Broken Horses

by Brandi Carlile

To put it mildly, they’re special…and sparkly and complicated. When they met, my mom was twenty and my dad was twenty-one.

Mom’s family had temporarily relocated to Colorado, so she moved straight in with the crazy Carlile family. When my mother got pregnant with me, she and my father decided to get married. Like so many people who married this young, they are still married…and in many ways, are still very young.

or a friendly neighbor with a horse called Pepper, or someone who lets you hop their fence to retrieve your Frisbee. Different houses sometimes came with different pets and the loss or abandonment of the old ones at the old place. And of course, there were the feuds….I remember every drunk neighbor. The busybodies and gossips, the liberals and the divorcees. I can recall the name of just about every landlord who evicted us and my parents’ list of grievances against them. I also remember every helping hand. Every nonjudgmental influence over our family and the impact of such relationships on our lifestyle. More than all this I remember worrying quite a bit.

But at the time this was an awakening to life’s subtle power structures…for me it came too early and in the wrong kind of package.

For all the right reasons, my mother thought she’d surprise me and put the whole thing together so that when I woke up, I could immediately play with it. But when I woke up, I was disproportionately furious. There was so little I had control over in there. I just wanted to build something on my own and get a little power back over something that was happening to me against my will. So I acted like a normal five-year-old and threw a fit. My mother of course totally understood, but because I’d become so perceptive, I immediately noticed the exhaustion and defeat on her face. I remembered everything I’d just put her through and was struck down by how guilty I felt.

That moment bothered me until I was an adult…until I had my children and realized that these are completely normal childish moments of innocent selfishness. The idea that a child might carry around guilt or a sense of responsibility for us as parents is so unfair…but I worry about it a lot.

I would find out many years later after noticing an uncanny resemblance between my father and serial killer Gary Ridgway in the book The Riverman that my mother was deeply concerned that my father was in fact the Green River Killer for about four years in the late ’80s. I’m fighting strange laughter as I write this, which should tell you everything about the dysfunction, humor, drama, and humanity of my childhood.

I felt like that girl from The Twilight Zone, lost in another dimension watching myself live like a child but not really feeling like one.

This experience and a few others have also given me a faith that is as impervious to political extremism as it is to the whims of culture. That tape was my comfort blanket or that one tattered stuffed animal that a child is fundamentally attached to. I must have lost it in one of our moves. I think things disappear when we don’t need them anymore. I listened to that music every night. It was my proof that God is real. Music is still my proof that God is real.

Singing and vocalizing in general create X-ray levels of emotional exposure. You may open your mouth and not know what’s going to come out.

The Opry had an announcer. I’ll never forget the sound of my name as I was being called out onstage for the first time. You don’t hear your full name for too many reasons when you’re a kid. Attendance in school, maybe a stern warning from your parents, but it’s not too often that your name is called out like an adult’s to do something extraordinary. I still think about it sometimes when I’m introduced to the stage or if I accept an award. It’s an honor to hear your name spoken in such a way.

The landslide came when I couldn’t apply myself in school. I was dyslexic, and failing sixth grade. I’d already been to six schools and simply couldn’t function in an academic setting. I struggled to get along with other kids and spent a lot of time worrying about being poor.

Until this point, I had been taught that AIDS was a disease caused by homosexual men. I of course was told for most of my childhood by multiple sources that to be gay was a one-way ticket to hell. Homosexuality and suicide were the “unforgivables,” and I believed this wholeheartedly. Thank God for books and libraries…and school.

School was brutal. My brother and I were being bullied and being bullies every day. The pecking order around this age is all-consuming, always avoiding embarrassment while trying to embarrass others…just trying to survive on fistfights and bravado, hiding and making a scene all in the same day.

You may have heard the word “broke” as it pertains to tamed horses. That is not what I mean. To be “broke,” a horse must allow a person to believe that it is afraid enough to be conquered, tamed, and ridden. It’s never true. They don’t break. I’ve never been thrown, kicked, or stepped on by a wild horse…they’ve always been “broke.” Horse people never say a horse is broken even when it would seem to make sense…

Whenever I wasn’t spending time with Amber, I was with David. (I never could spend a day alone, then or now, and I have never once been single.) I had a deep and enduring crush on David and he didn’t give a shit about my awkward eccentricity, or my passion for music, for that matter.

The Ellen DeGeneres coming-out episode was the beginning and the end of any confusion I was having around my sexuality. Ellen was obviously gay but hadn’t come out yet. I loved her so much and my dad did too. We never talked about her sexuality, but we lounged around the TV in the evenings and watched her show together quite a bit, both of us recoiling from embarrassment when she’d start rambling and digging herself into those famous Ellen holes. There was a buildup to her coming out and it was all over the news. I recorded the episode on a VHS tape marked “David’s baseball game” that I still have.

I knew that when Ellen said she was gay on national television that I was, too, and it was time to tell my parents. It didn’t happen all at once, so I don’t really have a coming-out story for you….I wish I did, but I guess it was clumsier and less beautiful than that; honestly it was a series of awkward little chats and avoidances. But maybe there are too many “coming-out stories” and not enough of us talking about an uncomfortable and awkward…emergence. Ellen gave me the language and an inroad to a dialogue with my family. It was the first mile of a very long road toward all of us understanding what any of that meant. I was, simply put, the only gay person I had ever met. Even I didn’t accept me yet….Should I cut my hair? Am I a vegetarian now?

The first time I said the words it was to Amber Lee. I told her on my sixteenth birthday. It was awkward and hard for her. She already knew, and she still loved me and wanted to accept me, but she began to phase me out as her friend. She had a very religious boyfriend and was feeling conflicted. Then her dad fired me—he said that my sexuality made the bass player uncomfortable.

I had lost my first job. The worst part was being told that because I was gay, I couldn’t do that music anymore. That was the one rejection I couldn’t take.

I was drawn back to church at this point because it had brought me such comfort as a young child, and I was fundamentally unsettled. All was not right with my soul. It’s probably ...