Status Updates From Inside Out

“From them, I learned that love was something you had to scramble to keep. It could be revoked at any minute, for reasons that you couldn’t understand, that you couldn’t control. The kind of love I grew up with was scary to need, and painful to feel. If I didn’t have that uneasy ache, that prickly anxiety around someone, how would I know it was love?”

“Any sense that I could count on either of my parents evaporated. In that moment, with my fingers in the mouth of my suicidal mother, who was flailing like a wild animal, and the sound of my father screaming directions at me, I moved from being someone who they at least tried to take care of to someone they expected to assist them in cleaning up their messes.”