Inside Out(56)

I felt so lost, I would wake up in the morning and think, I don’t know what the fuck to do—how do I get through this day? I was in so much pain, physically as well as emotionally, I could barely function. I rarely left the house, except to let the dogs out. That feeling of not being anchored by all of these people’s needs and my role as their nurturer was unbearable. Not a lot was going on in my career, and even if there had been, I was too sick to work. I had no choice but just to be with myself, and I hated it.

Is this life? Because if this is it, I’m done.

I knew I had a choice: I could die alone like my dad, or I could really ask, How did I get here?, and have the courage to face the answers.


HOW DID I get here?

I got here because I had a grandmother who put up with a womanizing husband who was charming and good-looking and charismatic, and she felt like she had no choice but to tolerate it because she married it. She didn’t have the education or the independence to free herself, so she made do and taught her daughters to do the same.

I got here because I had a mother who married the love of her life, but then lived in a state of total love-hate dysfunction with him until he ended his own life. She continued to choose men who were more and more abusive to her until the end of her life, and when she died, she had never experienced peace.

I got here because I am the product of a power play by my mom to get my dad back by her side. They did what they always did when they found themselves in trouble: lied. I came into this world already wrapped in a secret, the child of the wrong man. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t worry, Is it okay that I’m here? And it wasn’t, really. I was a complication. I spent decades scurrying to justify myself, thinking if I just worked hard enough, maybe I could earn the right to be wherever I was.

I got here because neither of my parents was old enough or wise enough to take care of my brother and me the way that all children are entitled to be cared for. They loved us. But they were not capable of putting our needs first. They did not know how to protect us from danger, and they put us in its way over and over again.

I got here because I couldn’t bear to face the question: “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?”

I got here because I responded to the dizzying lack of safety and the constant change in my childhood by becoming tough and adaptable. I’ve spent so much of my life accommodating and adapting to new environments—new schools, new people, new directors, new expectations—that making adjustments based on how I am or what I need was not conceivable. I never learned that. I think I existed in such a state of distrust that I didn’t really know how to be in the world—in life—comfortably. And so it was very rare that I was totally here for it.

I got here because I tried so hard to be different from my mom that I took care of everyone but myself. I pushed and pushed myself to be the mom my girls needed, the wife Bruce and then Ashton wanted—but what did I need? What did I want? It was nobody’s job but mine to figure that out and demand it. And it was nobody else’s job to convince me that I deserved it.

I got here because when I met the man of my dreams, trying to stay close to him became my addiction. Ashton had seemed like the answer to my prayers. But when we met, I had the experience and the preparation to be really committed. For him it was still the journey—he was still figuring out who he was. The thing I didn’t fully take into consideration (and who would want to?) when Ashton and I were falling in love is that what was magical to me and what was magical to him may not have been the same thing. I felt connection, communion. He was stepping off of a private plane for the first time and coming into my home, my family, which I’d long since created, and I had a body of well-known work in the very field he aspired to conquer. I was a forty-year-old who had had a big life with a big ex-husband and three children, and Ashton’s adult life was just beginning—both his personal life and his career. I didn’t see all that because I was inside of it. I just felt like a fifteen-year-old girl hoping somebody liked me—emotions that, if I’d had a safer and healthier upbringing, I might have been able to feel when I actually was fifteen.

I got here because I chose men with the same qualities as my dad and my granddad, and I turned myself inside out trying to please them.

I got here because I never dealt with all the rejection and scorn that came my way throughout my career—I couldn’t risk what that might feel like if I really took it in. It would be too terrifying, too much of a reinforcement of a much deeper feeling inside me, that someday, somehow, there would be some kind of big powwow, at which everyone would concur: What the fuck is she doing here? She’s not allowed to be here. She’s not good enough. She’s dirty. Get her out. Get her out.

I got here because from day one I’ve been wondering, Is it okay that I’m here?

And it was finally time for me to tell myself: yes.


I GOT TREATMENT. But for the trauma I’d never faced and the codependence that arose from it. My missteps at the party were the symptoms, not the disease. My physical health was deteriorating: it was the last thing I had, and when it started to go, I had no choice but to stop and learn, for the first time, how to digest. I worked with a doctor, going through my life, one piece at a time, breaking it down, so I could start metabolizing everything that had happened.

My kids had given me an ultimatum: we won’t speak to you unless you go to rehab. But I went, and they still didn’t show up for me. I told them how important it was for them to attend family week—not just for me, but for all of us. But they refused.