That’s what I have been doing my whole life, I realize. Always looking outside of myself for validation that I am okay, that I am worth something. Never believing that the key to self-esteem lay inside myself all along. You can’t drink it into yourself. You definitely can’t fuck it into yourself. You can’t work it into yourself either.
The more I trust her, the more I start spilling to Sherrye all of my unspeakable stories. She pours me glasses of water and hands me tissues to calm me down. She nods attentively, but I can see clearly from her questions what is happening as she tries to follow along.
“Now . . . who is this again? Okay, this is another person? And what is Twitter exactly?”
Sherrye can’t keep up. Hell, I can’t keep up either. I’m using all these meaningless transitory details to avoid articulating feelings that are so difficult for me. Eventually, after a few sessions of trying to constantly steer conversations away from my early life to prattle on about the minutia of some Post assignment, Sherrye confronts me.
She wants to know why I won’t talk about my childhood. Why have I been ignoring for so very long that little person inside of me who has been hurting and acting out?
“My inner child?” I repeat, and then I laugh bitterly. “What a bunch of bullshit.”
I haven’t heard from that little girl in years. She knows her place. I’ve made sure of that.
Sherrye never takes any of my dismissive or angry bait. She never “reacts.”
“I understand what you mean,” she says compassionately. “But it’s a lot more than that.”
I cry through my anger. I let myself actually feel the sensations that I did as a little girl and how frozen I become when even thinking about criticizing my parents or acknowledging any pain. It is my job to protect them. Why can’t people see that?
But week after week, Sherrye persists. As she gently guides me through the story of my life—to the most difficult parts—I realize that the little person is still there.
She hasn’t left me. She’s just completely terrified.
* * *
ONCE I OPEN myself up to all the feelings I never let myself acknowledge as a child, it feels like a dam breaking. The tears never seem to stop. The softness feels too soft. I think I am in danger of disappearing completely. The world becomes harsh, painful, ugly . . . dangerous.
“I can’t take it, I can’t take it, I just can’t take it,” I yell at Sherrye, sounding exactly like my father when he’s in a rage.
“You can,” Sherrye tells me. “Pain is not going to kill you. You’re not betraying your family by talking about them. It’s okay to acknowledge what you feel inside.”
But when I do, it feels like all I am doing is reopening old wounds.
I call my dad one night and tell him I’m trying to do my Fourth Step as part of my AA program, where you look at resentments you’ve carried throughout your lifetime. I write out a list for my father, and it’s late at night when I call. Instantly, my father snaps at me when I tell him what I’d like to do.
“Do I want to hear what a shitty father I was? No, Mandy!”
I hang up the phone, shell-shocked and inconsolable. How stupid and naïve I was to think such a thing was even possible. The next time I see Sherrye, when I try to tell her about what happened, I can barely speak at all I am crying so hard. This is all one giant bad idea, I tell her. I’m only making things worse.
“Okay, you need to go to an Al-Anon meeting,” Sherrye says. “You. Have. To. Go.”
But my dad isn’t a drunk. And Al-Anon is a twelve-step group for friends or families of alcoholics to deal with their volatile behavior. Hell, my dad wasn’t even allowed to drink for a long time because the doctors thought it would affect the metal plate in his head. But both his birth parents and his adopted parents were alcoholics. And his head injury has caused him to have the mood swings of one.
“Fine,” I relent. “I’ll go to yet another twelve-step meeting. Pretty soon my life will be nothing but fucking twelve-step meetings.”
When I arrive at my very first Al-Anon meeting on the Upper East Side inside a sterile office space, I notice that the pained, nervous smiles of everyone around me are communicating a code of sorts. We all seem to share a secret language of perfectionism and extreme self-criticism. We want so badly to be loved. We want so badly not to be rejected. We are on high alert constantly, crippled by hyperawareness, trying to sense what might be the alcoholic’s (or dysfunctional person’s) next move in order to accommodate that or dodge the chaos.
It’s a strange, unsettling feeling.
My face must betray my discomfort. Because a little old lady sitting next to me leans over and pats my leg.
“Everyone’s really nice here, don’t worry,” she assures me. “My name’s Anna. We can talk afterward if you’d like.”
When the meeting ends, Anna turns to me and asks if I want to get a coffee. She’s my mom’s age, and her kindness is so disarming, so comforting, so unexpected.
As we sit in one of those neon-lit Café Metros, each knowing only the other’s first name, I tell her a little about the disaster that calling my father was the other night. I try to explain why getting yelled at felt like reliving childhood trauma all over again.
“I understand,” Anna says. “You know, there’s this principle in Al-Anon that may be helpful to you. Have you ever heard of something called ‘detachment with love’?”
I shake my head no.
“Think of it like this,” Anna says. “You can still love your father as much as you always have. That never goes away. But you don’t have to keep engaging in the same way again and again with people who have hurt you, hoping for a different result. You can protect yourself first. But you don’t have to stop loving them either.”
We exchange numbers before she leaves, but I never see or talk to her again. This happens all the time in recovery meetings. People give you little gems of wisdom that dramatically impact your entire journey, and that is your onetime exchange with each other, human to human.
I take Anna’s (and Al-Anon’s) life-changing lesson and start applying it to the Post, too.
The conflicts stop. It feels like I’m no longer thrashing and bashing around, creating problems and expecting a different result.
I love the Post. But I can detach from it, too.
* * *
OF COURSE, I don’t stop looking for another job completely.
One late night at Carolines, I start talking to Scott Einziger, a TV guy who used to be a producer on Howard Stern and was a showrunner on The Amazing Race, and he tells me about how he’s started investing in and forming new companies. Boldly, I tell him that he should invest in me. What would the investment be? he wants to know. I think about it and suggest something I’ve been reading about a lot online: the self-publishing industry. We could create an e-book company together, I suggest, and he listens to my on-the-spot business plan I’m literally imagining right then and there.
Scott has to fly back to LA soon, but we spend the next few weeks emailing and talking on the phone all day long, exchanging ideas of how such a situation might work.
Within two weeks, Scott feels enough confidence to respond to my suggestion that he should invest in me. He is game. He says I should quit my job so I can move to LA, and he’ll pay for expenses. But there is a complication at play. We like each other quite a bit. At one point, he tells me that he thinks he may just have found a soul mate in me. I like him so much, too, and I could see myself falling for him. So I don’t let the potential for personal and professional entanglement scare me off.
I’m just so excited for a new chapter. I don’t even fully believe what is unfolding until one day my phone rings at work with an alert from PayPal. “You have $8,000.” I can’t believe it at first. No one is around, so I actually fall on the floor of the newsroom in disbelief. I am going to have a whole new life. I can’t stop smiling.
I quit my job a few weeks later. My last day is February 12, 2012. Reali
zing that this is an opportunity to also unburden myself from all the debt that I have accrued during my insane partying days, I take Courtney Love’s advice and declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy to rid myself of the more than $55,000 in debt I’ve accrued in the last few years.
I’m going to have a fresh start, and none of this could have happened if I was out drinking and getting high and not believing in myself enough to take control.
But as much as I can’t wait for this new venture, I’m also a little bit scared. I’m going to be living rent-free in a studio apartment that Scott is paying for, doing a business I’ve kind of pulled out of my ass, and also, he tells me after his last trip to New York, he thinks he might be falling in love with me. I feel emotionally bonded as well, but I’m also nervous.
“Won’t that complicate our business relationship?” I ask.
“You’re right,” Scott agrees. “We’ll slay dragons in business, and we can figure out what happens after that.”
I really don’t want to screw this up. I just want some kind of magic bullet that will make me have the perfect mental health for when I finally move to California to start my new life as an entrepreneur. But panic attacks occur fairly regularly once I no longer have the routine and scheduling of the Post. I no longer have the daily assignments to distract me from the full weight of all the awareness that sobriety has brought into my life.
When I visit Heather Spillane, an extraordinary acupuncturist who saw me at my absolute worst, I tell her all about various regrets from how I acted before I got clean. As I lie on her table one day, I ask her, “How do you stop thinking about things that you could have done differently? That you’ve messed up?”
“You know what ‘shame’ stands for?” Heather responds. “ ‘Should Have Already Mastered Everything.’ ”
I am stunned. Heather’s words flood over me like a cool tonic of healing and forgiveness. They’re so simple and so true. No one has mastered everything. We just have to keep learning, getting better, trying to be our best selves.
Heather tells me she learned it from the “Caron Institute.” I write down the name, google it, and read all about this drug and alcohol facility in Pennsylvania that specializes in intensive group therapy in something they call their “Breakthrough program.” I realize this is exactly the missing link in my recovery that I need. Something that will help me be able to live with the at-times-crippling realizations that sobriety brings as you look back upon your past and creates a bridge for you to move on to the next phase of your life in a healthy, stable way.
I ask Scott if it’s okay if I use part of his money to do Caron’s Breakthrough program—at a cost of $2,600—and he fully supports it. Soon after, I spend one week in a tiny town in Pennsylvania, learning from morning to night about what unhealthy relationship dynamics I might be re-creating in my life and how to advance my recovery to a better place.
Part of the experience includes writing letters to my parents, expressing what I wish I could have gotten from them when I was younger—versus the reality of what I did receive.
“Dad,” I write in my letter, “I didn’t just want to hear that I was valuable. I wanted you to show me I was valuable through your actions.”
In a small nondescript room with sunlight streaming through the windows, I stand up, wearing no makeup, no designer clothes, and I read this entire letter aloud to my group. Except when I get to that line, the therapist stops me cold.
“Wait,” he says. “I want to try something.”
In order for me to really reflect on the meaning behind my words—and how they relate to my own self-treatment and care—he assigns another group member to play “me” so that I can then read that statement back to “myself.” We did this sort of thing at Caron a lot. It sounds so silly, but for some reason these “psychodrama” act-outs can make you see a desire you are articulating in an entirely new light. Which is exactly what happens.
“I wanted you to show me I was valuable through your actions,” I tell the woman who represents me, sitting in a chair a few feet away. As the words come out, as I tell “myself” that I wanted to be shown that I was valuable through my actions, the impact is overwhelming.
Mandy, I wanted you to show me I was valuable through your actions.
Do you see? Do you see what I saw?
It’s like a layer of film was lifted from my eyes. An often-repeated principle of sobriety is the notion of “taking care of your side of the street.” Meaning, I can’t change my father. I can’t change anyone. I certainly can’t go back in time. But I can change myself.
So why have I been treating myself so terribly?
A few months later, at the beginning of June, I make my big move out to LA to stay in the apartment set up by Scott, someone with whom I have only spent three hours in person.
He’s a remarkable individual, one of the smartest, greatest men I’ve ever met in my life, but our relationship is complicated. I’m so consumed with my sobriety and self-care during this time, going to meetings all the time and without any kind of structure or schedule, the progress I make on creating this company I pitched him is fairly pathetic.
But I tell myself that it’s okay because I know that he is also shepherding my recovery, and he fully supports that. He loves me, after all. He told me that. But Scott is separated and going through a divorce at the time, and ours is not a true business relationship. I am his fake wife, and when on the night of my second-year anniversary of sobriety I crash the car he rented for me, he lashes out in a way that makes clear how dangerous the blurring of personal and professional can be.
Suddenly, the close emotional bond we have developed is nowhere in sight. Now he is a raging boss who is disgusted with me as an employee who has failed to deliver. It leaves me feeling shell-shocked. I have never seen this side of him before. It feels like a combination of the rage of my father and the vitriol of my ex-husband combined. It is extremely jarring.
“Where is the work you promised me?” Scott yells. “What is wrong with you? Why are you so full of shit?”
When I try to speak, he interrupts me and mocks me mercilessly.
“I’ll pay you back the money,” I tell him, my voice going monotone. “But I’m not going to accept this. I don’t let men talk to me this way in my life anymore.”
I tell him I am moving home to live with my parents in San Diego.
“Keep the money,” he says. “I don’t expect anything. But I’m disappointed in you for giving up.”
Scott says I need to get over his rage outburst and just pretend it didn’t happen. But I can’t do that anymore. My gut tells me that I need to get out. His anger at me is completely justified at my utter failure as an entrepreneur, but the rage he directed at me triggers a sense of fight-or-flight protection I can’t ignore. It feels like a switch has gone off. One minute our relationship is no expectations, take your time, focus on your self-care. The next minute I am deserving of the most brutal and demeaning of his anger. I realize I need to triage the situation before it gets any worse.
I’m happy to say that in the months that follow, a healing occurs. We become good friends again and recognize that the entire thing was a mistake, sparked by both of us being in such transitory, uncertain periods in our lives. I am still fairly new to sobriety, he is in the middle of a divorce, and I suppose both of us were so desperate to cling to something that felt positive and warm and good, we jumped into a whirlwind situation that unsurprisingly self-destructed within a very short span of time.
One of the things that I love the most about Scott and this experience is that never once did we share any physical intimacy. It taught me so much about how deeply you can connect with a man when you don’t muck the whole thing up with sex from the get-go. And it also taught me that establishing boundaries isn’t the end of the world.
But it is tumultuous. On a hot July night, I pack up my entire life once again after only two months in LA. I arrive on my parents’ doorstep at 1 a.m. with a U-Haul stuffe
d with my now incredibly stripped-to-the-bone belongings.
I am thirty-six years old. I have $279 in my bank account. I have no job prospects. I have no romantic prospects. I have nothing. And it feels like such a relief.
I am a phoenix, just like Courtney Love’s psychic predicted, starting over from ashes once again.
* * *
RETURNING HOME AS an adult woman is like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. It is awful and beautiful and extraordinary and like being given a time machine to understand some of the keys to surviving my childhood.
As a sober woman, I am now able to give myself something I couldn’t when I was just a child growing up in my family’s unpredictable household: compassion.
Seeing my dad yell and scream one day, set off by his cup being moved slightly, I react so differently as an adult. I still jump. I still feel scared. My insides still freeze. I still feel afraid. But I no longer absorb it like a sponge. I no longer feel like it is all my fault. Returning home helps me give so much love to the little girl inside me who didn’t have anyone watching out for her so many years ago. I think about what Sherrye the therapist told me, about connecting with that little person inside of me. I’m starting to get it now. It’s starting to make sense finally. You can re-parent yourself. You can give yourself what you’ve always needed. You don’t have to define yourself by the scars of your past.
In order to keep attending AA and Al-Anon meetings, I withdraw fifty dollars from my ever-dwindling bank account to purchase a used, barely working bike off Craigslist so I can cycle around the city and make meetings. At every single one I attend, I tell my story, and it feels so different from the ones in New York, where, despite the emphasis on anonymity, many people still discuss their very high-powered Manhattan-specific jobs in theater, in media, in PR. This kind of thing never gets brought up in San Diego. The pace feels so easygoing and languid. Like, you can actually feel how close the ocean is, and we are all so peaceful just because of it. There is nothing transactional about any conversation. I don’t want anything from them. They don’t want anything from me. We are just trying to be better people.
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