I’ve gotten some things seriously wrong.
And other things have fallen so perfectly into place that I question whether or not I’m just imagining it.
There are times when I am afraid that I am forcing myself to see things one way when, in reality, it must be something completely different.
I mean, schizophrenia does run deep in my bloodline.
So does denial.
But so does reinvention.
And I will get to all of that, hopefully, and maybe not entirely in this post, but the first point I want to touch on is that what I originally convinced myself to be the grandest gesture of “trying-through-the-illness” was really nothing more than someone still looking to escape justice and accountability and the gullibility of the love-starved child.
I think I’ve mentioned it before, but an issue with writing and the age of the internet is that there will always be a record of what was said, and when. A tweet from a decade ago can ruin an entire political or social media career before it can even get off the ground. With that said though, I think the record can also show progression, but only as long as there is also accountability. It’s okay to say, “that was my belief at the time, this is why that was my belief, and this is why I understand it was the wrong train of thought to board.” The record doesn’t just preserve our mistakes, it preserves our evolution.
I’ve written a few articles about my dad now. A piece that was published in The Havok Journal about him being homeless and mentally ill and it not being my responsibility to help him and then a rebuttal to myself that I published here.
There’s a point I’ve been circling for years without fully recognizing it. We are not the same person to everyone who knows us. Every relationship creates its own version of us. The father I knew is not the father my siblings knew. The man I defended is not the man other people experienced. And sometimes those versions contradict each other so completely that accepting one feels like betraying the other.
It’s still true that he had great taste in music and could build a home with his bare hands if needed, but he was also a drunk, ran from accountability like it was his job (the only one he could hold down), and left chronic wounds in the people he helped create.
And he died alone.
Like my mom.
I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of why or how it happened, but my mom and I hadn’t spoken verbally in well over a decade. And to make a very long story short enough to digest for this blog piece and so I can move on to what’s really important, it came to light that the things that were being said about me to my siblings and things that were told to me about my siblings, were not even in the same book.
This is less of a story about my parents and more about what happens when you discover the narrators of your life have not only been unreliable, but were writing different realities for different audiences.
Same author, different plots.
I won’t lie and say that I was prepared for her passing. I thought I was. I thought a decade of silence would be enough of a cushion. I thought the times I reached back out, only to be met with no response—or worse, a single emoji—had already done the damage. I thought the grief had happened years ago.
It hadn’t.
Distance is not the same thing as resolution. That, unfortunately, is a very human misconception.
I think the hardest part isn’t that I was lied to, or lied about. It was realizing how much of my life had been built around stories I never thought to question.
Not only stories about myself, but stories about other people. And how easily I accepted them because they fit a narrative I had already been handed.
I wasn’t evaluating the information. I was confirming a version of reality that had been written for me.
The truth, in many cases, was something else entirely.
And if I’m being honest, part of me preferred the version I’d been given.
It was easier to hate the people I believed hated me. Easier to turn my back on the people I thought had abandoned me first.
There was a certain satisfaction in that. A sense of righteousness. Even vengeance.
After all, if they had already decided who I was, why should I bother proving them wrong?
And why should I bother giving anyone the benefit of the doubt?
In those years of silence, I wasn’t just grieving my mother. I was grieving people who were still alive. Siblings. Family members. People that may have been damaged by stories neither side knew were being told.
And now, I have to figure out who everyone is without them.
And who I was in their versions.
Reconstructing Cori 