I like to brag that I’m the only one of Mom’s five children who was born after she received electroshock therapy. I don’t know if it had any effect on me, but it’s something unique I like to cling to in a family of unusually smart, funny, creative, and compassionate people who have done all the interesting things long before my turn comes around. It’s the curse of the youngest child in a large family of good people. We want to do something that sets us apart while simultaneously we feel left out of so many old family stories. Being a participant, let alone the protagonist, of current family stories is where we long to be.
It’s only through my own journey back into cognitive behavior therapy that I realized something at the center of my own story has been aching to be told. Fear kept it untold at first. Then shame. Then denial. Then respect or pity or maybe all of it wrapped up together kept it untold. But I feel like if I don’t let it out now, if I continue this cowardly vow of secrecy, it will continue to weigh me down and hold me back and prevent me from accepting and sharing my entire story.
I once got the chance to talk to memoirist Frank McCourt on KCUR’s “The Walt Bodine Show.” I asked the Pulitzer prize-winning author how he found the courage to write about family issues without hurting his family’s feelings. His answer: most of the family members who would have hurt feelings were dead when he published it.
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