This is where I'm going to die

A story about escape, return, collapse, and finally finding home.

In the spring of 2009, when my daughter was five weeks old, my husband and I moved from Boston to my home state of Colorado, into my dad’s basement.

I flew with the baby, vibrating with a hangover and more anxiety than any body should be able to hold, while my husband towed a U-Haul behind our silver VW Golf across the country with our dog.

Our decision to move was something like a Hail Mary attempt to save us, though we didn’t say that out loud, of course. We posited it as hopeful-yet-logical shift to a different geography, one where my husband, who’d graduated the year before a with joint JD-MBA degree had not yet saturated the market with his resume, and back to my roots, to the mountains, to a place he’d also easily feel at home as an avid skier.

Also, I was working for my dad when we made the decision, so, you know, all the easier to conduct business if I was there at the home office.

These were the reasons we gave, because these are all good reasons for moving when you’re in the middle of a recession and your husband can’t find work and you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and you’re about to not be able to afford the ARM mortgage you had no business getting. What I couldn’t say was that I wanted to be rescued, and I still held the fantasy that my dad would, finally, rescue me. What I couldn’t say—because I didn’t understand it, and wouldn’t for many, many years—was that I was unable to hold the intimacy of my marriage because all that safety felt so foreign my body mistook it for danger, for boredom, for being trapped in a box with only a straw to breathe from.

We were fucking kids, and I forget that, because I felt so old inside. So frayed, already, at thirty-one. It’s taken me this long—literally, until yesterday—to admit, even to myself, out loud (in my journal) that my primary feeling state in childhood and throughout my teens was fear. Hypervigilance. Anxiety. Like a taught rubber band.

This has long been contorted in my mind because there were happy times and there was love; I was loved well by my mom, by my grandma, who lived across the street and cherished me, and by many others. I had my younger brother. I made friends easily. We ate very well. We had dogs. I had cool clothes, a lot of books, and a bike to ride in my very white, very safe neighborhood.

It was not an unhappy childhood, yet I was deeply unhappy. And I’d unconsciously learned to mask that unhappiness in every way, to everyone, all the time.

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The move was a disaster. Less than six months later, we moved back—and my God, were we banged up.

We put our things in storage and moved into my brother-in-law’s home with his family: wife, two young girls, and their dog. Six humans and two dogs in a tiny 1700s house in a seaside town on the North Shore of Boston. We knew no one but them. They gave us their bedroom and slept on the pull-out couch downstairs. We had to walk around them to get to the coffee in the morning, or leave the house. It was humbling. It was too much. It is still one of the most generous things anyone’s ever done for me.