Different Doors Out of Similar Rooms
A few days ago, someone sent me the news that Hayden Panettiere had died.
I remembered her mostly as a child star. Bring It On. Ice Princess. That familiar face that seemed to have always been somewhere on a screen. I vaguely remembered hearing about addiction somewhere along the way, one of those pieces of celebrity news that passes through your consciousness without ever becoming a whole person.
Then I started learning more about her.
The addiction. The depression. The postpartum depression, which immediately made me more sympathetic because I don't think people understand how serious postpartum mental illness can become. The unhealthy and abusive relationships. The custody headlines and the complicated reality underneath them.
Then I found an interview she'd given only three months before she died.
And somewhere in learning her story, I stopped thinking only about hers.
I started thinking about mine.
Not because our lives were the same. They weren't.
But I knew some of those rooms.
Substances. Depression. Loss. Abusive relationships. Trying to find yourself while making choices that seem almost incomprehensible from the safety of hindsight.
The more I learned about her, the more grateful I became for finding different doors out of similar rooms.
Sometimes you don't realize which trajectory you escaped until you see someone else's life continue down it.
Intoxication Was the Price of Belonging
I have spent most of my life saying that I don't have an addictive personality. I still don't think I do, at least not when it comes to substances.
But I've been thinking differently about what kept me from going farther down that road.
I started drinking and partying in middle school. Beaumont, Texas wasn't exactly overflowing with entertainment for teenagers, and the people I found liked to have a good time. By high school, partying was mostly a weekend thing. In college, weekends became multiple nights a week.
Classes became less important than going out.
Attendance slipped. Grades followed.
I knew I was fucking up, but consequences have a funny way of remaining theoretical when they arrive one small decision at a time.
Skip this class.
Go out tonight.
I'll catch up tomorrow.
Until eventually tomorrow has a GPA and the university calls it academic probation.
That got my attention.
So did my dad.
He had spent years being sick, and during those years I put enormous pressure on myself to hold things together. When his health improved, I think some part of me decided I didn't have to anymore. I just did whatever.
But I wasn't accustomed to my dad being disappointed in me. When he saw what I was doing with school, his reaction landed.
There were other warning signs too.
I got pulled over for speeding after a Guitar Center work party and had to perform a sobriety test. To this day, I don't know why that officer let me go. I was less than a mile from where I was staying, and he told me he would be watching and I wasn't to leave again until I sobered up.
A guy I'd recently been involved with went to jail after a drunken fight.
One night my roommates and I came home to my dog losing his mind and an apartment filled with smoke because someone had left ramen cooking on the stove.
There was always some drama.
Some ridiculous story.
Something that was funny because nobody died.
I knew alcoholics. My stepmother was one. Heavy drinking ran through parts of my mother's family too. I knew enough to recognize a version of adulthood I didn't want.
Alcohol had quietly become what everything centered around, and I didn't want it occupying that much space in my life.
So I buckled down.
It wasn't particularly difficult to stop drinking so much, which is part of why I have never identified with addiction to alcohol itself.
Looking backward, I think alcohol was secondary.
Intoxication was the price of belonging.
What I wanted was friendship. Community. Family. Acceptance.
I happened to find those things among people who liked to get fucked up.
There is an old question adults love asking kids: If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?
It's supposed to be rhetorical.
But it's not that simple.
How high is the bridge?
What's underneath it?
Are we all jumping?
And what happens to me if I don't?
When belonging feels scarce, standing alone on the bridge can feel more frightening than jumping with everyone else.
At thirteen, I knew we were doing stupid things.
That might be the strangest part.
I wasn't oblivious.
Once, we were partying in a garage or shed behind my friend Alicia's house. It was cold, and we had some kind of barrel fire going. Someone told me to pour gasoline onto it.
I was fucked up, but I remember the thought occurring to me in real time:
This is really fucking stupid. The flame can travel up the stream and ignite the container.
And then I poured it anyway.
The flame traveled up the stream and ignited the container.
My sleeve caught fire. I threw the gas, ran around flinging my arm until the fire went out, and somehow walked away with nothing worse than a ruined hoodie.
Everyone laughed.
I laughed.
Then I looked at my burned sleeve like, You dumb bitch.
That story might be a tiny model of an entire period of my life.
My logic was there.
My self-preservation was apparently somewhere else.
There were men who picked us up at a gas station and took us back to a place where one of their friends was on house arrest. They eventually discovered we were thirteen and dropped us off on a corner.
We smoked weed in kerosene warehouses.
There was a man everyone called Dad because he gave us free things. We knew he was a drug dealer. That wasn't the revelation.
The revelation came years later when I remembered him handing me ecstasy and asking me to take it to someone waiting on the corner.
At thirteen, that was just another thing somebody asked me to do.
At forty-something, I went:
Wait.
Was I a fucking drug runner?
Apparently, yes.
Which seems like an appropriate place to pause and apologize to my parents if either of you are learning any of this for the first time.
Sorry.
Also, to any of the kids who know me, look up to me, or somehow stumble across this someday: these are cautionary anecdotes, not suggestions. Do not get any ideas.
Just because I managed to make it through all of this without a criminal record does not mean I'm afraid to get one.
I'm kidding.
Mostly.
Please make good choices.
Or at minimum, better ones than these.
There were hotel parties and cops and me jumping curbs in my SUV trying to get away.
There was violence. Fights. A hundred-gallon fish tank. A girl and two guys jumping me. Me telling my mother I fell down the stairs because explaining the truth would have required explaining everything else.
There were sexual assaults.
There were so many moments when some part of my brain whispered:
We probably shouldn't be doing this.
And I went anyway.
For years I thought of that as recklessness.
Now I'm not sure that's the whole picture.
I think I didn't know how to care about myself outside of how other people felt about me.
I had learned that things had to be earned.
Approval had to be earned.
Love had to be earned.
Why wouldn't friendship work the same way?
Do what everyone else is doing and you get to belong.
My friends became family. They helped me forget reality until reality started bleeding into that world too.
Even after being raped, I struggled to call it rape.
What had I done?
Had I given someone the wrong impression?
Had I somehow made him think I wanted it?
I didn't want anyone getting in trouble. I didn't want fingers pointed at me. And I knew that if I threatened the fiercely loyal, cop-hating family I had built around myself, I could lose them too.
I know differently now.
Rape can happen under any conditions. I can acknowledge that some of the environments I entered were dangerous without accepting responsibility for what another person chose to do once I was there.
The circumstances belong to the story.
The choice to take mine away belongs to them.
Still, I don't experience those memories with the weight people sometimes expect.
My rape is a bad thing that happened to me.
My house burning down when I was five is a bad thing that happened to me.
Other things are bad things that happened to me.
Intellectually, I know they affected me differently. Emotionally, they often sit on the same strange shelf labeled Things That Happened.
Sometimes I tell a story and watch someone's face change.
That's usually when I remember that whatever I just casually said isn't normal.
I laugh.
I reassure them.
I've dealt with it.
I'm okay.
I've never wanted pity. I've never wanted to turn pain into a competition either. Everyone has bad parts in their story, and I have always felt uncomfortable deciding that mine deserve more weight because they happened to me.
So I usually look at the pieces.
I rarely stand back and look at the whole painting.
And if you've been reading this blog for a while, yeah, you probably know some of these pieces already.
That's the thing about having a history and then starting a blog about your life. We're going to touch the same rooms more than once. Hopefully I can at least keep finding new doors and keep it entertaining while we wander around in here.
And I know some people reading this may look at me differently afterward.
Maybe there's a little holy shit, Lauren happening right now.
Fair.
Sometimes I hear these stories come out of my own mouth and have the same reaction.
But I'm not telling them because I want anyone to see me as damaged, tragic, dangerous, or somehow more interesting because bad things happened to me. And I'm definitely not asking anyone to retroactively worry about me.
I'm telling them because the woman you know now didn't appear fully formed one morning with boundaries, perspective, two kids and a suspiciously extensive collection of coping mechanisms.
There was a trajectory.
Actually, there were a lot of them.
And this is the first time in a while I've stood far enough away to see just how many.
Love Shouldn't Be This Fucking Hard
I met T's dad years later.
The first three months were toxic as fuck.
Drinking. Partying. Fighting. His chaos. I wasn't accustomed to relationships involving constant arguments, but we had separate homes, which gave us space to retreat.
Three months into the relationship, I discovered I was three months pregnant.
We decided we were going to grow up.
I was going to move into his house.
Then I lost the baby.
I fell into a depression so deep that I planned to quit school and move home to Texas.
He told me not to.
Move in with me anyway.
At the time, I thought it was sweet. We had both lost this baby. We were hurting together. And I didn't want to tuck my tail between my legs and run home.
So I stayed.
Almost immediately, it was horrible.
When I returned from Texas, I discovered that instead of moving most of my belongings, he'd given many of them away. I didn't yet understand the extent of his drug use or the coke binges.
But I was depressed.
I was ashamed.
And I was too proud to admit I'd made a mistake.
Some part of me also believed this might be penance.
I hadn't known I was pregnant. I'd been drinking and smoking. I blamed myself for losing the baby.
Maybe this was simply my life now.
Maybe I deserved it.
I thought he understood the loss because it was his too, until one day I told him I hated driving past the hospital where I'd lost our baby.
He said he didn't understand why I couldn't just get over it.
Eventually I began planning to leave.
We had a family vacation approaching, and I intended to use it as my opportunity to get out. He and his family pressured me to go. Bring the dogs, they said, so the dogs couldn't become my excuse for staying behind.
He knew I wanted to leave.
He poked a hole in a condom.
A couple of weeks off Depo was all it took.
I became pregnant with T.
The relationship had been unhealthy for a long time. Objectively, I knew it. If I'd watched another woman living my life, I would have told her to run.
That's one of the cruelest things about abuse.
Knowing where the door is and believing you can walk through it are entirely different things.
I thought love meant tolerating someone at their worst.
People always said love wasn't easy.
Eventually I started answering them silently:
But it shouldn't be this fucking hard.
After T was born, people encouraged me to make the relationship work without knowing what "making it work" actually required.
They didn't know about the nights his dad drank until he passed out and wet the bed.
The night he passed out near my car and people thought I'd hit him, then challenged the responding police officer to a fight because the officer was wearing gloves.
The shattered windshield.
Being kicked out without my belongings and sleeping in my car.
Locking myself in the bathroom because I was afraid of him, only for him to call police and tell them I was suicidal.
Waking up with a black eye after one of his alcohol-fueled rages.
Coming home to find him passed out drunk with the front door wide open while our baby was inside.
By then alcohol didn't represent freedom or belonging anymore.
Mostly it represented something I had to manage in another person.
One day, his younger cousin was being treated badly by her boyfriend.
He was furious.
He wanted to kill the guy.
Then he became angry with me because I wasn't equally outraged.
I told him why.
You treat me like that. Worse, actually. Why are you so angry that someone is treating her the way you treat me?
Because she was his little cousin, he said.
It was different.
I laughed.
I am someone's cousin.
Someone's daughter.
Someone's sister.
A human being.
Still, he insisted.
Different.
Years later, I understand what hurt so much about that conversation.
He believed she deserved defending.
I didn't.
He didn't even see me as someone he “loved” enough to defend from himself.
And yes, please insert enormous fucking air quotes around loved.
Then one day T said:
Daddy is going to kill us.
There are sentences that rearrange a room.
I had tolerated things when they were happening to me that I could not tolerate becoming normal to my son.
I didn't want him learning that this was love.
I didn't want him becoming his father.
And I didn't want him someday “loving” someone the way his father had “loved” me.
Becoming a mother made me want to protect my child.
Protecting my child required protecting myself.
That changed the trajectory again.
I'd Been in That Room
That's another strange thing about abuse.
I could recognize it perfectly well when it belonged to somebody else.
If another woman had described my relationship to me, I would have told her to run.
If a friend had shown up with my stories, my bruises, my excuses, my fear, I would never have told her that love meant staying through someone's worst. I would never have told her she deserved it. I would never have asked what she'd done to make him angry.
But inside my own life, everything looked different.
Years later I watched Maid, and parts of it were almost unbearable.
Not because our stories were identical.
Because they weren't.
It was that eerie feeling from the Fugees' Killing Me Softly: someone had somehow found pieces of my letters and was reading them out loud.
The rationalizing.
The instability.
The financial control.
The exhausting logistics of trying to leave when leaving sounds incredibly simple to everyone standing safely outside the relationship.
The way your definition of bad enough keeps moving.
The way you can know something is wrong without believing you have somewhere else to go.
I remember watching and wanting her to just get away from him.
And somewhere underneath that frustration was the uncomfortable recognition that I already knew why she didn't.
I had been her.
Not literally.
But I'd been in that room.
Maybe Love Was
Years later, there would be another relationship with another man who drank too much.
And once again I found myself managing someone else's drinking more than enjoying my own.
By then I rarely drank heavily. Roller derby after-parties. A night out with friends once a month. After pregnancy and breastfeeding, the appeal had mostly disappeared.
Eventually that relationship ended too.
People told me:
It's them, not you.
I remember disagreeing.
No.
It's me too.
Not because I caused what they did.
Because I kept choosing people capable of doing it.
At some point I had to stop asking only why people treated me badly and start asking why the familiar kept feeling like home.
Maybe substances were never my addiction.
Maybe love was.
Not healthy love.
The desperate kind.
Being wanted. Needed. Chosen. Accepted.
Unhealthy, unreciprocated love became its own drug, and I would settle for increasingly terrible substitutes to get the next hit.
Like a junkie drinking mouthwash or huffing paint, I was slowly killing parts of myself and settling for scraps of the life I deserved from people who didn't deserve me.
Eventually I had to become accountable for the only person's choices I could actually control.
Mine.
I couldn't always control which rooms I entered.
Some doors were opened for me.
Some I kicked down myself.
Some slammed shut behind me.
Some I went back through more than once.
Maybe my real choice was simply learning not to walk back into the same room once I finally understood what was waiting inside.
The Roads That Continued Without Me
Now I can look at the lives of men I once prayed would love me differently.
I prayed they'd come to their senses.
That we'd work things out.
That they'd finally see my worth.
That they'd love me enough.
And then I look at where some of those roads continued without me.
Drugs.
Alcohol.
Mugshots.
Records.
Trailers and lives that rarely extend beyond the front door.
Protection orders.
Abuse allegations.
Friends lost to murder and addiction.
More chaos.
More dysfunction.
More generations absorbing it.
I don't say that from some perfect life on a hilltop.
My life has its own problems.
But they are vastly different problems.
Sometimes I look at those lives and have the strangest thought:
That could have been mine.
My boys could have been different.
I could have been different.
Not necessarily because I was smarter or stronger or morally superior.
Addiction doesn't care who it claims.
Abuse doesn't only happen to a certain kind of woman.
Trauma doesn't hand out maps.
Sometimes people change direction because they make a brave choice.
Sometimes because someone helps.
Sometimes because something terrible happens.
Sometimes because a door closes and refuses to reopen no matter how hard you pound on it.
And sometimes because you get unbelievably fucking lucky.
There are so many nights from my adolescence that look different to me now that I watch true crime documentaries.
Men picked up two thirteen-year-old girls from a gas station and actually dropped us back off.
The fire burned my hoodie instead of my body.
The officer let me go.
We got home before the apartment burned.
The person driving made it home.
The fight ended.
The drug was what someone said it was.
I woke up.
Again and again and again.
None of those endings were guaranteed.
I don't know what would have happened on the other trajectories.
That's the point.
I never lived them.
Detour Signs
I do believe everything happens for a reason.
I also think that's a much easier thing to say from the other side of something.
Most of the time, we can't see the reason while we're living it. Sometimes we never get to see it. And sometimes the thing that happened is so incredibly fucked up that we don't particularly want to hear about some grand cosmic purpose behind it.
I don't need to be grateful that I was raped.
I don't need to be grateful that I lost a baby.
I don't need to be grateful for abuse.
I can wish with everything in me that some things had never happened and still be grateful for the life that somehow grew around them.
I can believe there was meaning without pretending the suffering itself was beautiful.
I can recognize my choices without taking responsibility for other people's.
I can recognize luck without dismissing resilience.
I can recognize resilience without turning myself into some inspirational survivor character I don't recognize.
And I can look at things I once begged God to change, relationships I prayed would survive, people I desperately wanted to finally see me, choose me, love me differently, and recognize that sometimes an unanswered prayer was a detour sign I couldn't read yet.
Sometimes the road I was furious about losing was leading somewhere I no longer wanted to go.
Stand Far Enough Away
I've been thinking about my life lately as some deranged collaboration between Salvador Dalí, Jackson Pollock, Tool and Where's Waldo.
From inside it, I see individual things.
A miscarriage.
A party.
A black eye.
A burning sleeve.
A baby.
A graduation.
A breakup.
A friendship.
A mistake.
A door.
A hundred disconnected marks.
Stand far enough away and something else appears.
A hidden picture.
Not necessarily a lesson.
I'm not teaching one.
Mostly, I am standing outside this enormous, cluttered, beautifully dark, deeply unnerving painting thinking:
What the fuck am I looking at?
And then:
Wait.
That's me.
I can see beauty in the whole thing without needing to call every brushstroke beautiful.
I can wish some of them weren't there.
I can stare at others and wonder how the hell they didn't destroy the entire canvas.
And I can recognize that somehow all those tiny pieces of chaos became orchestrated into a life.
My life.
I don't think I'd go backward and change most of it.
Changing one thing changes another. Pull one thread and maybe my boys disappear with it. Maybe I don't become this version of myself. There is no way to know.
But if I could go back to one version of me, I know exactly where I'd go.
Before the drugs.
Before the drinking.
Before the men.
Before the assaults and pregnancies and losses and relationships.
I'd find the little girl.
I wouldn't warn her about what's coming.
I wouldn't hand her a map.
I'd hold her cheeks in my palms and look directly into her eyes.
I'd tell her she doesn't have to earn being loved by becoming anything other than herself.
I'd tell her not to let people make her small or take advantage of her heart.
I'd tell her she is worthy of love and a beautiful life simply because she exists.
I'd kiss her forehead.
And before I left, I'd tell her one more thing.
Even when you think you have no one, you have me.
I'm waiting for you.
And I love you.
Then I'd let her go.
Because somehow, through all that chaos, she's going to find the doors.
With love (and gratitude for the doors I didn’t walk through),
Your Builder,
Lauren
