Finding The Secrets I Kept From Myself

Having blindly rewritten my own history to obscure any trace of vulnerability, I don't know who I am. I'm on an evidence-based archeological dig of dinosaur bones I'm not sure how to reassemble.

I’m purging again.

Not the vomity kind, the making room to breathe kind. Purging & reorganizing, I’m just now realizing, is my go-to prep for any new project—clearing space for some new creative endeavor as if my thoughts take up physical space.

When Mom’s dementia started really taking off, I drifted away from the 12-step recovery group I’d been with for over twenty years. It was chaotic and wonderful and messy and loud and a full spectrum of addicts & alcoholics in every color, gender, orientation, financial status, housed & not, one day off the hooch to over 40 years sober. It’s unlike any other 12-step group I’ve visited in the 34 years since I had what I hope will remain my last drink. But what was happening in our lives was so unpredictable and new, I had no idea where it would take us; I couldn’t stand any more chaos. I craved structure, needed to control what I could.

For several years, I attended nice, orderly, homogenous (read: all white middle & working class) 12-step meetings. They never felt like home, but I knew what to expect. There were never any surprises, no drama.

Once I’d gained some degree of mastery over the higgledy-piggledy of living with and caring for an aging parent with dementia, I found my way back to my home group. I went back to embrace, and be embraced by, the heart I’d found there for twenty plus years. Still as tumultuous as a snake-handling, Pentecostal, speaking-in-tongues, revival tent church, it's healing, it’s raw. It works for me.

But those two years of order were essential for me to gain my footing at home, with my new life as Mother Theresa as played by Nurse Jackie.

This is that.

Purging creates order from the chaos of home and mind. Shucking off the old makes room for the new, like a caterpillar / pupa / butterfly; a lobster’s ecdysis, a hermit crab molting & trading up.

I find things I forgot I had—things that tell me who I was—my own memories, having proved to be unreliable.

More will be revealed, more will be required.

One of the elders of my chaotic meeting used to say that. It’s biblical-ish¹.

Some of the best finds are letters that either weren’t sent, or were stamped “Returned to Sender.” They’re portals into my then brain and life.

October 1977

I’d just turned twenty. Written on manual typewriter, in all caps,² my pinky probably too weak to hold a caps key for a single letter³. I could type in no caps or all caps. I opted for ALL CAPS.

There are two paragraphs of blah, blah, blah, me, me, me. In the third / last graf I hit my passive aggressive reason for writing to this man-boy and ask about a weekend he’d invited me to spend with him in the Hamptons, then ghosted.⁴

“I’M NOT MAD, JUST HURT. IT LEFT ME FEELING VERY USED AND A LITTLE CHEAP, THE FACT THAT YOU NEVER EVEN CALLED OR WROTE TO CALL THE WEEKEND OFF. BUT I GUESS THAT IS ALL OVER NOW. I MISS YOU…HAVE YOU GOTTEN THE IMPROVEMENTS IN YOUR APT. YOU WANTED, LIKE HEAT, OR LIGHT? LIFE WOULD BE SO MUCH EASIER IF YOU GOT A PHONE…MISS YOU MUCHLY.”

I signed my full name, address, and phone number. You know, just in case.⁵

On the back of the letter, three weeks later I picked up the one-way conversation, in cursive⁶, with more about me, then “I miss you very much. The picture I took of you came out very well. I signed up for E.S.T….maybe I’ll get a chance to come see you during one of the weekends or in between (pre-training, mid-training, post-training). Again, I miss you very much. If you get a job, let me know so I can call you on the phone there…”

P.—who, ironically, was the first to try to get me sober and goes to my beloved chaotic recovery home group—was never someone I remembered being any kind of big crush, someone I’d miss “muchly.” Neither of us remember that.

We each remember having had sex with each other, once.

I remember it happening in his Minetta Lane Mews apartment, the one with no heat, lighting or phone. His memory is in my 7th Street apartment in the East Village, which would have been at least two years after the photo was taken, after the letter written.

Looking back on my journey through men (throwing my hands in the air, muttering I don’t know what else to call it), a small handful mattered, a few had an impact, only a couple I’d repeat if life offered a do-over. I could have skipped most of them. P and I would’ve skipped each other. Neither life was made better or worse for having slept with each other once (or twice).

What sticks with me—and maybe this is why I’ve saved this letter almost fifty years⁷—is the neediness, the wanting to be wanted, twisting myself in a pretzel to make myself available to someone who had little interest, someone who was just…there, in the same way I was just…there.

That’s not who I thought I was. It’s not the story I’ve always told myself about myself. I’d thought of myself—in retrospect—as a libertine (although I had no idea what that word meant at the time), a bohemian, a free spirit.

If you’d asked, just a few short months ago, I’d have told you I was passing through life, unscathed, sans feelings or needs. I thought I was a tough girl.

These are not the words of a tough girl. Hurt. Cheap. Used. ⬇️

These are not the words of a girl with particularly high standards. Not because he was a broke-ass musician, but because broke-ass, non-committal, unemployed or unemployable, homeless, unmoored was my business as usual, not an exception. Frankie had had nowhere to live, where he crashed was falling apart. Snake had just been released from prison with nowhere to live. P had an apartment, that was almost a step-up, I guess. Almost. ⬇️

I’d grown up in a two-parent home in the suburbs. The only time we did without heat or and lights was the blizzard of 1977.

It hurts my heart to see how little I valued myself at that time. In romantic or sexual relationships I was clingy, insecure, anxious, generally unhappy and actively making myself more unhappy by the men I’d chose.

It hurts my heart more to know where the seeds of that behavior came from, how that worthlessness was nurtured, fed and watered.

I’d thought I was done with all of that, but there are still more knots to untangle, more truths to discover about myself.

Have you smooshed the little heart?
— shared this with a friend?
— called your mother?
— what are you waiting for? smoosh, share, call your mother.

1. “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (Luke 12:48).

2. It would be decades before that would constitute yelling.

3. To this day, I get dirty looks in cafes because of how hard I hit the keys of my laptop. I learned on a old Remington Rand and they required finger muscles.💪🏼

4. Also, not a term then. But it’s always been a thing.

5. Just in case what, you moron? He wants to send a box of live doves as an apology? He doesn’t have lights or heat and prolly doesn’t even have a spare 13 cents for a first class stamp. Read between your own lines, girl.

6. Showing my age, as if I wasn’t already with manual typewriters and using the USPS.

7. One of the exercises I give my writing students is to pull something you’ve saved forever and don’t know why and write about it. About what we keep & what you let go of.