“The journey into darkness has been long and cruel, and you have gone deep into it.”

I had something of a polarizing childhood. At least, I percieved it that way. It is said that the major factor that leads to the development of Borderline Personality Disorder is a pattern of extremes. Ones and tens, blacks and whites, with no fives or greys in sight.

*What this is not: It is sincerely not my intention to imply blame on my family, friends, and environment for the things that happened to me. Every second is choice, after all, and I’m more than willing to be accountable for my sins.

• “Sin” is an archery term, meaning to miss the mark. From a Course perspective, a sin is a moment of our own failed perception. It’s a bit like mistaken identity, jumping the gun, or using the wrong name for something or someone. It is not a destruction of love or God, of ourselves, or of others. It’s a misinterpretation. Remember, “nothing real can be threatened, and nothing unreal exists”. It is certainly never irreconcilable. There is always room for a miracle.
• I’ll go into Spirit/Christ vs Ego/Fear in the next entry.

This part of the story is not a rant against my parents and relatives. “Oh if only they would have said this or if they never said this, I would have been totally different.” Nothing could be further from the truth. I know who they are, and they know who I am. Do you know? Children of God of course, facets of this unconditional love that is our true essence. So, if any of the story of Hell is off-putting, keep that in mind. We begin.

The joke, as I like to tell it, is that my parents split up when I was 6, and they both went on to find terrific women. Dad’s side is brilliant. Type A, Irish Catholic, and a big athletic family. We all went to the same school and had the same teachers, our classmates were in school with our parents… it was a bit like Hollywood inbreeding, this community. When your graduation class is 64, and you’ve been with 50 of them since preschool, it’s a bit of a glass house. I digress.

That side represents tradition. They’re happy to be who they are and though I was never quite what was expected, they love me for who I am, and I love them for who they are. Now, that didn’t stop me from growing up feeling guilty for not being more like them. I cannot stand football. Football is in the family DNA (two uncles played professionally, to great acclaim). I flunked math (family full of computer and mathematical geniuses), and hated just about every second spent in the school and church they so proudly are a part of. It’s not that that community and school was bad, it just wasn’t for me. I may have wished it was. I was not yet aware that it didn’t have to be.

I was a square peg in a world of round holes, and couldn’t see past my own ego that they loved that square peg unconditonally anyway. I see this now. I am thankful for their patience. THAT’s a miracle right there.

Mom’s side is a little harder to explain. Type B, less neurotic, more free-spirited, and creative. It was pretty much just mom, my grandma, grandma’s partner, and I. Extended family was out of state and I wouldn’t meet them until I was 17, so it really was just the four of us. They were unconventional, and proud of it. I learned to play poker by the time I was 6, and chose to spend weekends and summers hanging out with my grandma and her friends, playing cards, rather than being a kid. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t given every opportunity to be a kid — we would finish our poker tournament then go play in the pool in the backyard, making believe we were exploring a desert island, or singing showtunes as we bobbed around the pool. We made hours of home videos of me singing along to my favorite songs, trying to emulate the theatrical performers I loved to watch. I ate whatever I wanted. I could do no wrong.

Well, that’s how I remember it. Of course I got in trouble, started arguments, slammed doors, was treated like a kid when I was out of line. It wasn’t as polarizing as I thought, but who has any degree of perspicacity at that age anyhow?

So what these halves distilled down to was school days and every other weekend in a traditional, conservative setting where I felt I was neither accepted nor wanted, and home life in an eccentric setting where I could more or less do no wrong. That’s confusing in its own way.

They say it takes a village, and much of the village was/is the Metro-Detroit lesbian community. My “aunts” would take me to concerts, help me get to the front row and shake hands with Melissa Etheridge, would talk to me like an adult, and share what they knew, often coming from disparate pasts themselves. I had to reconcile that with going to a school that told me all my “aunts”, not to mention my mom and her parents, were condemned for eternity just for being who they are. How? How could the people who I spent the majority of my time with be so terrible in the eyes of God — how could my school be telling me this (and at such a young age) — and why would my family support my going to that school? Mom worked to counter the destructive indoctrination of the Catholic Church (ahem, by the Catholic Church’s definition, I am still a strident atheist and a heathen) by taking me to weekly lectures by Marianne Williamson.

I wrote Marianne, talked to her after her lectures, and tried to amalgamate the dissonant things I was hearing and seeing. She spoke to me, wrote my back, and though I remember now what she said, I wasn’t quite ready to make sense of it then.

Now. In science, when you think you know something, you put that belief on hold and try to disprove it. If you prove yourself wrong, the new truth becomes axiom. If your results reaffirm that which you already thought, it’s upheld. This is literally the foundation of science, and the foundation of self-enlightenment. The Zen Buddhists call this the Zen mind: You must present an empty rice bowl to God so that he can fill it. If you come into a situation thinking you know, you’ll never hear what’s really going on over the sound of your own screaming.

By high school, I had decided God wasn’t for me- I couldn’t answer much of anything, I decided one half of the family was actively against me, and the other side was placating at best, and ingenuine at worst. It was like wearing someone else’s prescription glasses.

So I dumped the rice bowl on the floor. I took the Marianne quotes off my wall, hid her handwritten replies to my questions in the bottom of some closet, and blew off my Confirmation. I skipped religion classes and weekly mass — why would I listen to some old jerk tell me what’s right and wrong when he spoke for an organization that harbors and protects pedophiles? I had no room for any of it. I was too busy plotting my own descent into Hell — though I didn’t know it at the time.

By 15, I was sinning left right and center. Missing the mark indeed. The ego spoke first and loudest, and I was tuned in. Normal teenage rebellion? You may be thinking, “yeah well who didn’t have a troublesome upbringing?” and I’d say you’re right. But my emotional malignancies gained traction, enough to get me on the radar of a number of mental health professionals. My ego had me disillusioned alright- enough to get me far enough from reality that I was certain that not only was I in Hell, but that I actuallydeserved to be, and that I absolutely couldn’t get out. So maybe I was a normal 13, 14, 15, year old? Probably not. (I think Susanna Kaysen makes this same point in Girl, Interrupted). Whatever normal is, this was few steps beyond.

Teenagers get pissed at their parents. They may even do irrational things. Not all teenagers have, at best estimate, 1200 scars over their bodies. If only it ended there! One of the diagnostic criteria for BPD is reckless and self damaging behavior. Go ahead and google it. There was way too much going on in, around, and outside my head. I was sure that physical pain, inebriation, material gain, endorphin kicks, any sort of distracting behvaior could numb the unending barrage of consciousness I was in. That they were all self damaging was incidental.

I needed miracle. My own nature, my own inherent condition sat on a shelf. I wasn’t ready to self-actualize yet. “I hadn’t remembered that a miracle is a reasonable thing to ask for.” (paraphrasing Marianne). Kind of like how the hero takes some convincing that he’s acutally the hero of the story!

• “You’re a wizard, Harry.”
• “Your Father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your (ego) wouldn’t allow it.”

Says the Course, “There is no place for hell in a world whose loveliness can yet be so intense and so inclusive it is but a step from there to Heaven.”

Well why didn’t you just say so!

We’ll get to that.

Required Listening/Reading: (Scroll Down for link to song)

• “My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
  I do not feel the romance I do not catch the spark
  I don’t know when I noticed life was life at my expense
  The words of my heart lined up like prisoners on a fence
  The dreams came in like needy children tugging at my sleeve
  I said I have no way of feeding you, so leave
  But there was a time I asked my father for a dollar
  And he gave it a ten dollar raise
  When I needed my mother and I called her
  She stayed with me for days
  And now someone’s on the telephone, desperate in his pain
  Someone’s on the bathroom floor doing her cocaine
  Someone’s got his finger on the button in some room
  No one can convince me we aren’t gluttons for our doom
  But I tried to make this place my place
  I asked for Providence to smile upon me with his sweet face
  But I’ll tell you
  My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
  I do not feel the romance I do not catch the spark
  My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
  By grace, my sight grows stronger and I will not
  be a pawn for the Prince of Darkness any longer
  Maybe there’s no haven in this world for tender age
  My heart beat like the wings of wild birds in a cage
  My greatest hope my greatest cause to grieve
  And my heart flew from its cage and it bled upon my sleeve
  The cries of passion were like wounds that needed healing
  I couldn’t hear them for the thunder
  I was half the naked distance between hell and heaven’s ceiling
  And he almost pulled me under
  By grace my sight grows stronger, grows stronger
  And I will not be a pawn for the Prince of Darkness any longer” — Emily Saliers