The Home I Know: Economy
Chapter 19
Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.
“I allowed myself to quit striving for some destination and owned my story with grace [...], to grieve the childhood I had lost, [...] understanding there may never be a finish line.”1
~ Jane Epstein
~ ~ ~
My company celebrated me for being the youngest leader on the team. Mentored by seasoned professionals in the industry, I felt confident I would succeed in my newly-created role at the company. But nearing the six month mark, things began to change rapidly. Twenty years behind those hired in the same role, I was too young and too inexperienced to succeed. The age-old expectation to “leave your personal problems at home,” didn’t work for me as my brain, body, and being went with me wherever I went. Too many identities lived within me all at once, and I didn’t seem to have the ability to compartmentalize them.
“Take your brain out and leave it on the couch, Annie!” I heard my father say in the back of my mind through my bosses expectations to leave my mental health conditions at home.
Many days, I spent time in the bathroom silently screaming in a single stall, trying to regulate after feeling activated by power dynamics imposed by my male superiors, the silence required of me to succeed, the reality I was dependent on this salary to survive.2 So much of the male-centered hierarchy of professional life felt like the institution of my abusive family. I always feared I’d be fired just because I had a bad mental health day, week, year. The system would abandon me if I couldn’t keep up, and I couldn’t keep up.
I pulled off someone’s version of a perfect life on the outside with my beautifully designed apartment by the sea, friends who loved me unconditionally like Peggy, safe lovers to explore my sexuality, and healing modalities that helped me to find a stabler baseline with my body. But my life’s infrastructure all remained dependent on this job I couldn’t manage in an environment run by men conditioned in the same patterns of power over/power under dynamics as my father, who expected the same silent submission from me as my mother.
Many incest survivors struggle to find financial safety outside of economic dependency on welfare systems or past and present family members.3 Some survivors discover self and social validation in activities outside of the house and family, and so become perfectionist and over-performing high-achievers who are vulnerable to chronic stress and burnout. Yes, the incest ended, but the lack of social, medical, and financial support keeps many of us trapped in a state of survival for life. The impacts of incest abuse extend beyond victims, as child sexual abuse costs US taxpayers billions of dollars each year in medical, welfare, legal fees, and productivity losses.4
With no plan, I quit my job. My brain began to shut down again, and the depression returned. I found my way back to bed and prayed for another miracle. I had two months of savings and paid out vacation days to figure out what to do next. Although I applied for more positions in the design industry, my body—like it did when I left teaching—knew that I couldn’t go back, even if I didn’t yet know how to move forward.
~ ~ ~
A friend invited me to her wedding, so I squeezed my body and my bags through the airplane aisle to find my seat on the way to Nashville, TN. Then, I saw her. The woman sitting next to me on this journey. Stick straight, brown bangs fell flat across her forehead. Her cheekbones were small and high. Her skin glowed. Her jovial spirit emanated from the inside out. She seemed to be nearly the same age as me.
“Hi, I’m Ruth!” She shared far too enthusiastically.
“Hi, I’m Anne,” I replied, not meeting the gleeful twinkle in her eye.
“You look really familiar,” she continued.
“I guess I just have one of those faces,” I replied, disappointed that this conversation wasn’t over.
“No…are you going to Martha’s wedding by any chance?”
“I am.”
“Me too! We met at her Bachelorette party.”
“Oh, right!” I replied performatively, trying hard to match her energy, then got trapped in a chat.
Surprisingly, the conversation quickly shifted from annoyance to fun. Her cheerfulness felt contagious and spread into me like the disease I deeply needed: play. We landed, attended the various wedding activities, then filled the space between with recreation. Soon we called each other best friends, but Ruth became so much more than that. She—a maker of children’s toys and her husband in tech—was full of resources and economic confidence, so being in her orbit also opened professional opportunities to me. While I was shaking with my sudden departure from salaried life and expected paychecks without other opportunities, her community of makers always needed help. So she taught me how to start my own business then plugged me in to client opportunities.
I started picking up side gigs to pay the bills: nannying for Ruth’s friends, manufacturing for her company, renting breast pumps at a children’s hospital she had been connected to through a mom’s group. In between, I drove for a rideshare company to keep food in my fridge and gas in the tank. Friends lent me money when I needed it to help me stay afloat financially. Suddenly, I felt like I was connected to an economy of reciprocity built on generosity. This economic interdependency made my disability so much easier to hold.
Entrepreneurship, although less stable, afforded me the time and space I needed to manage my chronic health conditions, to take breaks, to work around my brain’s best hours. But I couldn’t sustain the cost of my current lifestyle picking up side gigs. My lease ended in January and once again I needed housing.
“Come live with us!” Ruth generously invited me to stay with her family. Her husband, Oliver, agreed. I gave away or sold most of my things, drove to Ruth’s on the San Francisco Peninsula, blew up an air mattress, and called her home office by day my new bedroom by night. Every morning, I woke up and rode Ruth’s bike to the train to Downtown San Jose where I worked for a pop-up accessories shop. I sat in the often empty retail space daydreaming about what was next for me. A memory continued to return to me, not of trauma, but of former dreams, of nascent possibilities.
Around eight years old, I scurried into my mother’s bedroom after having an epiphany. “Mom!” I squealed enthusiastically, “I’m going to be a writer when I grow up!” She sat in bed, gazed at me with a strange perplexity and a brief nod of the head saying, “That’s great, Annie.”
Hardly enthusiastic, definitely not believable. Dismissive, as she had been with so many of my dreams. I dragged my feet through the walk of shame back to my bedroom and dreamed alone of my future success.
After work, I biked and trained back to Ruth’s where we ate, and dined, and watched movies. The first time I saw Josephine March — played by Wynona Ryder in the second cinematic rendition of Little Women — strut across the screen in her mustached-wearing-constumed confidence, I felt seen. Her search for position in an industry and society designed by and for men and her cravings for the comforts of class enjoyed by so many others surrounding her. Her tom-boyish character in a gender-based social system that demanded she dance, and marry, and procreate, when she wanted to walk, and weave stories, and write.
Josephine’s fictional example inspired me to cease conforming or confining myself to one of the paradigms or archetypes taught to me all those years ago by society, the Catholic church, and Disney. Instead, I could be a little bit of everything. Like Josephine, I could be free with my frustration, and my creativity, and my devotion, and my dreams. My imaginative schemes and pendulating mood swings. My love for home and the unknown. I named my inner screamer Josephine, which means, “The expansion of being,” after this fictional character who so inspired me.
~ ~ ~
I arose one morning and caught up on my social media apps before jumping out of bed and onto the bike to head to the pop-up shop. With a few taps and swipes, Facebook launched on my phone and I saw #MeToo splattered across the feed repeatedly.
What’s #MeToo? I thought to myself, as I quickly Googled it.
The results said, “#MeToo is a public acknowledgement that someone has been sexually abused.” The metoo. Movement was founded by Tarana Burke in 2006.5 I dropped my phone in shock, scooped it back up, and swiped through my screen to study exactly who had posted it. Then I joined the movement publicly by pasting “#MeToo” on my own feed. I followed the media’s portrayal of the movement for weeks and listened as sexual violence in the workplace and churches, extracurricular activities and by strangers, were represented in newspapers and on TV.
What about incest?
For months, I waited with bated breath until sexual abuse in the home was mentioned on global platforms. But it never was. In a rage, I biked to the train, and sat in the shop seething. When I could, I returned to the water to release the energy trapped in my body all these years, submerged under the supportive sea, and screamed at the top of my lungs. My inner screamer, formally silent, suddenly found her voice and finally felt ready to share her story. The breaking of communal silence around the global crisis of sexual violence helped her to feel that she might be heard.
I could no longer keep her in hiding, a secret once as deeply buried as my memories. I had to write. I had to share. I had to put my inner screamer’s new found willing voice on paper. I wanted the microphone. I wanted to stand up on stage. I wanted to lead a group to help women heal from incest abuse. It was my time to be like my father’s father, Pops: to become the storyteller. To place my body and our story in the center of a room on a stool and shout from the rooftops:
INCEST IS REAL!
I found a local writer to ask him for an informational interview, so I could learn not just how to write about incest, but also how to make money doing it. In advance of our meeting, he asked to review a piece of my writing, so I penned and then sent him my first blog post. We sat down for a coffee. He advised me:
“Get a job, Anne, and build your writing platform on the side. It won’t be easy, but I’m confident from what I’ve read that you will succeed.”
Inspired by the future and burdened by the present responsibility of it all, I returned to Ruth’s and continued organizing the next steps of my life. A few weeks passed until the next vision became clear in my mind. A friend’s friend offered me a room for less than half the cost I had been paying in San Francisco. It was located at the Northeastern-most tip of Lake Washington near Seattle. Nate, my hiking brother from LMU — who I was afraid to sleep next to in a tent all those years before — lived in the area and loved it. So, I thought it’d be worth a try.
“Friend, I decided I’m moving to Seattle!” I announced to Ruth, while still breathing heavily right off the bike ride home from the pop-up shop job.
“Really?!” Ruth replied enthusiastically. “If you don’t mind a bit of a detour on the way up, I’ll drive you!”
Her sister lived in Western Washington and Ruth had been meaning to visit. So, I had a place to live and a ride to Seattle. Following the path of least resistance and leaning into the generosity of this new friend, off to WA we went.
Epstein, I FEEL REAL GUILTY: A MEMOIR OF SIBLING SEXUAL ABUSE.
Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.
Assini-Meytin, Thorne, Sanikommu, Green, & Letourneau, “Impact of Child Sexual Abuse on Socioeconomic Attainment in Adulthood.”
Fang, "The Economic Burden of Child Maltreatment in the United States And Implications for Prevention."
Burke, “History & Inception: Where We Started. The Evolution of Our Movement.”