In 2017, I was commuting from NYC to a 9-5 job in the meadowlands of New Jersey. All around me was wet marshland and highway, which, yes, felt as claustrophobic as it sounds. With a sunlight-less desk lit by abrasive halogen lights, it was your typical corporate bloodletting. I was empty.
I was in a liminal space caught between complacency and dread. I liked my job (I was a health editor working with writers) but I loathed my employer and was newly officially diagnosed with an incurable chronic illness (which had gotten worse that year).
My disease is called Ankylosing Spondylitis (a mouthful!), and it causes new bone growth in my spine; the inflammation eats at my body so that it becomes stiff, tight, fused, trapping me inside myself — a metaphor, if I’ve ever heard one. It affects some of my organs and my eyes. My father has it. My aunt has it. My grandmother likely had it.
Part of me sees it as family trauma trapped within our bodies, some amalgam of genetics and grief growing up and our down our spines and in the little spaces between our joints. Small pockets where the pain lives and passes on to the next generation.
I felt in some way that my body, and the constant pain, was a message — to break a genetic cycle, to untether myself from the truths that kept them quiet and sorrowful. I felt that my family had lived in unhappiness for so long, and I was continuing that legacy by staying at a job that was taking my life force from me.
My body was always on fire from sitting at that office chair, and from three hours of daily commuting. And my mind was always wandering: What could I be doing if I weren’t at this desk? How could I be healing my body? Is there a story here, inside my actual bones? Daydreaming is a way to revolt, to resist. Maybe it’s more real than reality.
I was bored one day. So I pitched The New York Times from my little desk in Secaucus, NJ. I should have been doing real work, and my boss was breathing down my neck.
I wanted to tell the world about my life, and I felt the Times was the right venue.
Foster care was my wound, the thing that had me bound in shame and grief; it taught me to hold my breath, clench my jaw, retreat, hide, stay silent. To fear love. It taught me to behave or be thrown away. It taught me that I was a case number. But it also taught me to seek life and beauty and art and connection. To reach through the scrim of my fear.
I had to write openly about the experience, lest I be pinned down by the albatross of truth. I had to translate a whole sea of grief within the cavern of my chest.
The thing is, I was in foster care for a reason. And my parents dealt with addiction for a reason. And my father went to prison for a reason. You just don’t experience addiction, homelessness, foster care, family trauma, or mental illness in a vacuum. You experience it in context. It starts with the ancestral, for me: a great grandfather of mine had come from Russia or Poland and had nothing. My family from Sicily came to escape poverty. The Great Depression, assimilation, religious trauma, stoicism, poor health, lack of resources for single mothers — and on and on. The reason I went into foster care, the reason we lived in homeless shelters, the reason I saw the impact of addiction and prison — it’s because hurt people tried to cope, and they failed. And no one could catch them. It’s the story of a million families who suffer silently.
I felt I had a whole history of forever — an invisible history, barely unraveled — within me. Someone once told me that there’s always a storyteller in the family (maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s also you?). Something about the dregs of that job made me want more. More illumination. More truth.
Perhaps this is the artist’s grand delusion. Perhaps we assign more meaning than it all deserves. Perhaps we just take a public path toward inner healing. Perhaps we speak out into the void and someone speaks back and that collective something is what slowly pieces us back together.
When the article was published, I was at home in NYC around Thanksgiving with my mother and brother. (We are close now, even after foster care). I could not tell them how happy I was to see this byline. My mother had begrudgingly (but generously) both corroborated my story and gave permission to print her life in the Times. My brother was supportive but still inferred that I was capitalizing on our shared trauma. (This is every memoirist’s fear — that you will have caused more pain by writing your truth.) So, I kept my joy to myself.
So. The piece was out. Just like that. It felt like I was nude, splayed out at the foot of my whole life, looking up at it, or back at it. Comments and replies from strangers and fellow writers were supportive and kind, and it felt good to speak not only about my experience but to create a conversation around compassion for parents who would otherwise be seen as “bad.” I wanted to write about humanity.
I thought that this story would be the end, that I’d always be looking forward. I thought that having the Times share my piece would be some miraculous antidote to the wound. It wasn’t, but it opened Pandora’s box.
I’m not sure writing or publishing can heal us. I think that’s a narrative that sounds beautiful, even glamorous, but writing — like anything — is only one type of Great Work. The real change happens in your heart.
Publishing that piece felt like the beginning, honestly. Like I had only scratched the surface. I find that I am constantly looking back, looking to put the pieces together. I find that I am not ready to move on. I have this story inside me and it’s clawing its way to the surface.
Once I realized I wasn’t ashamed — that the world would and could still love me, even on that great big Times stage — I realized I could do this. I could survive being seen and perceived and that I could maybe even make changes with my words.
And that’s why I started this Substack. Because I’m stuck between now and then. And I’m writing my memoir.
Thanks for being here. (And BTW I quit that job).
This is exactly the newsletter I have been looking for, thank you! Keep writing. :-)
I related to this deeply, Lisa. I've had the feeling that I MUST tell my story, that telling it would liberate me and meet some deep psychological need. I've also had to manage the consequences when people wish you hadn't written what you wrote or that your story could be a bit more palatable, a bit easier to hear.
I appreciate you sharing your experience, as we both figure out a way to hold the dualities involved in writing about our lives.