Thicker than Water: A Memoir

by Kerry Washington

Being busy is one of the ways I create a sense of safety and control during times when I feel like there is none.

I learned that appearances matter, and that to be thought of as wealthy or powerful or successful was a goal worth pursuing, whether it was true or not.

I often joke that she spent her entire life learning how to not have feelings, only to be gifted with a highly emotional child.

I longed for an authentic connection with my parents.

As miserable as she may have been at different points in their marriage, my mother was unable to inflict the kind of pain on my dad that she said he had placed on her and on our home.

she let me find it on my own and in my own time so that I was ready to learn it.

The secrets began early in my family; they were secrets designed to protect me, and to do what my parents thought was best for me. But they were secrets all the same.

We would do almost anything to protect the illusion of our perfection.

FINE can be an acronym for fucked-up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional.

I learned that appearances mattered, and what mattered most was the appearance of being OK.

She had wanted to create a world that was different from the one she grew up in. She aimed for a picture-perfect, upwardly mobile African American home, filled with joy and love and success. She believed it was her job to have it all and do it all and be it all.

when you teach a person to believe that their internal truth is a lie, you take from them the very thing that is most important to each of us—our ability to know and trust ourselves.

locked in my bedroom, hiding under the covers, drowning in self-contempt, I would once again look to food and exercise to create a false sense of safety, as well as a kind of physical pain that mirrored the emotional swells I was trying to swim through.

it didn’t matter what people said to me about my appearance—my brain was committed to the idea that I was not enough.

There was freedom in rejecting the need for control and perfectionism that had plagued me for so long.

my dad seemed to do it out of a genuine psychological disconnect, an absolute denial of the truth of himself and of me—

since the truth was not available to my dad, I don’t fault him for not giving me something he didn’t fully have. What he did have was love, imagination, and an enthusiasm for life, and he gave those to me freely.

Without the ability to tell the truth, I was forced into a perpetual series of lies.

my ability to accept and metabolize truth, just like my ability to move through the water, was perhaps stronger than his.

We are as sick as our secrets, and there is healing in community.

Blood may be thicker than water, but love is thicker than blood.