oh the bridges you'll burn

Memory, Myth, and the Fear of Being Seen

In the process of writing in kinship, I’ve come to realize there’s no way to produce the book that needs to be written and leave myself out of it. I have spent my entire life afraid to tell my story, afraid of myself—bound by the unspoken and marrow-deep mandate bestowed upon me by my family’s values. Now I know I have to move through and past that fear, to do this book justice, and trust myself to convey my experiences honestly. In doing so, I can unburden myself, liberate my younger self, and honor the people who have been part of my story with the dignity and respect they deserve. This is a labor of love, trust and tenderness. Sometimes in order to do generational curse breaking, we gotta do some familial code breaking.

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I learned I had a bad childhood from other people, after the fact.

It came as a shock because I believed the only thing wrong with my childhood was me, which explained why I was thrown out of it before I had much time to finish it—or before it had time to finish with me. I began to realize I was different, slightly “undercooked,” as I moved through the social spheres of adolescence and early adulthood and saw myself in relation to my peers. My difference eventually became impossible to ignore. My stories weren’t seen as funny like everyone else’s; instead, they garnered sympathy, pity, or faces frozen in expressions akin to horror. At a certain point, I was explicitly left out of the “truth” part of truth or dare, mandated to take a drinking penalty instead because, as my roommates so delicately put it — “your truths make everyone feel fucked up". This was a huge departure from how I’d perceived these events and anecdotes, cocooned within their own context and protected from the prying, judging eyes and opinions of everyone else.

Everything I initially understood and believed about my childhood was told to me—explicitly and often—reinforced by a family whose very bloodline runs on storytelling. These stories would be retold at holidays and barbecues, often ballooning in funny, joyful details with each retelling, while the parts that included hurt, shame, or anger would shrink so far into the background that eventually any attempt to mention them would be met with a full denial of their existence. And if you went poking around too much, you could expect to be met with a quietly hostile “don’t exaggerate” or a dismissive “that’s not what happened,” tied neatly in a bow with the insinuation that you were simply too sensitive. So, by all credible accounts, I was loved, I was protected, I was safe, I was supported. Nothing was wrong, nothing had gone wrong, and nothing had ever happened to me. This created a crisis of identity. As I grew older, my behavior, my emotional state, my very being did not, in fact, reflect a person who was loved, protected, safe, and supported. So, the issue to reconcile was me.

It’s not easy for me to recall the first twenty or so years of my life. Not because the memories themselves are difficult, but because there seems to be a distinct lack of memory. Even typing this, I feel my body seizing around the truth of it—the distrust I sowed in myself. My memories and experiences became hardwired, baked into my very being by a deep and fundamental distrust of myself as the narrator.

Recently, a family member and I reconnected, and she expressed a lot of recognition and personal regret about events in my childhood and her role as an adult in my life during those years. She mentioned a time in my adolescence when I slept on an air mattress. Hazy sensations bloomed to the surface of my mind: a bluish-gray color, the feel of a suede-like top, the sensation of my fingernail flicking at the edge of cinched vinyl pressed together to make a seam, the specific sickly-sweet sweat smell from the body of a person detoxing from alcohol. I believed her. For whatever reason, the memory felt borrowed—neither untrue nor mine. Just another story assigned to me that I only loosely related to.

My earliest recollections of myself center around elaborate reunification and rescue fantasies. As a kid, I was obsessed with money. I was obsessed with wishes. I had a deep, rich internal world, and all its fantasies were about how everything could be alright without anyone getting in trouble. I was obsessed with wish-making—dreaming and scheming the perfect wish that would bear no negative consequences for the outside world. I would have been a genie’s worst nightmare.

I wished for a percentage of all the pennies that ever fell into the ocean to be deposited into a bank account, as long as it didn’t drastically change the chemical makeup of the ocean. I dreamed of miracles, of being The Chosen One, plucked from obscurity, and soap opera style switched at birth solutions to the problems in my home. I wished for the sum of any disintegrated winning scratch-off tickets I saw littering highways to be delivered to my mom’s account. Surely somebody tossed a winner by accident now and then, right? I was obsessed with finding resources and reprieve without hurting anybody or disrupting the world as I knew it. At a certain point, I had learned loud and clear that getting what you wanted or needed came at a high price, to be paid later, in consequences you could never fathom in your wildest dreams—or prevent, despite your best, most anxious efforts. These thoughts ran in obsessive, anxious loops in the background of my childhood. At times, a few hours indulging them left me with a genuine feeling of relief, even though everything remained the same.

I remember occupying a constant state of confusion throughout my childhood—a looming, ominous uncertainty that something bad was about to happen (or already had), a sense that I was somehow in trouble, and an absolutely paralyzing certainty that I was not normal and therefore dangerous. Let me be clear: my family has blanketed my life with verbal affirmations of my beauty, intellect, and talent. However, my experiences led me to conclude that something was deeply, incurably, fundamentally wrong with me. Over time, these lessons looked like this: I would be having fun, enjoying myself, or just existing without much conscious thought. Then something would happen, unbeknownst to me, and my entire world would turn upside down in seconds—with very little explanation.

I recall a moment that, to this day, fills me with such dread, doubt, and confusion that my hands are shaking as I type. My mom and I fled from Florida to New Hampshire after the end of a very abusive relationship with my first stepdad. We took refuge with my aunt, uncle, and cousins. As an only child, I loved staying with them; their house had stairs and a basement—it felt like living in a palace with built-in friends. One day, my aunt invited me to come to work with her. I remember being so excited. I remember waking up early and feeling so special because it would be just the two of us. We arrived ahead of her colleagues, in an empty office lit by fluorescent lights, with neat rows of cubicles. I’d never really seen an office before, all the desks lined up, each adorned with the personal effects of the person who sat there. I sat down in a spinny chair, tented my fingers like Mr. Burns, and in my best business voice said, “I’m ready to see my clients.”

Those words landed like a slur. I watched my aunt’s face transform—rage, disgust, disappointment. She told me how disrespectful my statement was, that she worked with people who had disabilities. She assigned me an intent I had no context for. I was in the third grade. I had never known what she did for work. I’ll never forget the shame, confusion, and hurt I felt in that moment. The day was ruined from then on, for both of us. I remember racking my brain to figure out how I had so grossly misstepped, finding no way to predict or prevent such an egregious misbehavior. I didn’t know, and I didn’t understand. But I learned that I had the capacity to do unspeakable things without even realizing it, simply by the nature of my being. Everything was fine. I was bad. I now understand this was part of a larger case I’d been building against myself since I was about five years old.

I began to fear myself. I began to fear my face, my words, the evil part of me lurking at the edges of all the good my family insisted I possessed—just waiting to destroy the wonderful things I was so lucky to have. I think this is when the lying really took off. Telling the truth was always difficult for me, because I knew I couldn’t tell the truth of my life—my mom’s life, our life—without betraying us. I learned the truth was dangerous because if people knew it, I couldn’t control what they did with it—and they would do terrible things. I began to use lies to coerce a positive reaction from my environment and the people in it. I wanted to be funny, loved, liked, and to run interference on that other Jamila who was set on wrecking it all. I also used lies to comfort myself. So often, people wonder if someone’s story—their words or perspective—is close enough to the truth to trust them. I lied because my fantastical stories brought me closer to a truth I desperately wanted to be real: a truth where I felt safe, stable, healthy, and whole.

My childhood was terminated early when I was kicked out. Before that final decision was made, I was sent back to that same aunt and asked, “Well, if you were to be on your own, what would you do?” I didn’t understand what was happening, so I answered as teenagers often do, blissfully unaware of the consequences, listing all the things I thought I’d try in the worst-case scenario. This was the nail in the coffin. I’ll never forget her expression, as though she were looking at a fellow adult—a fellow adult she did not like: “Well, it seems like you’ve got it all figured out.”

From then on, I existed in transient states. I entered relationships in a cloud of golden stardust and exited them like a runaway father. I came and went, and came and went, for years. I’ve experienced every type of homelessness one can think of. Every single relationship I’ve exited has been under the most extreme and catastrophic conditions. Bridges have burned, and my reunification fantasies would reemerge. I’d lie awake, fantasizing about how I’d repay or repair the damage my tumultuous, chaotic existence caused—how I’d send massive sums of money anonymously or show up as a healed future self and say, “See? I’m okay after all.” I spent my twenties desperately trying to live up to a first impression, ultimately making an absolute mess of things in the end. I had never learned how to have anything. I had never learned a thing about longevity, faith in others, or asking for help.

I often joke that the most annoying thing about homelessness was how expensive it was to pretend I wasn’t. I was always working to keep up appearances, to get my story straight—even if I was telling the truth. I thought the fake me was the one people loved and admired—that I was some grifter coercing people into caring for me. I believed the real me was the runner, the trainwreck, the ruiner. This was confirmed by people’s distrust and confusion about me. It took me about thirty years to realize I had my math backward. I now see this has less to do with my character and far more to do with people innately sensing when something is incongruent. When I was homeless, I’m sure people wondered, “Wow, can Jamila afford to cover everyone’s drinks, and yet never invite us over?” People do not like getting 10% of a story that still doesn’t make a lick of sense. Nobody likes to occupy prolonged states of confusion, and nobody likes to feel the edges of a story only to poke their fingers through the gaps.

My current self is constantly arriving at the understanding that I desperately need to be seen and loved—and that in order to get to the bone marrow, the golden nourishment of it all, I absolutely have to trust people. I have to resist the desire to control others, hand them the truth of me—broken and tattered, luminous and powerful—and allow them to come to their own conclusions. For me, unlearning requires being presented with new outcomes. I need proof of concept that if I share who I am, I will not die or be cast aside. It requires a full rewriting of the code that has run my system since the day I was born. It demands that I risk in the direction of my aching and my longing. It also requires me to remember who I am. I may fear blaming others, or fear that I’m evil or manipulative, or whatever. But the fact remains that I am this way because of an absolute refusal to blame anyone but myself. Trusting myself means remembering there’s a third path—where there are no angels, no devils—just a trusting, loving awareness of what is in any given moment.

What is, in this moment, is that I have a right to my story, my history, and to let myself write about it and through it. What feels so true to me is that, no matter what, everything I’m afraid of is already there—it happened to me, and it’s inside me. So I don’t have to stress about getting it “right.” I just need to figure out how to get it out, so I can hold it in my hands and accept it for what it is. So I can hold it to my heart and accept it as my own.