the scariest girl you know

Nanny and I

Not long ago, my mom handed me a manilla envelope that her mom, my Nanny, had set aside for me. In the car on the way home, I read the contents of the manilla folder aloud to Joe. Some of the writing inside had been done by Nanny, including a short story about Stella from when she was just a kitten. The majority of the writing was my own, stories I had written and published in high school, stories that induced equal levels of cringe and nostalgia in my gut. For Nanny, who taught me how to read and write, they might have served as a reminder of her skill as a teacher. One story was about the day we found out my uncle had committed suicide. I was three, my mom was 24, Nanny was 66. I transcribed what I remembered of the story when I was 16 and published it in my high school newspaper. Now, I am nearly 28, my mom is 49, Nanny is 90. Reading the story reminds me of several different versions of me, my parents, and Nanny.

As you age, you find that all of the ages you’ve ever been continue to exist inside of you, rearing their heads in opposition or occasionally, in harmony. My therapist explains this via something called Internal Family Systems therapy. If you imagine all parts of you—good, bad, unwieldy—as a family attempting to jostle for power or collaborate, you feel less tied to each individual wave as the true and omniscient you. I find this is also true for the people you love over time. As much as I feel and don’t feel attached to my three year old self, I recognize that my mom can still feel like 24 year old Mary to me, just as Nanny can still feel like 66 year old Catherine. And it really has little to do with how attached they are to those versions of themselves; I believe it has more to do with how attached I am.

It’s hard to reconcile who someone has been with who they are now. I see that play out in my relationship with my mom just as I see it play out in her relationship with her mom just as I see it play out in my relationship with my selves. Sometimes my brother will attribute something to me that seems unrecognizable until I realize that there are many other versions of me that exist to him. Joan Didion wrote,

“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a dark night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

Mermaid Girl from The Last Resort by Roberto Innocenti & J. Patrick Lewis

Generally, it is much easier to remain aware of the parts of someone else that you don’t like than it is the parts of yourself that you don’t like. As children, we’re conditioned to 'be good’ despite being capable of and acquainted with “bad.” As a result, we create shadow selves or repressed elements of our psyche. It has been proposed that your shadow self is most evident in what you project onto others or become disproportionately angry with them about. My mom’s rage is what I’m most likely to get upset with her about. My own rage is what I’m mostly likely to repress and unleash in less than ideal moments. My anger is something I grapple with a lot—here, in therapy, and with those I love. No one has ever said to me, You are too angry, but they have lovingly told me that I can be scary. I grew up dissociating from the rage of my mom’s family so much so that when it appeared in me, I didn’t recognize it.

“Remaining on nodding terms” as I understand it requires recognizing all of the parts of you that might arrive at the function, even the ones that are more volatile and difficult to predict. And after the recognizing, there is perhaps the more difficult part—the accepting. I don’t think the phrases, “love yourself” and “accept yourself” adequately convey the level of emotional sifting and debunking some of us need to do in order to get to a place where we can sort-of-tolerate ourselves. In fact, for someone who has limited examples of unconditional love, the phrase “love yourself” might equate to controlling, disciplining, and at times, abusing yourself. For me, loving and accepting all of my selves means trying to be less obsessed with being perfect. Sure, I can always be better, but if I’m always focused on being better, then when am I expending energy towards liking and accepting who I am right now?

Perhaps nodding is a form of recognizing that the shadow parts of you exist in response to your environment—to how you learned to give and receive love, to what makes you feel safe and unsafe, to how you’ve historically gotten the things you most badly desire and how you’ve historically lost access to them. Just because you find better resources to cope doesn’t mean those once trusted parts of you won’t be more than occasionally triggered; just because you feel different now doesn’t mean the traumatized or aching parts of you cease to exist. And though I don’t have a definitive answer to how we continually shed light on our shadow, I notice that paying attention helps.

I try to pay attention to my emotions, especially the ones that feel disproportionate to a situation. I try to pay attention to the way people who love me treat me when I act in a messy or unreasonable way. I try to pay attention to the way I treat people I love when they act in a messy or unreasonable way. I try to pay attention to the things about other people that piss me off or drive me crazy. And at risk of over-writing ‘the point', I try to pay attention to the fact that no one is paying more attention to me than me.

Recently, I read this Bazaar article by Laia Garcia-Furtado entitled, ‘The Joy of Sad Girl Music,’—please read it in full. In it, Garcia-Furtado talks to various musical Sad Girls about how they found ways to embrace the sadness and anger that is so often relegated to the shadow for women. I particularly liked Shirley Manson’s (of Garbage) thoughts on anger:

“I loved Patti [Smith] because I really connected with what I perceived as her [indignation] and her fury and her power. [Then] I read a description of Patti, which was, ‘Patti Smith is the most positive person I know in my life.’ …It really changed the way I viewed myself. I thought, if Patti is a positive person, then all these attributes I apply to her must be positive too. Therefore I see anger as a source of great power as long as it’s used responsibly. Disagreement is necessary and healthy. The expression of pain is necessary. And so that is why I will always be a Sad Girl.”

I think about my anger and my mom’s anger and the anger of all the women I know that sometimes manifests as something more like sadness. You can be so angry that you burn your whole life to the ground, OR, you can be so angry that you never stop running out of energy to make new things. Anger can be a kind of tool—a dangerous one, one that takes years to hone and can still burn you if you’re not careful—but a tool nonetheless. And so, as scary as it is, I think our angriest selves are selves worth spending time with.