I Was Owed. I Let Go. A Story of Grief and Growth.
Finding Meaning in Trauma
Note from the author:
I’m going to be away from regular writing for a bit while I go through surgery and recovery. To keep this space alive (and your inbox from forgetting me entirely), I’m resurfacing a few earlier essays that resonated strongly with readers the first time around.If you’re new here, these may be brand-new to you. If you’ve been with me for a while, consider this a chance to revisit some of the core pieces behind Ledger Ethics and Architectural Humanism with a bit more distance and a slightly different version of yourself.
Fresh work will resume once my body and brain are back on speaking terms. In the meantime, thank you for your patience, for reading, and for sticking around while I do the unglamorous work of healing.
Today is my birthday. It’s the day I dread the most on every calendar. Not because I am upset about my lost youth and vigor. I’ve long since made peace with that.
No, it is because I am a twin. And my other half, my twin sister Angel, doesn’t get to dread her birthday. She hasn’t been able to celebrate her birthday since she turned 19. Because a few months after a blood vessel burst in her brain and extinguished the warmest light I knew.
The following essay is adapted from my memoir, Half Life. I wrote it as a breather chapter after my recounting of the first time our father, Leo, molested my twin sister as I listened in the next room, paralyzed with fear. It was written as much to help me distance myself from difficult memories as it was to demonstrate a point.
A point about the corrosive bitterness of entitlement.
As a lead in to my next essay about “you owe me nothing” it also seems thematically relevant as well.
As unpleasant as the prior memory was to read, I can assure you it was unpleasant to write. Dredging the memory back up, putting my mind back into that space, reliving the emotions again, and lingering there to get the details right, trying to bring forth as much of the truth of that moment as I can conjure, it was heavy. An act of endurance. When I finished the last of it I had to walk away from my computer, go into another room, and collapse into a heap.
I’ve made several attempts at writing my story over the years. And here is always where I’d always fail. From that first incident with Angel or reliving the memory of Leo introducing us to pornography at the age of six. Remembering being lifted by my neck and thrown across my bedroom. Angel being forced to lie about having been in a fight to explain the bruises on her face. Being kicked out of where we lived in the middle of the night because Leo had beaten his girlfriend in a drunken rage. The early years of our lives are full of so many of these stories, story after story after story, and they grow longer and more dense with the terrible details and heightened emotions. So much pain.
And when I start to share the tales, how do I choose which awful thing needs to be brought to light, and what sits hidden in the dark of my memory? How do I respect the suffering Angel and I endured if I don’t lay bare all of Leo’s sins to the world? How do I get the world to recognize the strength I had to summon just to survive this? How do I show everyone the armor I earned for completing these trials?!
HOW AM I TO BE REWARDED FOR MY PAIN!?!?
And therein lies the trap. The stories begin to pour out of me. Because don’t you understand? I was hurt. I was harmed. I was abused and beaten and violated and broken, again and again. And I have to show you how much, because it was so much, and I am owed for my suffering.
Every time I try to write about this, I get lost. Lost back in these memories, lost back in the mind of a scared little boy who wished someone would protect him from the monster that lived inside the house. And I have to show the receipts, because for the cost of my childhood, my innocence, my happiness, my wholeness, I am owed a debt.
Who exactly owes me for what I went through? Leo? While he was the direct cause of a lot of bad things, how do I collect from him? He’s been dead since 1997, and even if he were still alive, what, exactly, do I think he owes me? What can repay such a debt?
Does the collective “The World” owe me? How does that work?
“Sorry kid, your family and society at large failed you. Please accept this ‘The-Rest-Of-Your-Life-Will-Be-Easy’ certificate as recompense. Blackout dates apply. See terms and conditions. Not valid in Tennessee.”[1]
This was how I thought for a long time. At least as far back as middle school. It drove my angst in high school. And once Angel died it basically became my default mode. Don’t you understand? My life was hard. I was owed.
But that is not the way the world works. No one is lining up to make my life better or easier because I suffered. And for every indignity I endured, there are so many people who went through so much worse. Even amongst my own siblings, my oldest sister Angel (the other one) never knew our dad at all. They may not have been good, but I had relationships with both of my parents.
The truth of the matter is that I want that suffering to have meant something, anything. For years I used it as my angry shield to the world. As time went on I attempted this memoir, thinking that if I put all the stories out into the world it would somehow create the meaning that I wanted. But all I did was write some childhood abuse trauma porn and get stuck in some of the worst moments of my life.
But meaning is not something that arrives formed from the ether.
It is not a naturally occurring resource to be mined and exploited. It does not coalesce around a narrative on its own. We have to create our own meaning and bring it forth into the world.
Trauma and tragedy aren’t things that happen to provide meaning. Trust me, the saying “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger,” is utter bullshit. If my arms were torn off by a wheat thresher I could survive, but I wouldn’t be stronger after. Sure, I might find resilience or something intangible, but the amount of weight I can lift, an object measure of strength, would have gone from *something* to *nothing*. And resilience doesn’t carry in all the groceries in one go.
If I want to find meaning in what I went through, it’s not going to come by trying to share as many terrible stories with the widest audience possible. That only plays into my own narcissism. For my meaning, I have to make it myself.
Humans, as a species, have an evolutionary knack for pattern recognition. It’s why we were successful hunters and foragers, why we have music and probably key to how we developed language[2]. It’s also why we have conspiracy theories and gamblers think are definitely going to win the next hand[3]. It also means that we fall easily into the “everything happens for a reason” line of thought. That is not what I am doing here.
I didn’t get beaten and molested and suffer grief and loss in order to impart upon the world some great lesson that it didn’t already know. As much as I’d like it to be otherwise, I am certain there is no grand revelation in these pages that no one has made before. And that is ok.
But one important lesson to take away is how easy it is to feel owed when you’ve been wronged. I say that not to diminish any harm that has befallen anyone; in a just world we would all be made whole when broken. But holding on to that debt, the anger, the pain, it feels good, it feels righteous. After all, if I had to go through so much, why shouldn’t I wield my pain at the world?
By reliving these stories, I’m not extracting what I’m owed from the world. I’m not hurting Leo. I’m not protecting Angel. I’m only punishing myself. I can’t change these things that happened to me. I can’t control the past.
What I can control is my position in relation to the world, and the expectations I place upon it. Few could argue my anger wasn’t justified. But that justification doesn’t make it any less acidic and harmful. When I argue that the world owes me nothing, it isn’t some plea to be a martyr, or a license to wallow in my woe caused by a callous world.
It is a recalibration of expectation, that while grounded in a bleak fact, offers freedom from bitterness, from envy, from vitriol. And once freed, that liberty gives us the flexibility to pivot into a better world. Not because it has changed. But because we have.
This kind of vulnerable exploration of grief, growth, and meaning-making is what I share every week with subscribers to Radical Kindness: Empathy as Rebellion. If you’re on your own journey of healing and ethical living, I’d love to have you join our community.
This chapter is from my complete but unpublished memoir, Half Life. To get it published, I need to prove that this story matters to people. Sharing this post with others is the single most effective way you can help me do that.
[1] I have no idea who is presenting this compensation to me. I guess in my imagination there is a Department of Bad Childhood where an official would process my application, like student loan forgiveness or something
[2] Citation needed, I’m not an anthropologist
[3] Source – trust me bro
Although I did not go through even half of what you did, I still appreciated your article today. I have gone through life feeling sad that I was not made "whole" for the wrongs that were done me over the years, from shitty birthdays to beatings from enemies in childhood. It made me feel a little better to know I was not the only one who feels "owed" by the universe. Thank you.