Growing up with so many unexplained and unexplored traumas—an emotionally distant mother who leaves mysteriously, a physically abusive father who drinks too much, a knife-wielding sister—I’d learned how to block out what I didn’t want to think or hear or see. When you put on blinders, it becomes easy to create your own reality, to blur fact with fiction. You sharpen the focus to only a few pixels so that you can’t see the whole picture. You start to wonder if something really happened or if you were making it up. After a while, I couldn’t trust myself to know the difference.
