New. Each one of us begins as something shiny, unadulterated ー arriving slippery and howling. Yes, the lettering of our DNA spells out predispositions ー handedness, eye color, height, even likelihood of extraversion or affability. We bring these gifts into the world, holding them aloft to see how they will be received. My own offerings were generally accepted ーmy parents watered the seeds of musicality, storytelling, and creativity so that they might bloom.
Infused with this nurture was a promise of abundance ー of Big and Mighty forces I could entice to sway things my way, as long as I said my prayers, perfected my homework, and kept on the sunny side of life. I’d carried these expectations with me throughout my teenage years, hoarding good grades, achievement medals, and pats on the head, always looking for the next source of praise and expecting that it would come.
Along with a heaping spoonful of cheerful childhood, Mom and Dad also fed me the myths of their own journeys ー bootstrapping themselves upward in society, juggling young children and night classes, shopping at the discount bread store, and refinishing used bicycles for the kids. The underpinning for all of my opportunities, I knew, was that Dad worked long hours as a software engineer, balancing the family’s finances, and wielding the big stick of tight budgets. Meanwhile, Mom navigated the timing of when to tell him that my brother and I needed basketball shoes for the upcoming season. “Don’t lie to your father if he asks what we bought, but maybe…take the bags straight to your room when we get inside.”
Thus, when I arrived at college in August of 2004 I had the understanding that all my family’s dragons were slayed. I could enjoy the kingdom.
I was a small town Texas girl savoring every succulent detail of city living. I glamorized the mundane, trying on adulthood like I used to try on Mom’s lipstick. I journaled about cool professors who stayed up until 3 am, failed relationships, and sermonized about what it meant to live an upright life. One sentence I wrote from this time period sticks with me: Isn’t it great when God picks us up and shakes our little snow globe around? Right now I’m just waiting for the fake snow to settle.
Oh, sweet, naive soul, I think, you’re poised on the precipice of life’s craggy peak, pep-talking yourself to run down the mountainside.
I had no awareness that the demons my family allegedly thwarted ー poverty, broken childhoods, toxic relationshipsーhad not been banished. They’d only been relegated to the basement to hibernate and grow fat ー feeding on shame and guilt and growing additional heads. I was not yet prepared to discover the loose ends of trauma, addiction, and bereavement that were untied and dangling over the fence into my own adult life. The vulnerability and change I was feeling was a mere foreshadowing of the earthquakes to come.
Some years ago, during our family’s struggle with a dysfunctional dynamic and my father’s addiction, I discovered Brené Brown and her book, The Gifts of Imperfection. In it, she delivered the words of a sacred vocation: “Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story.” This was a rebuttal to my teenage observation that I’d need my snow globe world to settle down. I didn’t need peace — I needed truth. The change I was experiencing wasn’t a subtle jostling –it was the first cracks in the glass of family secret-keeping and forgotten lies. Over the next seventeen years, the religious icons I’d made of my expectations for a safe, happy, linear life would fall apart– the result of an iconoclast both painful and real.
Consider this writing endeavor an invitation to join me as I crack my life open, exposing the shards of family dysfunction and forgotten lies, and flip shame the double bird.
Writer. Singer. Storyteller. Shiseiji. 