The ghosts of childhood past

It's still spooky season, right?

Dear Writer,

I recently drove back to the area where I grew up, not because I grew up there, but because the book I’m working on is set there and I wanted to spend some time walking the terrain, hoping it would crack open the insight I needed in order to finish my revision.

The book I drafted in April was… you know… okay… but it was missing something, and I didn’t know what that something was. So, since long drives are really good for me creatively, I figured I’d do my second road trip from Colorado to New York this year, and see what broke loose.

Nothing is what broke loose.

At least at first.

Despite the fact that I had a pretty traumatic childhood, I love the Hudson Valley, especially in the fall. Even driving by places where truly awful things happened to me, I feel a lovely sense of peace wrap around me when I drive over the same wildly winding roads that defined the geography of my youth. Even though I will likely never go back there to live again, the area will always be home to me in a way no other place I’ve lived ever could be.

I was staying in a town about an hour from where I actually grew up, one that was completely unfamiliar to me. It wasn’t until the end of my first week there that I finally returned to familiar ground, when I went to a dinner party in Poughkeepsie with a friend. After I left, for some reason, my GPS took me on a completely different route from how it had delivered me, a route that strangely drove me directly past the townhouse where I’d lived for the first 11 years of my life, a place where my brother terrorized me regularly; the cemetery across the street where at the age of seven, I’d been molested by an old man; the dodgy neighborhood flat we’d lived in for a year when I was 12; the library where I’d had my first (volunteer) job; the boarding house where my father had been living when he died.

“What the fuck?” I said, staring out into the blackness at places I couldn’t see, but knew were there. I drove past each of these spaces without slowing down at all, so weirded out by the fact that I was being dragged past them, almost as if the GPS had an agenda in mind.

There’s a thing that happens in trauma… or, at least, there’s a thing that has happened to me in trauma. When bad things happen, I split myself in two. One of us gets to go on about her life, chipper and happy and looking for the good wherever it can be found.

The other gets left behind, a ghost created from denial and neglect, benignly haunting the spaces where I’d been, unwelcome to travel forward with me but unwilling to fade away into nothing.

As I drove past those spaces that hovered in the darkness, I had an odd feeling. A little whoosh sensation, and it wasn’t until the third or fourth one that I realized what I was feeling.

I was pulling those childhood ghost versions of me back into myself.

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It’s a process I’ve referred to before as reintegration. On the podcast Big Strong Yes, I talked about a specific trauma, and a specific ghost version me that I sliced off and shut down so that the part of me that needed to get through the day could do so without the dark knowledge the ghost version of me possessed. That reintegration process was devastatingly hard, and I was under the impression at the time that it was the only ghost version of me that existed.

But it wasn’t.

Not by a long shot.

The kid that was traumatized in that townhouse also played in the woods behind it, and had friends, and laughed, and loved there. She wrote her first stories there, on a little blue plastic typewriter that her father bought her for her 10th birthday.

Whoosh.

As I drove past, this ghost child full of hope and resilience flew back into me, like a piece of magnetic putty folding into its source until the two are one again.

The kid that was taken into the cemetery kicked that man so hard he couldn’t get up to chase her when she ran. She was strong, and when no one else would rescue her, she rescued herself.

Whoosh.

I called her back, her strength and certainty of her own value flowing back into me.

It continued like that down these dark roads. Little ghosts, rushing back into me, bringing their stubborn and unbreakable senses of self with them.

The kid who helped clean out her dead father’s rented room. The kid who ran the projector for the movie day at the library. The kid who locked herself in the bathroom to escape her brother’s friends who grabbed at her when her mother was working a second job at night.

Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.

I finally made it back to the town where I was staying, the town I had never been to before, where there were no ghosts waiting for me, and went to sleep.

Throughout the next week, the book still refused to move. I was getting a little panicked; road trips always worked for me. Why wasn’t it working this time?

On the last day before I was slated to leave, I went to the other town I’d lived in, about 45 minutes away from the first town. Now aware of the ghosts of myself I’d left behind, I decided to deliberately do a pickup tour.

The A&P where I’d worked in high school.

Whoosh.

The best friend’s house where I’d pretty much lived during high school.

Whoosh.

The Quaker meeting house where my mother is buried, and where I experienced complete peace for one hour every week.

Whoosh.

These weren’t all traumatized ghost versions of me; many were just pieces of myself I’d left behind in my rush to get out, to move on, to fly away.

The next day, I started my drive back home.

I wasn’t even out of the state of New York before the book cracked wide open, and I knew exactly what I needed to do to finish it.

I credit the kid with the blue plastic typewriter.

She always knew where we were going the whole damn time.

Everything,

L

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