Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom

by Gypsy-Rose Blanchard

Fear, manipulation, and isolation were all I knew of your kind of “love,”

Trust is necessary for survival, and for most of my childhood I was told that my mother was the only thing keeping me alive. “Stay close to me,” she’d say. “I know how to protect you. I have your best interest.” She convinced the doctors of the same.

I didn’t have leukemia or anemia or any of the illnesses that had defined me and confined me.

As I took a look at my life during these years of incarceration, I realized that trust and its flip side—betrayal—were ever present in my family’s dynamic. My mother had been betrayed growing up, she had betrayed me as I grew up, and then I betrayed my mother in the ultimate way. Three generations of botched trust.

I didn’t realize there were things in my life that weren’t normal until I got to prison and worked through it all. Like the baths I used to take with my mother, up until right before the murder.

I never thought this is not normal.

Because my exposure to anyone other than my mother was so limited, I had no idea that the way I lived was different or unusual. How could I? Without a broader range or exposure to how others lived their lives, I didn’t suspect that our daily schedule was odd or dysfunctional:

my gummy smile is destined to be a permanent reminder of my abuse.

I lost my faith. By the time the murder happened, I didn’t have God in my life at all. I didn’t believe in anything or anyone. My faith and trust no longer in God, I opened myself up to putting blind faith and trust into Nick.

I keep

remembering that I am here because I committed a crime, not for any other reason. Every time an interview request comes in or someone asks me for my autograph, I say to myself, You’re a murderer. No high horse here. That stays at the forefront of my mind.

I was familiar with the carrot-and-stick game. My mother loved me when I was sick and took her love back when I wasn’t. In order to be accepted and loved, I needed to meet the expectations of others.

Being a people-pleaser requires you to submit a part of yourself to the person you aim to please. You give up your own needs and desires, and put the person’s interests in front of your own. In return you expect a payment in the form of validation and acceptance. This kind of currency is dangerous because the cost is you.

After a while, you begin to be able to predict what people want to hear, so you begin to say things you don’t mean. Positive reinforcement to your people-pleasing teaches you real quick how you should act. Deferring to my mother to make decisions for me, to tell me what I like to do, watch, wear, made it impossible to understand myself. Who am I? What makes me tick? What interests do I have? How do I view the world? These questions, which over time and with experimentation help form and shape an identity, were suppressed for me during a time of life that should’ve encouraged them. For twenty-three years I only had one identity, Gypsy-Rose, and for far too long remained one-dimensional.