How hopefulness comes

From transmuting pain

I love these mountains. Western NC, 1.28.23

“The hopefulness comes from knowing I turned out alright,” I said.

I was holding my grandmother’s hand as she sat in her leather reading chair. She just apologized to me, her blue eyes looking grey and tired behind her glasses. She couldn’t finish reading my last post, she knew it’d be too much for her.

I told her she didn’t need to, that it was a pretty dark one for most people. But that, I suppose, the hope in it comes from knowing I turned out alright.

Thank you to those who made it through last week’s writing—it sparked many important conversations about regrets and sadness and grief and the vague shadow of precognitive death that flickered about my childhood.

But I will say I’m unsatisfied with it. As true as every word may be, it doesn’t wholly do my family or my childhood justice. It excludes memories of playing with my brother in rhododendron thickets and the countless meaningful hours I spent with my mother, talking about anything happening in my life.

No, I never made it to school on time and rarely ate my vegetables. And yes, there was dark temptation tucked in dusty corners and a strange heaviness in our sunny home. But we are all dealt our hand in childhood. That’s a glimpse of mine. Not all of it.

I grew up knowing there was no room to be a burden. Quentin in chronic crisis took precedence. Mom’s arms weren’t strong enough to bear another heavy load. It’s a common feeling for those raised with disabled siblings.

Which, in its own odd way, made me resilient. And independent. And kind.

“It really showed the unhealthy fusion you had with Bennett from birth,” my dad commented to me over the phone after he read last week’s piece.

I’d be lying (or naive) if I said it wasn’t unhealthy. It had many stages: the incoherent emotional melding of early childhood progressed into becoming her unpaid counselor. When she was in her abusive second marriage, dried of all her assets, she didn’t tell her mother or sister or brother or friends the full truth of how difficult life had become.

With me, she didn’t need to hide anything. I’d already witnessed it all. Her at her highest functioning and barely getting by. With money and without. I knew the reality of her marriage, the shambles of her house. I was her confidante when it defied normal parenting boundaries.

Each of us has traumas or lineages of hurt that we can either suppress or transmute. This fusion is my burden. This was an unjust weight given to a child. But it is also the origin of my greatest strengths. If I was going to be so bonded to a human for so long, at least it was one as incredible as her.

I’m a woman now. Knowing so many people, hearing their stories and their pains, I recognize the gifts my mother gave me. She gave them to the clients she worked with as a therapist, too. It is an expansive patience for self. And a deep, broad self-love.

She was a woman who laughed at herself. A mother who never cut me down or undermined me, seeding self-criticism. (How many women do I know whose eating disorders or anxieties originate from their mothers?) She articulated every shining quality she saw in me. Named it and praised it, every time she saw it.

I remember coming on stage with an ensemble after a high school theater production. The lights were on us, I was smiling. We all held hands as we bowed. We stepped back and allowed the next flow of ensemble members to take the stage. My mother watched me. She watched my face and body change from polite and present, taking my own bow, to bursting excitement and beaming with pride to cheer on my peers. She said it was as if I had been lit up.

“You love others so well,” she said, hugging me.

There are countless other examples that come to mind, and endless lessons in self-love and unabashed creativity. She was patient and non-judgemental, donning a therapist’s passivity when I was a teenager, being inflammatory just for the sake of it. I felt free to be exactly as I was. She could love, brilliantly. She could make anyone she met feel accepted and understood.

This week, I interviewed for a job at a wonderful therapeutic treatment center in Asheville. I got accepted to rent a darling little house with fig trees in the backyard. My mind is busy, envisioning the beautiful life that I can craft for myself. And I met with the Western North Carolina branch of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. In the next few months, I’ll be trained to facilitate family support groups for those coping with suicide bereavement.

It’s all we can do to cherish what is good in our complicated lives, and try to transmute the difficulties from obstacles into strengths, somehow. For me, it’s been leaning into death a bit. Leaning into pain. Struggling to meditate or cultivate presence. And without a doubt, taking the gifts that both she and my brother gave me to offer them up to the world.

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Thanks to all who continue to read Internal Alchemy. Because I will be transitioning to a steadier Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 lifestyle soon, I’m swapping release days to Sunday. Until next week!