What should I have done differently?
Young-adult emotional poverty
I was an only child in Chicago in the 1970s. At age eleven, I lost my mother to cancer. This experience is the background to my writing. My memoir follows a formerly confident young girl suddenly fragile and precarious. With luck and courage, she finds stability through nature, journal writing, and friends of all ages. My Substack entries support my book-writing process. Click the title in your email to be sure to see the whole post.
This is writing about writing—thinking out loud—because it's been too long since I posted here. This will be a ramble about, or maybe a first attempt at, the essay I'm working on, that keeps getting me turned around.
I read Ian Frazier's beautiful piece in the New Yorker about urban pigeons and the people who capture them to clean and heal their poor feet. I remembered how I used to loathe the pigeons at Howard Station in Chicago, a commuter bus terminal where I caught a bus to Skokie for a few years in the late 80s. I thought pigeons were disgusting, and I couldn’t stand how sleek and dignified they looked. I think it was a reflection of how frustrated I was with my life at the time. I was discontented and felt so much lack, and I didn't know why. I had a new job that kept me broke just like my former job had, even though this one wasn't a dead end and I was proud to get it.
Money was only part of the lack I felt. I want to write about the rest of it. "Emotional poverty" is my mind’s phrase. Between 1985 and 1988 I had catapulted myself off of a foundation from which my needs were met and into a world where I denied my emotional needs and my wishes. I then tried to get my needs met—need for a friend group, need for parental affection, need for positive reflection—in ways that wouldn’t really pay off. I was in the middle of college at the time, with two years left. I know that trying to get your needs met in ways that aren’t sustainable is a common experience in college, but I think I had a unique void. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone should write their story.
Timeline: I worked part time as a legal proofreader and lived with my girlfriend starting in September 1985. I graduated from college in June 1987, then worked as a full-time legal proofreader on a night shift. I moved into an apartment by myself in September 1987. My girlfriend and I broke up in January-February 1988. I kept my night job until November that year when I started commuting to Skokie. I was an administrative assistant at a group of trade magazines. Having a degree in writing, my goal was to move to the editorial department, which I eventually did after holding several other roles at the magazines. This was a small company of about 40 people, an almost family-like workplace complete with "parents" and "siblings"—just what I needed actually, but not enough; after all they weren't there specifically as my family.
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I think lots of young people think in terms of "someday." Someday he’ll create great art, someday she’ll make a scientific discovery, someday he will travel alone to remote places for adventure.
My someday consisted of nothing so tied to the outside world. I was organized and smart and responsible, but I was missing the emotional foundation to be ambitious.
Someday, I thought—many the wishes of a child that had never left me—my whole family would be together again and I would be special within it, like I was when my mom was alive. Someday I would be able to visit my aunt in the Ozarks and feel as close to her almost as if we were best friends. Someday I'd swim in one of the clear blue springs of Missouri. Someday I wouldn't have to work full time and could finally rest my mind. Someday the guy I was involved with would truly open to me and we'd be as close as I'd hoped. Someday I'd get back the confident exuberance I had at 21 while I was still living at home. Where had it gone?
When I left home, I left behind: my best childhood friend; the neighbor couple who were important friends/confidants; my high-school boyfriend who remained a good, wise, loving friend with whom I was an equal like I'd always wanted; the peace and privacy of my own bedroom in our house; and the fraught but always-there relations with my dad and stepmother.
Of course I was so excited at 21 moving out of the house, and could not even perceive that I was giving up anything by leaving. After all, I moved only eight blocks away and could still see all these people—but college and work took up all my time, and building an intimate relationship was hard. And there was no slowing down. School project deadlines had to be met, work had to be arrived at on time and in proper clothes, groceries had to be bought, relations had to be navigated. In short (I can't write "in short" without laughing at the thought of Micawber), all of that meant shoving my emotional needs aside.
Hmm, where did I learn to do that? That's a whole memoir, but anyway I thought ignoring my needs meant I was independent. Having needs meant needy, and that wasn't cool. So by the time my girlfriend and I split up and I got involved with the new boyfriend, emotional poverty was my state. Dead mother; an only child; absent dad; no nearby family; adult-life demands. I was in a hole, a deficit, and there was no elastic net to buoy me up and out.
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What should I have done differently, given the resources I lacked? I still don't know. Sometimes I thought I was going to break down in some way. I guess I was just resilient enough to plow on, going to work every day and paying the rent and wondering what was wrong.
Eventually I have gratefully reached the somedays I hoped for, the ones that were achievable. I built a foundation in my 30s and 40s, thanks to Tom in many ways. (A long and secure marriage has a lot to recommend it.) If I had not built that foundation better late than never, I would not have had a content life. I would never have pursued the nontraditional career I've had for nineteen years. My self-protectiveness after my mother's death, and my emotional needs going into severe deficit, caused me to lack ambition during most of the years I could have used it. I was exhausted. Honestly I feel that I'm still decompressing.
Beautiful as always. I’m blown away by the healing I see you do through writing, Fran 💕