I don’t know that I have a story worth selling. I have an interesting life, that’s for certain. Not many people have driven alone on a 400-mile dirt road to the Arctic Ocean, communed with crows, and overcome crippling depression, suicidal ideation, and its accompanying fibromyalgia. Not everyone has found or even understands true self-love and how it can break a person away from patterns of abuse and abusive relationships. But my story doesn’t have a once-upon-a-time unfolding, a climax of terror, struggle, and heroism, and a happy conclusion. It’s an ongoing journey, fluctuating between successes and setbacks, highs and lows, deaths, rebirths, recovery, and discovery. It includes long stretches of general contentment, which, though a tremendous boon for one who struggled most of her life to achieve and maintain this level of safety, makes for mundane reading and isn’t worth more than a sentence or two when attempting to captivate an audience for the long haul.
Still, I have to start somewhere.
Once upon a time I was a baby. An innocent little thing. A fresh canvas upon which my genetics and my environment would paint the instructions for how I would navigate life for the many or few years of my human existence. I had a kind heart, full of love and compassion for living things. I was a good little girl. I did my best to do the right things in an upbringing where rules and expectations fluctuated. I was quick to modify my behaviors to adapt and prevent the varying levels of punishment for a concept of disobedience I didn’t understand. I learned to accept that, more often than not, favorite coffee cups etched with the gold and rainbows appreciated by most young children were smashed against the walls to the regular rhythm of blood-curdling arguments between my parents while I hid under a large pedestal desk that I still own today.
Once upon a time I grew up in an unstable home environment with a narcissistic mother and a relatively absent father. It was a chaos that I knew only as normal life.
How many details of my abuse and neglect do I divulge? We humans do love to be appalled. We enjoy the gossip that makes us feel better about our own perceived shortcomings as much as we appreciate the validation we find in the familiarity of struggle and injustice. Yet there is a certain point at which the divulgence becomes a pity-party, a compilation of complaints that run a sympathetic heart dry and make you close the book, put down the kindle, turn off the audio stream and search for something lighter, something uplifting after all that woe.
So what about the good memories? The piano and singing duets with my father and the artistic, literary, and musical talents nurtured by my mother. The love of nature, animals, and the outdoors instilled in me from infancy. How do I create a balanced picture that accurately explains why I put off my childhood intentions of running away until I turned 40?
I don’t know how to explain why it took so long to heal and what healing looks like. I don’t know how to portray that part of my life as inspirational. Much of it was arduous and, frankly, embarrassing, having to look at myself and my behaviors under the ghastly bright light of honesty. And as much as I have found an abundance of peace and self-compassion in that honesty, I’m still hesitant to feel like an ass to the general public on the off chance of reaching a few people and helping them out of the wallows of their own personal despair.
But you do want to hear about the wild crow that stands on my head, right? And all the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met and the things I have seen and done. The great things. The life-changing and once-in-a-lifetime events and accomplishments. I want to share them. But I can’t sugarcoat them. They need raw naked cold vulnerable honesty, a backstory of suffering and growth if they are to have any substance. You need to know how I got here.
Dear god, how the fuck am I going to tell this story?
Once upon a time I was me.
All pictures and words copyright Anna Horvitz (me) and cannot be used without my consent.
The little girl in the photos is me.