Content warning: Mentions of parental suicide, child loss, parentification, and alcoholism.
Sometimes I deliberately use writing as therapy to help me through big emotions in the moment. If I’m having a particularly bad day, I might go kill off a character. It’s cheaper than breaking things, and fictional people are wonderfully accommodating that way. If I’m sad, angry, grieving, or feeling something especially intensely, I’ll sometimes write a scene where a character is experiencing something similar, not necessarily because their circumstances match whatever’s making me feel that way, but because there’s something useful about writing an emotion while you’re actually experiencing it.
When you’re in the middle of feeling something big, you notice things you won’t necessarily remember later, like where it sits in your body and the strange physical sensations what your thoughts do, what irritates you for no logical reason… The tiny details that suddenly seem important. You know, the things that are almost impossible to reconstruct six months later, when you’re perfectly happy, drinking coffee, and trying to remember what devastation actually felt like.
So yes, sometimes I consciously use whatever I’m feeling as raw material. It helps make hard emotions feel productive.
What I don’t do is sit down at my computer thinking, ya know what, today seems like an excellent day to process major childhood trauma that I don’t even realize exists! I certainly don’t start a book intending to work through the sorts of things people ordinarily spend years unpacking in therapy. There are sometimes certain things that you saw as normal while growing up that you don’t even realize until many years later, many, many years later, that it wasn’t actually a funny haha she was thwarted moment when you mom put a shotgun to your head and pulled the trigger thinking it was loaded when it wasn’t, thankfully. I was 14 when that happened, and only realized a couple year ago that that wasn’t actually funny. That was sobering.
When I write, usually I’m just thinking about the characters. What would this person would do? What would hurt them? What are they afraid of? What realization would completely change how they understand everything that came before? Etc.
And every once in a while, I write the answer and realize…
Oh.
Oh shit.
That wasn’t only about them. So, uh….
That’s happened to me twice, in ways that genuinely changed how I understand my own life. Buckle up. It’s downhill for a while because I’m airing it.
The first involved a book that hasn’t been published yet, and since it’s 1920s/1930s mafia romance, which is currently a pretty dead subgenre, won’t be for a while. One of the characters lost a child long before the book begins. Years later, he falls in love again, and eventually he becomes a father again, this time to twins. When he looks at those newborn babies, something hits him.
There are terrible things in his past he would never have chosen. There are losses he would have prevented, if it had ever been up to him. But if he changed those events, everything that came after would change too. His life would have taken another path. And these children, the two little people now sleeping in his arms, would never have existed. How can you wish to undo the past when it would mean undoing the present? But how can you not when what happened was horrific and you saw things no one should ever have to see?
I wrote that realization for him. And then, somewhere in the middle of writing it, I realized I had just answered a question I had spent years carrying myself.
My father died by suicide, and I witnessed it. Another gun event. (I’m staunchly anti-gun, which is probably no surprise, and that gun was also aimed at me. Fun time….)
There was also a great deal before his death that I spent years wishing had been different. My childhood involved alcoholism, instability, responsibilities I should not have had, and circumstances that required me to grow up far earlier than I should have. I was also dealing with significant medical problems of my own through much of it.
For a long time, the idea of changing the past seemed obvious. If given the choice, of course I would. Wouldn’t I save my father?
Except now I have a daughter.
And one day, because of a fictional man holding his fictional children, the question suddenly changed. It stopped being if you could undo all of that, would you? and became…
If undoing it meant losing her, would you?
No.
There isn’t even a pause before the answer. No. Hell no.
My father has been gone for more than two decades. If he suddenly stepped back into my life exactly as he was when he died, we would be strangers to one another now. But my daughter isn’t hypothetical. She’s here. I know the sound of her laugh. I know how her quirky mind works. I know the things she gets excited about and the things that annoy her. I’ve watched her grow into this very specific, irreplaceable person.
There is no version of the past I want badly enough to trade her for it.
That doesn’t make what happened good. It doesn’t mean tragedy happens for a reason. I don’t believe suffering is secretly a gift wrapped in ugly paper, or that every horrible thing eventually turns out to have been necessary. Some things are simply awful. But cause and effect are messy, and this is the path that led to the life I have now. I can’t reach backward, remove the things I hate, and somehow guarantee that all the people I love now will still be waiting for me when I return.
And once I understood that, I stopped wishing so desperately for a different past. I didn’t need to make it good. I just needed to stop fighting the fact that it was mine.
Strangely enough, a fictional character helped me do that. I needed to address how something traumatic that had affected him through the first two books would affect him as a parent to two little girls, and in putting myself in his shoes (for the record, my daughter had a twin sister), I was able to let go of the past and move on.
Then it happened again. This time, the character s Caspian. He’s in the next boom I’m releasing, a contemporary figure skating/hockey romance, the book for which I started figure skating lessons two years ago including with a coach whose had skaters go pretty far, including to the Olympics.
Anyway, Caspian has been severely parentified. He has essentially been raising his little sister. Their parents are the sort of people who don’t care to be parents, the sort who should have lived childfree lives, but had kids anyway. They bolt, and he becomes everything to this toddler. Their parents pop on maybe a few times a year, then bounce until next time, leaving him to figure it all out.
Because this has been his normal for so long, Caspian doesn’t spend much time thinking about how abnormal it actually is. That’s one of the insidious things about parentification. When you’re the child in the middle of it, you usually aren’t thinking, I am currently experiencing inappropriate role reversal in my family system. You’re thinking that someone needs to do this thing. So you do it. Someone needs to keep everyone calm. So you do it. Someone needs to remember the important things. Someone needs to fix dinner. Someone needs to deal with the crisis. Someone needs to make sure the younger kid is okay. Someone needs to make sure CPS doesn’t take you and your brother.
Eventually you become “mature for your age.” “Responsible.” “Independent.” “Good in a crisis.” People often compliment children for qualities they developed because the alternative was letting everything fall apart. It’s really sad.
At one point in the book (this isn’t a spoiler since Caspian dealing with being parentified is part of the blurb), Caspian looks at Lily and really sees her age. She’s obviously a kid. She doodles dragons in the margins of things and behaves like a child because she is one. She needs stability. She needs protection. She needs someone older to make sure the things that matter get handled. Can’t have lists of three, so she needs someone to remember permission slips.
When looking at her, Caspian realizes he was only about five years older than she is now when he started becoming her primary caregiver. Suddenly, he understands how young he had been.
I wrote that realization only about an hour ago from writing this sentence. And then I thought about my daughter. She’s sixteen, almost exactly the age to the month that I had been during one particular night of my childhood. And suddenly I saw sixteen-year-old me very differently, and it wasn’t good.
When I was sixteen, my fourteen-year-old brother came into my bedroom absolutely terrified. The police were outside, shining flashlights through the windows, banging, calling, “David, we know you’re in there! Open up!”
My brother thought the police were after him for some reason since that’s his name. But it’s also our dad’s name.
We had been asleep. Our mother was at work. Our dad had gone to a bar, and we thought he was still there. We didn’t know he had driven home extremely drunk and hit multiple parked cars, enough that the police just followed the trail of smashed parked cars, literally.
The situation became something sixteen-year-old me had to manage.
I had a terrified fourteen-year-old brother who didn’t understand what was happening. I had police outside the house. I had an intoxicated father. I had the very real fear that if our dad was arrested and the situation spiraled far enough, my brother and I could end up taken from the house, and possibly separated from each other. Police aren’t exactly allowed to take the adult from the home and leave the kids behind. Well, weren’t allowed to. This was years before the dumpster fire we’re living in now.
So I did what I had already learned to do by sixteen (I was actually eight the first time I had to deal with something like this…). I tried to hold everything together, to calm my brother, and to deal with the police to try to keep our dad from being arrested. I got lucky, I guess, since instead of being taken away in handcuffs that night, he was ticketed and later had to go to court.
As an adult, I can look at the situation and think that arresting a man who had driven extremely drunk and hit multiple vehicles would have been entirely justified. He really should have been. That was far from the last time he drove drunk. There was a night a year later an hour from home when I had to fight him to not get in a vehicle when he was so drunk he could hardly stand.
But sixteen-year-old me wasn’t weighing public policy or appropriate criminal consequences. I was a kid thinking if they take him, what happens to my younger brother?
For years, I could tell that story without fully grasping the absurdity of the fact that the person trying to solve all of those problems was sixteen, because by sixteen, that level of responsibility didn’t feel particularly strange to me anymore. I had already spent years taking on responsibilities inside my family while simultaneously dealing with major medical problems myself. That was just life. I didn’t know any different. Trying to keep it all secret should have clued me in, but I was only going into my junior year of high school. I get a pass on that.
Now my daughter became sixteen, going into her junior year. I look at her and think that she’s just a kid, not in the sentimental parental sense where your child is always your baby. I mean she is objectively, developmentally, visibly still a kid.
There are important responsibilities I deliberately don’t place entirely on her shoulders. She takes medication that’s extremely important to her well-being. I don’t even expect her to bear the sole responsibility of remembering to take it at exactly the right time every day because why would I? She’s a kid, and something so vital shouldn’t be her responsibility.
While writing this scene with Caspian, I found myself comparing my daughter to sixteen-year-old me trying to keep the police from arresting my father because I was afraid my brother and I would be taken away, trying to soothe my terrified younger sibling while figuring out what the adults were doing, literally trying to stabilize an entire family crisis.
And suddenly Caspian’s realization that, though he felt like an adult, he was really, truly still just a kid tasked with too much became mine. Like him, I had spent years remembering what I had done. I had never really stopped to look at how old the person doing it was because, in my body, I didn’t get to be a kid.
The older I get, the more people I meet around my own age who have some version of this story. The circumstances vary, but usually they involve alcoholism, addiction, mental illness, an absent parent, an unstable household, a younger sibling who needed raising, a parent who made their child the confidant, mediator, caretaker, peacekeeper, or crisis manager. Many of us thought we were simply unusually mature. Some of us were proud of it. Sometimes we still are. Some of us might even think that the maturity we had is normal because we don’t now better.
There is nothing wrong with being capable, but there’s a difference between a child developing independence and a child becoming competent because the adults around them left a vacancy. Sometimes you don’t realize the difference until many years later, sometimes when your own child reaches the age you were, and you look at them and think, oh my God, I was this young, but she’s just a kid and I wasn’t…
And sometimes, apparently, you have to invent a fictional person first and let him figure it out for you.
Maybe that’s one of the strangest gifts of fiction. We are remarkably compassionate toward people who don’t exist. We can look at a character and immediately understand why something hurt them. We can recognize that they were too young to carry something. We can forgive them for surviving imperfectly. We can see the injustice in their circumstances because we’re standing safely outside the story.
But it’s harder to do that with ourselves. Our own lives come with too much context, too many excuses, too many years of telling ourselves, well, that’s just how things were, wishing it was normal so we don’t feel something broken.
But characters give us distance, and sometimes our experiences slip into them without our consciously putting them there. A question we’ve never resolved becomes their question, and a wound we haven’t looked at closely becomes part of their emotional logic. Then we follow them until they finally understand something about it, and occasionally, right as they find that understanding, we realize we’ve followed them somewhere inside ourselves and find some hurt little kid that needed to simply be acknowledged.
I’ve now had fictional characters teach me two things I apparently wasn’t ready to learn directly. Neither time was I in the headspace to unpack and deconstruct traumatic events.
One taught me that accepting the past doesn’t mean approving of it. It can simply mean understanding that I cannot repave the road behind me without sacrificing the catalyst to the road eventually brought into my life.
Another taught me that being capable of carrying adult responsibilities as a child didn’t make me an adult. It made me a child who had learned how to carry adult responsibilities.
Both times involved taking a look at my own daughter, just as Vincenzo and Caspian had to look at people they were raising, one as a parent and the other as a parental figure.
I didn’t sit down intending to work through either of those things. But every once in a while, you put something into a character without realizing it belongs to you. You follow them through the story, and through watch them, finally understand their own life.
And then you find yourself standing there beside them, thinking:
Oh.
Me too, dude. Me fucking too.
~~~~~~~
I want to be clear: I don’t want pity or for anyone to feel bad. Despite the shit I’ve been through, I have a life I wouldn’t trade to undo it. I would rather go through it all a million times over giving up what I have now. My daughter wouldn’t exist without major events on my life throwing me onto different roads that led to my daughter. The realizations I’ve had involve trauma, yes, but I wouldn’t change a thing in the end. It’s just kind of amazing how sitting down and figuring out the story and what words to write can make you realize things about yourself and help heal traumas you didn’t know where there.