This book begins with a child reaching.
Not successfully, not confidently, not with any clear belief that the world would answer. But reaching all the same.
My earliest memory is of water.
Learning to swim with an instructor who was in her late teens or early twenties. I am four or five. The indoor pool at the Y. The warmth of the water against my skin. The vastness of it — stretching beyond my reach.
I remember floating near the wall, small and weightless. Swimming toward the instructor. Then, a moment of panic. The deep end offered no bottom to secure myself. My arms flailed; my breath caught in my throat.
I saw the instructor was nearby. I don't know what gave me courage, but I leapt. I wrapped my arms around her, clinging to her like my life depended on it. She steadied me, her arms firm, unshaken. My heart pounded against her shoulder, but she didn't let go.
I was safe.
But something else lingered. Not just relief. Something deeper. Something I wasn't meant to have.
I wasn't supposed to know what it felt like to be held. To be protected. To be cared for. And even at four or five years old, I knew that.
If shame has a birthday, no one recorded it. What I have is the first memory in which I can see it already alive — the first time I knew what it felt like to be held, and the first time I knew I wasn't supposed to want it.
Before I ever knew the word for shame, I had already absorbed its weight. Not from a single moment of humiliation, but from a slow erosion of safety — emotional neglect that left me starving for comfort, for gentleness, for someone to notice my fear and say, "You're okay." The earliest years of my life are not defined by memories but by their absence — by the hollow space where warmth should have been. And in that silence, shame grew. It would shape the way I spoke, or didn't speak, the way I looked at others, and how I would eventually disappear from my own life without realizing I was gone.
The indifference I knew from my family told a story about who I was and how I should think of myself.
This book is about that story.
The House of Unspoken Rules and Child Abuse
I don't remember my parents ever holding me like that swimming instructor.
In my family, affection was something distant, implied rather than given. Love was duty. Gratitude was expected. Respect was mandatory and not earned.
My father, Bruce Sr., was a man of unshakable silence. He believed actions spoke louder than words, but his actions were cold efficiency — he provided, and that was enough. My mother, Kathy, was a storm you learned to anticipate, never knowing when lightning would strike. There was a chill in the air, a tension that wrapped around me like a vice. It was the kind of silence that demanded submission, not understanding.
I never looked directly at my father's face. I kept my gaze down, or slightly averted, as if instinctively avoiding something dangerous. The thought going through my mind was that I should not expect an easy explanation of what I did wrong. My mother's nature was more volatile, though that would become more obvious later in life.
I felt that I was being met with a general sense of disapproval for being.
As a child, I chose not to look — because looking meant finding the disapproval I already knew was there. Years later, I would become incredibly skilled at reading people's body language. I had to build that skill deliberately, as an adult, precisely because I had spent childhood refusing to see.
Refuge and Frailty
Our maternal grandparents were our refuge, our shield. They moved in with us when we were very young, and they were already old — old in the way a child measures it, by frailty. My grandfather had lost his vision. My grandmother needed a walker; she stayed in the dining room that had been converted into a bedroom, while Grandpa stayed upstairs. I remember the skin hanging soft off her arms, her discolored legs. To my child's mind, their bodies were frightening, and that fright kept a distance between us that is uncomfortable for me to write into words even now. They offered safety by their very position as parental figures to my parents — but they did not look powerful enough to rescue anyone.
I remember Grandma standing up for me — her frail voice telling my parents, "Don't hurt him." I might have been 10 years old at that time. That small moment, that whisper of resistance, was the only time someone tried to intervene.
Grandpa would worry about me lifting too much when I joined him to take out the garbage once a week, stacking the garbage pails in a way that would ensure dogs couldn't get into them. He was very protective of me and worried about me getting hurt. I was concerned about not being a wimp or a sissy — which is not what Grandpa intended — but being a tiny boy made me feel a pull away from being seen as weak. Even tenderness had to be measured against that danger.
The Art of Hiding
I began to hide. In Kindergarten, I literally hid behind a chair instead of walking up to the front of the room with my milk money.
We lived in Southington, Connecticut, near the end of a dead-end street. There were woods around our home, a small mountain (Ragged Mountain), and trees to climb. This offered a way for me to hide by myself in the woods.
Around this age, there was one incident where a few boys taunted me. This would not be repeated. My life was not defined by any form of bullying or torment from other kids.
I recall at about age 8 or 9, my mother ushered me out to play with the neighborhood kids after school. I found a telephone pole and hid behind it, my small body pressed against the rough wood, hoping no one would notice me. The world felt too big, too loud, too dangerous. Maybe if I just stay here, no one will notice. Maybe if no one sees me, I can't get hurt.
A Brief Respite
Then the world felt safe in third grade. I was still thin, but I wasn't afraid. I had a friend, Paul Plourde, and that made all the difference. His presence was like armor — with him beside me, I could face anything.
One day, I sat at my desk in Mrs. Felt's classroom when a girl named Donna stood up and declared, "I like Bruce!" My face burned crimson. Then, to make things worse, she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.
Back then, before 5th or 6th grade, boys didn't like girls. The age-old idea of girls having cooties was part of our culture, this bizarre notion that we could get infected by being touched by a member of the opposite sex who was the same age as us.
When Donna said this, the class erupted in giggles. Heat crawled up my neck, spreading to my ears. I didn't know what to do, so I said the first thing that came to mind, the thing I thought boys were supposed to say: "I hate girls."
Mrs. Felt chuckled and turned to the other teacher in the room. "Aren't they a cute couple?"
It's strange, the game we played when we were kids. When did it change — by 5th or 6th grade, when it was suddenly okay to admit that you liked girls?
I never found out the way the other kids did. But third grade had shown me something I wouldn't fully understand for decades: what I could become when I felt protected. With Paul beside me, with a teacher who chuckled instead of scolded, with a girl bold enough to announce she liked me, I was almost a regular boy.
The protection would not last.