The Tell (Oprah's Book Club)

by Amy Griffin

Mine was my need to push harder, to run faster, to keep moving. My fear of slowing down long enough to listen to what my body might say. She could see that there was something so deep within me that I did not even know it was there, a presence with no name or shape. Not an awareness but instead the absence of awareness. The way it felt to know that there was something about myself I did not know.

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.

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. Besides, as I was reminded often, I was very fortunate. I knew to pay it forward. Looking back, I can see that this laid the foundation for the person I would eventually become—a people pleaser, someone who was conditioned to think of others’ needs first and who strove to be perceived as a pillar of virtue within the community.

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.

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.

Other kids seemed to have an easygoing approach to life that was incomprehensible to me. Even Hikari, the fastidiously polite Japanese exchange student who spent a year living with Courtney’s family, seemed to be having more fun than I was: During an actual tornado warning, sirens blaring through the neighborhood, Courtney found dozens of crushed beer cans under his bed in her basement. He’d come to America for a cultural experience, and he was certainly having one. Why couldn’t I, in my own hometown? It wasn’t that I was serious all the time. Rachel and I took woodshop solely so we could hang out with the cute boys. At sleepovers, Courtney and I would prank-call the neighbors. “Is your refrigerator running?” she’d ask. “Then you better go catch it!” she’d shriek as we howled with laughter. The three of us would pick up burritos at Taco Villa, the local Mexican fast-food restaurant, where you’d have to lean halfway out the car window to scream your order into the speaker, spelling out B-E-A-N or B-E-E-F, since they sounded the same. The ridiculousness of the drive-through was half the fun.

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. I was constantly looking for my next hit of validation. I needed people to affirm that what I was working so hard for was worth it, that I was separate from the crowd.

He was so forthright and so clear. I had never heard him share this truth publicly. I studied him, wondering why the party line had changed, and so dramatically. 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.

I had satisfied every expectation that the world had imposed upon me, met every demand that was made of me. I went to a good school, got a good job, married a good man, built a good business, created a good life for myself and my four children. Hadn’t I done everything right? Hadn’t I tried so hard to be perfect? I had chased validation from the world, and the world had granted it to me. But I’d never really felt it. I’d felt a void inside for years.

And now? I was blistered, run-down, exhausted. Incapable of rest. Terrified to stop for fear of what might emerge from the shadows. That night, brushing my teeth next to John, I realized I simply could not keep going like this. I believed that the pain of maintaining the status quo was greater than the pain of facing whatever it was I had been trying to outrun. For the first time, I could see a different path.

Scrolling through social media, 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

This was a perfect opening for me. “How do you know when someone is trustworthy?” I asked. “Have you played with this other person before?” “No,” he said. “Well, people need to earn our trust. But sometimes these mistakes help us learn things, because not everyone who earns our trust deserves to keep it.” I didn’t want to scare my eight-year-old. Maybe I had gone too far. “I know, Mom,” he said. “But I gotta get that coin back. It makes me so mad.” I ran my hand over the top of his head. “You have every right to be upset,” I said. “The important thing is that you learn to lean on your instincts.”

I couldn’t write everything down fast enough. I was having a hard time remembering anything happening in the real world; I slept poorly and felt spacey. I’d hidden something so huge from my conscious mind for decades, it was difficult for me to trust my own discernment.

And yet I hadn’t even known myself. Isn’t that what I had done all the years I had run from my past? Isn’t that what happens when you’ve been abused—that you can’t see what is right in front of you?

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. I had reached out to Bess hoping that she would remember something that would confirm my experience, but she didn’t have any revelations that could help me to begin to understand things more clearly or bring Mr. Mason to justice.

“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.”

Or had I been so defensive because I felt that I’d been shamed by an authority figure? I thought about what Lauren had said. She’d assured me that she wasn’t angry; then we talked about boundaries. As much as it stung to be called out, I knew this was the mature way to build a real relationship.

“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.”

More and more, all I wanted to do was burn things to the ground. I was angry: angry that I had to navigate this patriarchal culture to have any hope of getting justice; angry that, as a woman who could easily be dismissed as hysterical, I was responsible for carrying the burden of proof; angry that on some level I still felt like I’d betrayed my family by leaving this small town and never coming back, making me forever an outsider. The divide between me and the girl I’d been was so vast that all I could feel across it was rage. And so everything infuriated me, from the weeks it would take for Duke to respond to an email to his repeated characterization of me as a “victim.” “Duke, I am a survivor,” I’d tell him, so much tension in my body I felt like I was about to pop a blood vessel. He never noticed that I corrected him.

Even her asking the question made me feel alone and misunderstood.

It was that he had exploited my most tender quality—my desire to lead, to please, to be kind. He had seen who I was at my core and used it against me. It was the worst kind of abuse I could imagine: taking me from me.

All these years I had wondered: How do I prove to others that this happened to me? But I had tied myself in knots trying to control it all when that was just life—a series of unsolvable mysteries and unanswerable questions, invitations to let go when everything in you wants to hold on tighter. Cryptic messages from the universe, scrawled on postcards with no return address.

didn’t do it for anyone else. I did it for me. There is also, I’ve learned, a way that people sometimes respond when I tell them about my experience. They grow tight, zipped up, locked away. “I don’t think I could do anything like that,” they say. “I’m too much of a control freak. And besides, I don’t think I want to know. What if I don’t have the space for it? What if I find out something that I can’t deal with? I don’t have the time to process what comes up on the other end. Why would I want to wallow in the pain?” Or the line I hear the most: “If I don’t remember something, isn’t there a good reason for that?” In these comments, I hear the sound of their tell—the thing that nags at them with gnawed edges, the way it did at me for so long. Olivia laughed when I told her this. “You and I both know those are probably the people who need it the most,” she said. “Just like you did.”