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To my brain— You crazy motherfucker, this one’s for you.
HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO understand about my family: all of our money came from drugs.
We copywriters are the engine that moves society forward.
Recovered from my addictions, I mean. Not to drugs or alcohol—to other things. Thoughts, food, people, places. Oh, yes—you can be addicted to a place.
Because when you want ice cream or crispy, hot buttered bread, the feeling pools right atop your tongue, but when you want a place, it calls to you with every sense, sight and smell and touch and sound and, yes, even taste.
I exist in this strange in-between: too old for a high chair, too young to be taken seriously by the adults. A child perennially annoyed by her place in the world.
Happiness, to me, isn’t a presence. It’s an absence. The absence of Worry. Of fear. Of sadness. Of the thoughts and compulsions that directed my life for so long.
Memory of pain is often worse than the pain itself. It drives us. What we do or don’t do, embrace or fear, repeat or avoid at all costs—all of that is dictated by our memory of pain.
He even appears on our Christmas card this year—and will every year hereafter—a fact she dubs “sheer coincidence.”
Oh wow he's a stand in son :(
“It’s okay, Eliot.” The words sound out of place in his voice. They’re adult words, and we’re still just kids. “You’re going to be okay.”
He moved to the US at ten years old—that awful age, when most children go from innocent to something short of evil—and even though he talked about missing parts of his life in Colombia, I never saw him cry. Not once.
If your oldest brother was a goat fucker, it doesn’t matter if you commit your entire life to saving the planet. It doesn’t matter if you’re hotter than a supermodel or faster than Usain Bolt or ordained by God as the second coming of Jesus Christ himself. You’ll always just be the sister of a goat fucker.
This is wild
“That’s one form of OCD, yes. But the disorder manifests itself in many different ways. It’s less about being afraid of germs and more about the way the patient reasons and rationalizes.”
Some days, the thoughts are bad. Torturous. Some days, I can turn them into background noise, a steady hum of worry.
Is she still unmedicated?
