she tells him to take the wheel and turns around to attend to me.
We’re still on the highway, guys. My dad is yelling at her, asking her if she’s lost her mind, and she snarls at him. She does what she thought she needed to to get me to stop crying, and turns back to the wheel. I don’t remember if I stopped crying, or how long she was turned around for.
But I do remember the heavy silence that hung in the air like humidity, making the car feel too small.
This intrusive memory is a bolt of lightning, and pure terror is the thunder. Reliving that memory sends my heart racing and my stomach freefalling. We all could have died. My fault. My fault we all could have died.
Now, you wanna know something about me that isn’t surprising? I have a hard time asking for what I need. It’s a people-pleaser thing, if you know, you know. Just as I’m not a scientist, nor am I a psychologist (because psychologists are scientists, duh). But it’s not hard to see a connection between me expressing my needs as a child and subsequently being put in a life-threatening situation and having a hard time asking the waiter for a refill.
It’s snowing today. This was the storm that my uncle was so concerned about avoiding. He and my aunt arrived on Wednesday and surprised my mom with a visit. Of course, the whole point of them being there was to take her out of the building for the day so that my husband, my aunt, and I could move my mom without her knowing it. It’s funny how people get about driving in the snow -- they worry about things like the weather, and it seems as if they almost want to come out victorious against Mother Nature. Is it too punny to call this paragraph of random observations a “cold open”? Get it? Like cold weather? Nevermind.
The past 24 hours have been strange. Typically of all the various mental health issues I’m facing, OCD is the most annoying. It feels constant, like a needy toddler holding onto your pant leg, tugging, tugging, tugging. Always doubting, always asking what if, always gnawing on my fears and desires. But lately grief has been center stage. An overwhelming, heavy coat of sadness, nostalgia, anger, disappointment, loneliness, and fear. I don’t want to wear it, but it’s always on. Suffocating me.
Yesterday, I moved my mom without her consent. She knew she was moving -- in the sense that people would ask, “Oh, I heard you’re moving! When is it?” and she’d say, “No, I’m not moving.” -- but she didn’t know when. So while she was at the museum with my uncle and aunt, my family and some movers worked a miracle.
The days going up to the move, I was so scared. I played through all the possible reactions my mom could have to being moved without her knowing. She called me a traitor, she said she hated me, she said she wanted to kill herself. But in reality, she ended up just being confused. She’s still pretty confused. “Have you seen my new place?” she asked me on the phone today. “Yes,” I replied, “I set it up for you!” And I had. I had gone through all her things, decided to get rid of some of the things I figured she wouldn’t notice were missing.
My mom is a deeply sentimental person. She saves almost everything that has made her feel something. She has a whole file cabinet, I think for stress. The bins and bins of photos and birthday cards and other momentos are for loneliness and love. The cookbooks and cake tins for hope.
Whenever she’d get me a present, it’d mean I couldn’t get rid of it. Every time she came over to my apartment when I was an adult, she’d point out all the things she’d given me, as if those objects anchored her to me, to my life. And she would get me a lot of things. Almost every time I saw her as an adult, she’d have things for me. Random things she saw on sale and thought I needed or could use. Measuring cups, snow shovels, beach towels, cartons of organic soup, smoked paprika, and a stuffed animal for my cat are just a few.
Now she doesn’t remember that. She has barely any recognition of the things she got me. When she would give me these things, if I tried to politely decline, she’d only insist all the more. She would pout and complain until I relented. All of that effort, only to not even remember it. I’m scared to pull on that thought. If my sanity is a game of Jenga, then pushing or pulling on that particular block -- the one postulating that eventually I won’t remember any of my life, any of my feelings, any of my actions -- will send the whole tower crumbling.
In 12th grade, my English teacher said my creative nonfiction essay which wove in various metaphors about my life was “fatalistic.” As if a 17-year-old could be anything but fatalistic. My mind has evolved since then. I can appreciate nuance, I enjoy being spontaneous, and serendipity is one of the most beautiful forces in the universe. But perhaps at the core of some of my fears, at the core of some of my obsessions, is fatalism. The idea that all events are predetermined. That we as humans have no control over anything, least of all our own lives. It terrifies me to think that I have no control, but it also terrifies me to think about the control I do have.
I am in control of my actions. That’s about it. I can’t always control my thoughts or my feelings, but I can listen to them and react how I want to. I’ve developed that skill over the years. But everything else in the whole world, I have no control over. And in a way, it makes me think of that scene from Fleabag where her therapist asks her if she wants to fuck God.
I don’t believe in God, and Fleabag is agnostic at best, but I do. I do want to fuck God. I want to fuck whoever came up with this whole thing. Whoever created this world and my sentience and my expiration. I want to fuck It and have It tell me everything is okay. Have It soothe me, caress my hair, hold me tight. Rock me to sleep in Its arms.
Doesn’t the idea of cosmic comfort sound divine? I just want to feel a primordial peace settle over me, stripping me of my grief coat and letting my skin breathe in the air of deep space.
I don’t believe in anything, but I want to. I think I’m too afraid to believe in myself. But I need to. The only one I can have faith in is me.
I know I should probably talk more about my mom. Talk more about the move, about the family secrets my aunt spilled. And I will, but I think right now, I need to let the universe know that I need comfort. I need comfort and peace -- please tell me how to get it. I feel lonely, and I know the cure to that will be self- love, but I want something to fill that void.
Am I praying? Is that what this is? Has it really come to this? I don’t believe in anything, okay? It makes me feel pathetic to do this, to reach out into nothingness and hope something latches on. There isn’t some wiser being watching over me typing into my laptop going “Hmm yes well this girl has had quite a hard time lately, shall I throw her a bone?” I’m not praying to a God. I think I’m praying to my fellow humans. Please, friends, look out for me. Be kind to me, and show me love. I will return it, I promise.
