By Celine Sutter (Gallatin BA ’18) Originally published on Unfiltered Family Stories.
So, it lands a little something like this: how quiet CAN I whisper to my therapist on the phone while my ENTIRE family sits on the other side of a thin plane of glass eating breakfast?
answer: not softly enough.
I had a cute thing going for about a week where I couldn’t make eye contact with my mother and she took NOTE. Mostly, I just couldn’t take the small talk or the one story she was still lost in the middle of telling over 20 times?? But mostly I think my mother thinks her and I are very similar – which could be beautiful – but leads to a lot of blind spots between us.
I took a walk with my brother. He said I was a dark person. So I whispered that to my therapist, and she asked me to stop mumbling.
Since big fights in high school, my mother and I have just been trying to be ‘perfect’ for one another. Which is not only exhausting but really truly deeply sad. It’s the exact opposite of stopping to actually notice someone. It’s a projection of your wants onto theirs.
Anyway – last week did end with me: recently unemployed, racking in grad school rejections, quarantined, and terribly and uncommunicatively queer, sitting on a bench sobbing as my mother barely reacted. I think it was a real win!
Can’t wait to see what this next week holds 🙂 I hope some extravagant goose hunt while my incredibly immune-compromised father and I wobble around my house looking for hand sanitizer to wipe down cans of beans!
Xoxo I think I might have to write a memoir that nobody reads but its just self indulgent enough that I like it!