Dear Reader,
I've spent years studying the craft of writing, and I know that a compelling narrative should evoke emotion and draw you into the story through vivid scenes and immersive detail. I've also been studying the latest research in psychology and neuroscience that has profoundly influenced how I understand and tell my story. Yet for this first section, I must break a cardinal rule of storytelling—I will be telling you rather than showing you much of what happened.
This isn't a failure of memory or craft, but a consequence of survival.
Through a combination of dissociation (what laypeople call "blocking out memories") and years of intensive therapy, the specific details of repeated physical assaults by my parents—and yes, I use the word "assaults" deliberately, as these were not punishments but acts of violence—have been processed, metabolized, and in many cases, dissolved. What remains are the memories of having nightmares about these events, the somatic imprints of fear, and the knowledge that these things happened without the accompanying sensory details that would make for gripping narrative.
When my sister engages in gaslighting about our childhood, the confusion isn't about which particular incident she's disputing—it's that there were so many that they blur together in a haze of normalized terror.
This section chronicles my journey through shyness, social anxiety, and what might be best characterized as social phobia – a fear so complete that it required total avoidance. Paradoxically, by avoiding what I feared most, I never experienced the typical anxiety symptoms others describe. No sweaty palms, no racing heart as I contemplated asking someone on a date. Instead, there was simply... absence. A void where connection should have been.
I'll share stories from my college years, including my experiences with two young women I dated—each relationship lasting exactly one date—as I began the slow work of emerging from my invisible shell.
The background in this section is essential groundwork. At twenty-three, I experienced what felt like waking up for the first time in my life. We're not there yet. That awakening, that full immersion into living—that begins in Section Two, where the narrative becomes what you'd expect from a memoir: immediate, sensory, emotionally resonant.
Recent research, as Lisa Feldman Barrett explores in "How Emotions Are Made," reveals there are no single necessary characteristics of any emotion. This understanding has been crucial in making sense of my own experience—why my anxiety didn't look like textbook anxiety, why my trauma responses were more absence than presence.
For now, I ask for your patience as we traverse this necessary landscape of context. Think of this section as the foundation upon which the house of my story will be built. Some details might feel sparse, but they represent what remains after the essential work of healing has been done.