The Tell (Oprah's Book Club)

by Amy Griffin

I ran because I was afraid of what I would feel if I sat still.

“Amy?” she said. “Are you all right?” I felt wetness on my cheeks. I pressed my hands to my face, which was streaked with tears. She looked concerned. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m so embarrassed.”

Trauma response?

Denial is not a switch that can be turned off and on. Denial is a glass case that must be shattered before you realize you were trapped inside it in the first place.

Free—that was what my childhood in the Texas Panhandle felt like to me. Free like the wide-open spaces, where you could see for miles.

There were two worlds. There was the one outside, where I could be wild, always in a swimsuit, my hair bleached from the summer sun and dry umber dirt under my fingernails. I was as rugged and free as the longhorns that, according to folklore, still roamed Palo Duro Canyon. Then there was the world inside, a world of things, which was ruled by order, exemplified by the stores my family owned. The aisles and shelves were organized, each product perfectly lined up.

That order was a form of safety. Life, I thought, would be better if everything could be presented like the items in that store, packaged or frozen. I believed that the things that we sold at my family’s stores were good because we sold them. And what we sold—what was good—was convenience. This—convenience—was very important. The best things in life weren’t free. They were shrink-wrapped.

It was the first time I understood that everything has a cost.

I began to see that there were things, adult things related to matters of intimacy, that people just didn’t talk about. Nobody said that Tom was gay, although it was obvious that he was different from other men I knew, nor did they comment on the fact that Harley and Novie slept in separate bedrooms, as we once discovered when we were playing hide-and-seek in her house. My mother assured us that babies were delivered by stork.

Looking good was important. Our Christmas card was always sent on time, some clever little message over a photo of all of us perfectly dressed; in the process of getting the shot, we all would have pushed, poked, and prodded one another a hundred times, but so long as there was one photo with the four of us smiling, that was all that mattered. Growing up in the South, you understand quickly the ocean that separates appearance and reality, particularly for women.

From an early age, I was told that I was a natural leader. In some ways, perhaps, it was a birthright: My mother modeled kindness and my father modeled achievement. Leadership, I thought, existed at the crosshairs of these two qualities. There was no higher good than to be good to people.

Getting to Amarillo was a challenge; you had to fly through Denver or Dallas to get in or get out. From the highway, Amarillo might have looked like little more than a place you would stop for a bathroom break on a long-haul cross-country trip, wedged between truck stops as vast as small cities and the Big Texan steak house, where if you could clear an entire seventy-two-ounce steak with all the trimmings, including dessert, you’d get it for free.

Memory is a sieve that catches only the most important moments. The insignificant details of daily life don’t stick; instead, they flow through the sieve. Then there are experiences that are unusual, set apart from the everyday, that carry an emotional charge. These we often hold on to, turning them over and over. As I do with this image. The roar of the applause, the tears in my father’s eyes, and me standing onstage.

When Lizzie accused me of thinking I was better than her, of course, I denied it. But at some level, Lizzie was right. I worked harder than most of my peers. I pushed myself more. Wasn’t that what it meant to be better? The way pressure makes a diamond, I thought that striving for exceptionalism, no matter how burdensome it felt at times, was a virtue. It was my superpower.

Maybe that was just what growing up felt like—to lose that innocence and disinhibition, to replace them with an adult-minded sense of responsibility.

Back then, freedom was a kind of abandon—wild, reckless, unselfconscious. Now I felt free when I could control every detail, from the temperature to the song on the stereo to where I would go next.

The past is full of paradoxes. I knew that I was loved by my parents. Even my name, Amy, meant beloved. I was reminded of it every time I looked at the turquoise bag from Joan Altman’s, the Jon Hart bag with my name on it. I loved my family and I loved my friends. My connections were deep and real.

But at some point I had come to believe that I was loved not for any inherent worth but because of all my accomplishments. With each new accomplishment came more praise; that praise, I thought, was love. Yet I burned through the praise so quickly: There was never enough to sustain me.

Perfection is a lonely pursuit.

It was bred into you, between school, church, and southern morality, that a woman was meant to look pretty, take care of the kids, and somehow maintain the appearance of chastity while doing it.

Even though we had all been there, the experience was so violating that it was easier to pretend it had never happened.

“So, we’re two Texans in England—what are you doing after this?” he said. “Can I take you to dinner?” I nodded. I was in a foreign country, which felt exotic, and my father already approved of James’s family. This was exactly the type of man to whom I should say yes.

Set up to..... Fail

“If my dad knew what you did to me,” I said, “he would kill you.” I

Rape

My mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer; she had a lumpectomy, and her prognosis was good, but there was so much uncertainty. Lizzie moved home to spend more time with her. She was a consummate caretaker, and she and my mom were deeply bonded from the years my mom had spent making sure Lizzie didn’t fall behind. It was a familiar dynamic: I was achieving out in the world, while Lizzie had the space to be caring and to be with my mom. Life felt fragile, and I envied the time they got to spend together.

This feels liks its just thrown in here

John’s philosophy in all things—business, romance, deciding what to order for takeout—was this: Long no, short yes. What this meant was, if he found himself deliberating, equivocating, and questioning a decision—if it took him a long time to reach a conclusion—the answer was no. If he quickly and definitively committed to something, the answer was yes. He trusted his instincts. With him and me, it was a short yes.

After a dinner of hot dogs and watermelon on paper plates, my hair still wet from the pool, just as it had been from the rain on the night of our first date, he proposed. It was easy to love him and to be loved by him.

This is all so fast... Wasnt 9/11 like three pgs go?

“But we don’t feel like we know who you are,” Gigi said. “You’re nice, but you’re not real. Do you have any idea how hard it is to have you as a mother? You do everything perfectly. You make everything look so easy. How are we supposed to relate to you?”

For the first time, he sounded grateful, at peace with the reality of his childhood.

It was a reminder that multiple stories could be true at the same time, that we select our narratives in accordance with how honest we want to be and how honest we can be with ourselves.

“This medicine allows you to recognize that you don’t need to be in control,” she said. It was golden hour, half her face bathed in sunlight. Her words sounded like poetry. “It’s a day with yourself—with the you that you’ve forgotten.” “So it’s like rewinding,” I said, “to the way you were before.” “It’s not rewinding,” she said. “It’s rebecoming. You have always been your essential self. You just have to remember.”

Isn’t life funny that way? You start off running from something, the point where it all began, and then, as it approaches on the horizon, you realize that you haven’t been running from it at all. You’ve been running toward it.

I felt profound compassion for that little girl—me—and all she’d endured. The warmth and sweetness and beauty reminded me of the way I’d felt that day in the sea in Ibiza—a perfect day, bathed in sunlight.

“All of this is to say: Just because you couldn’t recall your trauma on a conscious level doesn’t mean it hasn’t always been there, affecting your life.”

What we don’t always see is how the ambition of high-achieving people can be a trauma response. Sometimes the person who appears to have it together might actually need support.”

“You owe it to yourself to sit with it all,” Lauren said. “When you tell someone, it will take on new meaning. You’ll be worried about their feelings and whether or not they believe you.”

“William,” I said breathlessly, “this is unbelievable. You were validated. He was held accountable. What an incredible outcome for such a terrible thing.”

Who talks like this?

I’d seen a quote from Carl Jung that resonated: “Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our life and we will call it fate.” I was determined to unearth whatever I’d been ascribing to fate. “I want to put myself in control.”

And yet it was John with whom I’d gotten so upset because his love made it safe for me to be angry. With all these other men, I couldn’t allow myself the indulgence of my rage. I had cosigned their bad behavior with my southern gentility for too long. Enough was enough.

This was where I learned how to keep myself safe, how to survive. Those were the only boundaries I knew.

Abuse, I was beginning to understand, was a tangled mess of shame and silence. The abused learn early that survival sometimes means protecting the secrets of their abusers. Growing up doesn’t mean that impulse goes away.

“That’s an interesting thought,” Lauren said. “As though your word isn’t enough, even for the people who love you. Like you still need to prove something to them—and maybe to yourself.” “It’s about holding him accountable—that’s how I will heal,” I said. “Justice is how I heal, for me and for everyone else who’s been through something like this. What kind of example am I setting for my daughters, and for other women, if I don’t do everything I can to make sure he can’t hurt anyone else?”

“Tough to keep people from talking in a small town,” I said, sighing. “I think I’m at the point where I need to tell my family. I’m going to see my sister.”

Ugh this dialogue is killing me

I loved her deeply, but I also sensed that she wanted more from our relationship, something I never knew how to give.

‘Lizzie, you have nothing to be nervous about. She’s your sister. She loves you. She might look good on paper, but you have so much more to offer her emotionally than she does you.’ ”

Damn

How could I have much to offer my sister emotionally if I was always on the run? For that matter, had I been emotionally available for anyone? I had always prioritized achievement, focusing on the way things looked from the outside and how people saw me.

All those years, I’d had a tell. Now I needed to tell.

Barf

“Who is Kali?” I asked. “The Hindu goddess of divine feminine energy,” Lauren said. “She possesses the power of both creation and destruction. They’re two sides of the same coin.”

For the first time in months, I felt something unfamiliar—a bubble of hope within me that felt like it was filling me from the inside out. The police believed me; Mr. Mason might soon be in custody; then I could tell my children, and life would go back to normal. How validating it would be to know that Mr. Mason would not be able to hurt anyone else—that I was right and he was wrong. The world would take care of me. Things would work out.

Foreshadow Failure

My forty-six-year-old brain can see that he was flirting with me and testing me.”

Who would ever say this

It had been two years since our trip to Tennessee for my dad’s birthday.

Wtf

My father looked pensive. “Well, the coyotes can’t help it. It’s a law of nature. It’s just what they do. And it’s our job to make sure they don’t.”

Uhhhh