I'm About to Lose Control...
and I definitely DON'T like it.
People have very often told me not to worry about things that I cannot control. I find this sentiment a bit absurd. The inability to control something is the one and only reason to worry. The idea that anyone would worry about something they can control is laughable to me.
I suppose some people just don’t worry at all. But that seems so far-fetched as to be classified as fantasy.
I am not obsessed with being in control out of some misplaced power trip. I do not have an over-inflated ego that makes me think that my way is always the best way.
I seek to control things because I am afraid. Always, constantly afraid.
It is not unusual for people who experience chronic trauma throughout their lives to become obsessed with being in control. I’m not really self-absorbed. I’ve just been hurt far, far too many times.
Everyone keeps telling me to relax, to heal, to stop trying so hard and just let things happen. I find this advice baffling. How am I supposed to be calm when everything keeps getting worse and worse and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to make it better?
How can I heal when I’m constantly afraid? How can I relax when I have never had a place that felt like home?
People keep calling Kansas my home. There seems to be this prevailing notion that I spent most of my childhood here and that I moved in with my adoptive family in high school and that I feel safe and happy in Kansas.
Kansas is not my home. I do not feel safe and happy in Kansas.
I moved here halfway through eighth grade when it became clear that lying to the child protective services people in Arkansas—where I actually grew up—wasn’t working any longer and I was going to be taken away from my birth mother for more than just a weekend if something didn’t change.
And so, two days after Christmas we packed up some of our belongings, crammed six people into a small sedan, and moved into a three-bedroom, one bathroom house with two other families. Twelve people, three bedrooms, one bathroom. But the roof wasn’t falling in and we didn’t have to sleep with the lights on to keep the roaches off of us, so it was really a massive improvement.
Second semester of eighth grade was the first time in my memory that I got truly depressed. I stopped wanting to go to school. I skipped as often as I could.
Those who know me understand the horrifying importance of that sentence. I LOVE school. I would spend my entire life doing nothing but going to school, getting degree after degree after degree if it were at all feasible. But that winter and spring, I did not want to go to school.
I was never interviewed by child protective services in Kansas. Years of lying in Arkansas, culminating with having to leave nearly all of my meager belongings behind to share a room with three other girls, one of whom kept deliberately peeing the bed out of protest, taught me the importance of keeping the welts and bruises on my body well-hidden. I learned the hard way to be careful what I revealed about my home life.
Yet in the years since I’ve had my own children, I’ve formed a conviction that I cannot shake that my teachers somehow knew anyway. They couldn’t prove it, they never saw or heard anything that would trigger the reporting requirements, but they knew.
That whole thing my freshman year of high school where I wouldn’t talk to anyone except my English teacher was probably a big red flag. Oddly enough, that had nothing to do with the abuse I was suffering at home. In that last semester of eighth grade, some of the kids teased me about my accent. I was a white trash Arkansas hillbilly, and I talked like one. My solution was to stop talking until I could master speaking with a flat midwestern accent.
Over the intervening years, I have gotten many compliments on my diction. My favorite is “you talk like a newscaster.” I’ve heard that one quite a bit. But those close enough to me to be around when I’m tired or on the rare occasions I’ve been relaxed enough to let my guard down have heard me drawl. Norman would always make fun of me for it. I tried hard to hide my drawl from him.
I met my adoptive family sophomore year of high school. But I didn’t move in with them. I have only lived with them twice in my entire life; for three months after hurricane Katrina, when I had no place to go so my brother came and got me from Morgan City, and for three weeks in February of 2014 when I was studying for the Kansas bar exam. Other than that, it’s just been short visits over the years.
I have few good memories in Kansas. Everywhere I turn, there is something waiting to trigger a nasty flashback. Being here now feels just like being here after Katrina. I’m frightened, and desperate, and I have no idea what’s going to happen to me.
The only difference is, after Katrina I got two jobs almost immediately. Now I can’t seem to land even one.
I am trying to relax. I am trying to be calm. I know there are a lot of people who love me very much and are incredibly glad I’m here.
Among them is a woman named Betty,1 one of the first people I met when we moved to Kansas. She was in my eighth-grade class at that tiny little rural school. She never made fun of my accent. Although we have not seen each other in the flesh since 2001, she has remained a loyal friend and is now one of my biggest fans and most devoted readers. If I ever manage to make it as a writer, there will be a book dedicated to her. I don’t yet know what it will be about, but it will happen.
I’m already working on a screenplay to be dedicated to that wonderful ninth-grade English teacher who was the only person to whom I felt safe and comfortable speaking that horrific year when I was trying to find my place in what felt like a hostile alien environment. She is the reason I write.
Books had been my refuge since the moment I learned the alphabet and what sounds the letters made. No one taught me to read, they just ignored me for hours on end and with nothing else to do I took it upon myself to work it out. I do not remember the name of my kindergarten teacher. But I do remember her astonishment at finding I could read at a third-grade level the day class began. I remember her frustration at realizing my “parents” had absolutely no idea I had that skill. And I remember the work she put in to getting me transferred to a charter school for the literary arts. She somehow arranged for me to take the bus to the public elementary school, and for a van to come and get me and take me to the charter school.
This system remained in place until spring break of third grade, when we had to flee the city to get away from child protective services. That school was EVERYTHING to me. I have almost no memories of my life before I was nine years old, but I remember that school vividly, inside and out. I remember many of the books we read. I remember a few of the projects I did. I wish I could remember the name of the woman who made it happen for me. She and LeVar Burton between themselves probably saved my life in those early years.
Butterfly in the sky/ I can go twice as high…
I can go anywhere/ Friends to know, and ways to grow…
I can be anything/ Take a look, it’s in a book…
A Reading Rainbow
If I ever meet LeVar Burton I’ll probably just burst into tears, then die of embarrassment.
By the time I made it to freshman English, I was pretty devoted to the written word. Books were my safe space, my solace, my salvation.
Then I was placed in a classroom with a handful of other students in a tiny little Consolidated Rural High School that served five towns and still only had a couple hundred students at any given time, and a magical woman taught me how to turn my love of reading sentences into the art of making my own.
When I came up with an idea for a movie set in a rural high school in Kansas, I knew immediately it was for her, even though there isn’t an English teacher in it. There is a librarian character, in honor of my beloved high school librarian who used to let me skip class and play scrabble with her. It was a very small school. Everyone knew where I was and what I was doing and my grades were great, so they just kind of left me to it. But I never skipped English.
Or American Government, come to that. That teacher would have cared. That teacher was all up in my business since early freshman year, even though he never actually taught me until senior year. That teacher used to say things like “did it ever occur to you what you could accomplish if you would just apply yourself for once?” He also knew full well I sometimes did other kids’ homework for money, and never did anything about it. He’s the main reason I now believe the teachers knew more about my home life than they were letting on.
I wonder what became of him. I wonder if he knows I became a lawyer. I wonder if he knows I still quote things he said in that American Government class on a regular basis.
One person’s rights end where another person’s rights begin.
It’s a paraphrase of United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s assertion that “the right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”
I doubt my teacher was the first person to say it the way he did. But he was the first person to say it to me, and I have carried it with me all these years. It has colored who I am as an individual, as a citizen, and as an attorney.
Kansas itself holds a lot of bad memories. The high school does not. That’s something.
The job issue is what’s causing me the most grief right now. I don’t have an active law license here right now, so I couldn’t practice law if I wanted to. All it would take to get one is $600 (to pay bar admission fees, because I passed the bar exam ten years ago), but I don’t have any way to get $600 right now, so it’s pretty much moot.
I don’t deny that I’m incredibly overqualified for basically everything else, but I still think I should be allowed to…erm…dumb myself down, for lack of a better way to put it. Although I do appreciate the perspective of the lovely woman at the General Mills plant who very politely explained that I would make the other employees uncomfortable.
“We don’t have to tell them I have a law degree.”
“Oh honey, they would just know.”
That’s fair. People were telling me I talk like I’m educated long before I even got my bachelor's degree. I like words, and I am good with them. It’s not something I can hide, no matter how hard I try.
The job issue is compounded by my complete lack of confidence inspired by a horrifically humiliating interview I had last month.
I applied to be an appellate court law clerk. Although this was a legal job, it was one I felt I could handle, because it was just doing research and analyzing cases and writing down what the law said. There would be no talking to defendants or victims. Only about half the cases would even be criminal. I wouldn’t even be permitted to consider anything not included in the trial court record. And the judge said that while she preferred I have my primary residence in Louisiana, I could work from anywhere in the country, as long as I didn’t miss any deadlines.
I would have gotten to see my kids more often.
It sounded perfect. I was so excited when I was invited to interview for the position.
Less than a minute after the interview began, the judge started listing other positions with other agencies for which she thought I should apply. It was very confusing. Then she told me that she didn’t think I was a good fit for the position for which she was hiring, but that I seemed so interesting, and she enjoyed talking to me on the phone so much, that she just had to meet me.
I tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the smile on my face. I did succeed in keeping the tears from my eyes. I put on a magnificent show of bravado and talked myself up like never before. But it was clear from the outset that she had no intention of hiring me. She was kind enough to tell me she hadn’t entirely ruled me out. We both knew it was a lie.
I don’t think she meant any harm. I firmly believe that if you told her it wasn’t a very nice thing to do she would be absolutely astonished. Nonetheless, it fucked with my head.
My confidence comes and goes in the best of circumstances. Now it has just straight up gone. I’m not sure when, if ever, it will come back.
It’s hard to do well in a job interview when you walk in believing that they have already decided not to hire you before you even say hello. But that’s where my head is at right now.
I have few prospects, no confidence, and no control.
Of course, I’m depressed and anxious. How could I possibly not be depressed and anxious?
Right now, I cannot think of a single way things can get better. I can, however, think of a whole lot of ways they can get worse.
I am worried specifically because everything is entirely out of my control. And I can’t stop worrying because I literally have nothing else to do.
I’m not a control freak. I’m just scared. And tired.
So fucking tired.
Not her real name, obviously, but I think she’ll like the one I gave her.
You are one of my favorite humans, Rob… I don’t know how you have endured everything you have, and yet are still standing… 🫶🏼