'All I Want Is to Move Back to NYC!'

Good habits, firm boundaries, and a big heart will make you the strongest person in any room.

Surrealist Composition with Flames (1973), Jane Graverol

Dear Polly,

Nearly a year ago, I overheard a conversation that wasn’t meant for me. My dad was on the phone with his friend speaking explicitly about being with another woman. To say this moment felt like a sword going through me would be an understatement. It was not ambiguous. When I asked him point blank if he was having an affair (he is and has been married to my mom for 40 years), he got very defensive, denied it, and said if I started a rumor like that, it would not be good for me. I essentially started fawning, apologizing and aggressively backtracking, despite there being no doubt in my mind as to what I had heard.

I pieced together via a few context clues that the woman he was having an affair with was someone he had met at a conference, whom he had enthusiastically connected me with via text, a woman who touted herself as an intuitive healer. I’m pretty woo-woo friendly in general, and she had been texting me nonstop wanting to know about me and asking when we should have our Healing Session. Somehow each time she contacted me (many, many times) I kept ignoring her or politely saying I wasn’t able to at the time. I didn’t know what to do.

A bit about me: I lived in New York City for the past decade, much of which was beautiful and hard and magical. Then early last year, I showed up at my brother’s Brooklyn apartment and told him I didn’t know how to stop drinking. I went to a rehab in Ohio, entered a 12 step program, and finally started to think I could be sober and not live in fearful addiction. I returned to New York and found incredible recovery there, which opened up the city in a whole new way. I started realizing that the particular living situation I had been in wasn’t so conducive to my new sobriety (i.e. the people I was living with) and spontaneously let go of my apartment and put everything in storage. I decided to take a 6-month seasonal job upstate in a close-knit rural community, which was wondrous, and I thought a great way to mark a change in my life. I had every intention of returning to the city when the job ended in November, but resolved to spend the holidays with my parents in Massachusetts until I’d found an apartment and a job. That’s when I overheard the conversation with my dad, and this whole nightmare started.

For about six months, I endured this woman’s text messages in which she seemed eager to get close to me, and I continued to play dumb. I overheard more conversations between her and my dad that I wish I hadn’t heard. Because Polly, I got stuck at my parents’ house during this time, in part because I no longer had a home in New York, but I was also holding the knowledge of this secret affair. I felt frozen, like a watchdog, like I couldn’t leave my parents’ house while I knew this affair was continuing, not until it ended or I could know they would be ok. I can’t tell you how many hundreds of hours I lay awake at night obsessing about who I could possibly tell without everything exploding, without anyone getting hurt. I am so used to being the obvious cause of chaos and hurt because of my drinking, and I couldn’t fathom being that again, after all the work I’d done. Instead I alternated between gaslighting myself and denying reality completely and hoping it would just end quietly. I told myself over and over I’d let it burn a hole through me before I caused any more chaos with the truth.

Finally, my mom found out about the affair on her own, and told my dad he had to come clean to my brothers and me. He did. After he told this woman that their relationship was over, she proceeded to harass and attack me, saying my parents were in a sham marriage, telling me this was all my fault, that I couldn’t stop them being together. She threatened suicide, sent me pictures of them together, and threatened to come to my parents’ house. When I blocked her, she would contact me from a different number. Each time I thought I’d heard the last from her, she’d somehow contact me again, until I finally had to contact a lawyer last month when she texted me on my grandma’s 90th birthday. I still feel hyper-vigilant, afraid I’ll hear from her again.

I am what my therapist calls the designated patient in my family, because of my history with addiction and a severe eating disorder in my teens, but also the only girl, the dramatic one, etc. My brothers have “serious” jobs while I have always been the one who wrote plays and lived in a fantasy world. So I have also been, in effect, the designated child in my family, despite the fact that I am now 37 years old.

I published a book two years ago, an accomplishment I let myself be proud of a percentage of the time, though it seems so insignificant now. I mention this because aside from my sobriety, it’s the last thing I can say I am really proud of, but fear that I’ve lost momentum.

It feels impossible to express adequately how this experience with my dad and this woman has warped my brain, and though you might think I’d have more trust in myself after being validated, I don’t feel that way at all. My sense of self feels like it is in the toilet and I feel so disempowered, and my heart is broken for everyone.

Sometimes I think it would be easier if I hated my dad, full-stop, and could just write him off. But despite his many flaws and despite the fact that he has been deemed a narcissist by more than a few people, despite the fact that he hurt me so much, I still love him and am sad for him and want him to be okay.

After deciding I could not be in my parents’ house, I somewhat arbitrarily rented a room in a small quiet Rhode Island town 30 minutes from my parents’ home. While I can’t discount its charms, I also can’t deny how lonely and dejected I feel, and how demoralizing it feels to start from zero. It feels like my life is on hold, I am miles away from my friends and robust recovery community in New York City, and my life is passing me by. I have done my best to make new friends, but it is draining. I have started working as a receptionist in a woman-owned massage studio where everyone is very nice. But it’s not enough. On a good day, I am accepting that this is now, not necessarily forever, that this is a nice quiet place where I can write another book. On my worst days, I can’t help but feel like this is not what I deserve after the year that I went through (and believe me, I don’t like how that sounds), after holding onto a secret so acidic I was willing to have it burn inside me forever to keep my family together, which I know is a false premise anyway. Sometimes I start to believe this is what I deserve, actually, that I deserve to be punished.

I have been here almost a year, but with intermittent trips back to New York whenever possible, roughly every six weeks if I can swing it. Each time I go back it feels more like home and is the closest thing to not feeling like I am rotting in my questions and shame and confusion over all that has transpired. I feel energized, I cherish my AA meetings, I practically cry at seeing and hearing people on the street. I feel hope, not despair. Upon coming back here, I feel as if all my bad thoughts are waiting for me, like everything screeches to a halt again and I am back on a time-out to think about the whole shitty, traumatizing thing.

Needless to say, my mom’s life and psyche and heart have been drastically altered by this fiasco. She is the strongest person I know, and I love her more than I could ever put into words. She has been willing to work on things with my dad, and no-one would ever blame her if she told him to fuck off forever. This is why it is so hard to express to her what I have just expressed to you, about the life that I want, and that a huge part of that is having clarity that I am not done with New York. When I say something of that sort, she seems to shut down. She has even offered me financial help if I stay where I am, but not if I go back. It is difficult for me to parse out exactly if it’s because I will no longer be as physically close to her and my dad, or because she associates New York with my rock bottom. It is so hard because I don’t want to abandon her and I don’t want to scare her, but I also can’t keep living this life that doesn’t feel like mine, and still feels enmeshed in their marriage. My brothers are living in cities they love, with partners of their own. I have been part of this for so long, and feel so trapped and my heart is still breaking. If I felt like I was on a roll with a new writing project, I might feel differently, but I feel frozen even in my imagination.

I don’t know how to tell my parents that I need their support, that I need to leave this town in Rhode Island and build my life again, that I still love them. I want it so bad, and yet it seems impossible right now.

I know that is a fuck ton to unpack. Please help me Polly, I don’t know what to do.

With love,

Desperate to Move On But Afraid to Move

Dear DTMOBATM,

It’s funny how the last thing people write in their letters is sometimes the least true: You say you don’t know what to do, but the truth is that you know exactly what to do. You love New York City. You feel happy there. Let’s review your own words: “Each time I go back it feels more like home and is the closest thing to not feeling like I am rotting in my questions and shame and confusion over all that has transpired. I feel energized, I cherish my AA meetings, I practically cry at seeing and hearing people on the street. I feel hope, not despair.”

You should find a way to move back. If you don’t, you will have regrets. It’s time to find the strength to stand up for this desire.

That said, obviously I don’t want to encourage the magical thinking that everything in your life will be fixed and healed simply by moving locations. You’ll still struggle to write in NYC. Struggling to write is writing. They are one and the same. No writer is every free from that battle.

Moreover, you’ll have to navigate changing friendships, difficult career choices, and expensive living conditions. I want you to be realistic about these things.

In fact, I want you to be realistic about everything. Realism is a tough pill for most of us to swallow, but it’s particularly difficult for writers with addictions and writers who have addictive personalities – my language of choice for a very large category of people. I fit this description and so do most of my friends, so I have a lot to say about the contours of living inside various fantasies as a means of evading reality, sidestepping dread and darkness, circumnavigating big emotions, and withdrawing from the heaviness of guilt, betrayal, decline, death… and so many other things!

THERE IS SO MUCH TO AVOID. There is so much we can’t control. There is so much fear and pain and uncertainty that can overwhelm incredibly sensitive people in an incredibly savage world.

It will break you, if you let it all in. That’s the fear. But you know what will break you into even smaller pieces? Blocking it all out. Tricking yourself into believing that you have control over everything. Holding the ones you love at arm’s length, or worse, letting their needs upstage your own deepest desires. Giving in to the tempting notion that a person, place, or thing will save you from yourself.

You will not be saved from yourself. You will save yourself. You will work hard, every single, terrifying day, to save yourself.

I want you to know, first and foremost, that I believe you can and will save yourself. I believe in you. I love that you’re living within arm’s reach of your parents, but just far enough away to get a clear head. That was such a good intermediate choice, and it tells me a lot about your priorities. You want to love them through this crisis. You love your mother more than you can express, and you want to lift her out of this darkness. You are living inside the illusion that this is possible, and so is she. God, do I feel for you both! It’s making me cry just thinking about how much you want to help her and be there for her and not abandon her.

But girl. I never call people girl, ever. But GIRL. You can’t save your mom. Your mom needs to save herself. I don’t mean by dumping your dad. It’s not that simple. She needs to reckon with what it’s going to take for her to feel strong and happy and hopeful again — hopeful enough to trust that her little daughter is big enough and strong enough to move back to the city and stay sober and write her novel and thrive.

The novel thing is just a guess, but Jesus, do you have the material for it now! Fiction is fucking torture, which is why I’ve been avoiding it and why I need to stop avoiding it. I’m big enough and strong enough to write my novel and thrive, too! And honestly, it would be great for me to take on something that impossible at this moment of my life. I keep taking on harder and harder things lately, and I’m coming alive even as I’m in agony over how hard I’m suddenly working!

Throwing yourself right into the grueling center of an agonizing struggle with words can save you from despair. It’s a form of escape at some level: You enter an alternate reality and build it from the inside out. But it’s also like working the program: You are humbled every single goddamn day with how little you know, how little you have inside your brain, how overwhelmed and paralyzed and stupid you feel.

I’ve never been in recovery but I have been been living with my mother for a year now, so I know all about writing blocks, enmeshment, and emancipation. The vibes of enmeshment do not favor creative productivity. I’ve had to build tall walls around myself in order to write while we’re living here. That wasn’t my mother’s fault at all, it was the fault of my own weird, porous boundaries and my internal maps, which were screwy and scribbly and confused. I had to redraw them in order to be kinder to myself and also kinder to my mother.

Your childhood home is a funhouse with the power to make you anxious and dizzy. There is no way around that. There will be a reckoning no matter what.

I just want you to remember that it’s normal to get confused under those circumstances. And as you become less enmeshed with your parents, you might experience a lot of anger and guilt and confusion. Building healthy boundaries, as an extremely sensitive, loving child with parents who want you close at all times, is a dramatic and difficult process. I want to caution you that if you start to feel distant from your mother, that isn’t a moral failure on your part. You can feel however you feel and it’s okay. Your overwhelming love for her will return, over and over again. Trust that and don’t embrace an extreme of either enmeshment or avoidance just to gain control over your emotions. Honor the reality of how much you care.

This applies to your father, too. Whatever he’s been through, whatever bad choices he might’ve made, he’s also a sensitive and maybe slightly escapist person, or he wouldn’t have fallen for someone quite so boundaryless and messy. Your father has an addictive personality, too. And I’m sure he has regrets, given what a completely unethical shitstorm that woman has turned out to be.

Whatever healing his paramour had in mind for you in the early days, it was wildly immoral of her to suggest it, given her position. And needless to say, it’s beyond fucked for her to harass you repeatedly, let alone to hold forth on her highly subjective views of your parents’ marriage. I mean, Christ, I cannot express to you in words how fucked that is! I’ll have to do an interpretive dance of some sort, which will need to include punching my fist into several walls and setting something on fire in order to capture the lunacy of that human being.

Did you know that I wrote a novel fifteen years ago about a married guy who falls in love with his wife’s life coach? I loved the idea of a healer who turns out to be a manipulative piece of shit, in part because so many gurus are just garbage people in disguise.

But before we tumble down that hillside in an avalanche of extremes, let’s try to be compassionate about everyone in this picture: Your father loves you so much (in his own desperate, self-involved way), and his intuitive healer friend probably believed that she could fix your addiction singlehandedly, using only her words. I’m sure she thinks she’s clairvoyant and it’s her duty to step up and help you. See how magical thinking is its own form of escapist addiction? See how a narcissist can unknowingly weaponize her narcissism in spite of pure(ish) intentions?

My novel was all about these things. Why didn’t I revise it? Because it was so hard. Every time I picked it up and tried to edit it, I would fall into a funk. I would start out thinking “This will be brilliant!” and I would end up thinking “This is pure shit!”

See how extremes protected me from the hard work of facing reality, which was far more mundane: My book was pretty good but not great. It needed work to become better. And see how extremes protected your father from dealing with his own life? This fantastical clairvoyant appeared out of the blue. She claimed that she could fix everything, it would all be perfect once she got her grabby, pushy, dirty-ass fingers into every pie!

MORAL: EXTREMES AND FANTASIES ARE A FAST TRACK TO DISASTER!

I think I could pull that novel out now and work on it, though. Because I’ve been married for almost 20 years now, so I understand why people have affairs. I’ve never had an affair myself, which, UGH! WHY DOES EVERYONE ELSE GET TO FUCK SHIT UP AND I HAVE TO STAY RIGHT HERE BEING GOOD?! I’m joking, of course, but I also think that affairs must be a lot of fun, at least until the wheels come off and your marriage falls apart and your ex finds someone much better and you miss your ex like crazy and worst of all, you only have yourself to blame. It literally happens all the time. People don’t know what they have until it’s long gone. I see it every day!

My excellent husband is worth the many sacrifices and savages of monogamy. I mean that sincerely. Besides, I’m straight (AGAIN, UGH!) and even the extra-pretty men usually turn out to be pretty boring underneath their pretty skin. Why do I sound like Hannibal Lecter now?

The point is, I understand a lot more about marriage now than I did 15 years ago. I know now that not every affair is an absolute tragedy. Sometimes people wake up and they realize that they love their spouse a million times more than they can tolerate, and that’s why they were trying to escape in the first place. I’m not saying that affairs don’t also injure people deeply and make them feel more betrayed and crushed than can be described without punching a fist into a wall. But in my opinion, more than anything else, married people shouldn’t lie to each other. Why even be married if you’re just going to lie?

That’s just MY approach! It is not one size fits all. Different people have vastly different marriages, and other people’s shared decisions — and shared lies, even — are up to them. We have no business judging what works privately for two adults who are doing their best to feel good together. WE LITERALLY CANNOT JUDGE THEM. We don’t have to pity them or moralize about them or worry about them, either. We will never completely understand, and frankly, it’s none of our business.

Unless we’re writing fiction, in which case we can do whatever the fuck we want!

So girl (ugh I’m sorry, I can’t stop now!), listen up: It’s time to move back to New York and write your books and see your old friends and make some new ones who are grounded, secure, and deeply involved with the mundane joys of everyday life. Explain to your mother that sober reality is your thing, and you will make sure it remains your thing by continuing to show up to meetings. You will never again believe that you can magically drink without becoming a drunk, nor will you believe that you can magically write amazing things without hard work, struggle, and sacrifice. You will never believe that you can magically save anyone else, because you’ve seen firsthand how ugly and deluded that belief system can make a person. And you will never go back to living inside an extreme fantasy where you’re the lovely, brilliant, perfect star who is effortlessly talented, rich, famous, loved, and happy.

Life is hard work. You know that now. But hard work is joy. And you’re a person who can absolutely do the hard work it takes to live a big, exuberant life. You tell me that you hate it where you are, but there you are, doing what’s necessary to survive. You got out of your parents’ house and you held down a job that you didn’t like that much. Do you know what a big deal that is? Are you proud of yourself for having done that? Because you should be.

Doing small, difficult things is what makes it possible to do big, difficult things, to take on challenges that are worthy of you. You are someone who loves difficult challenges. Lean the fuck into that and own it.

Reality is your friend. What’s crazy is that the more you learn to love reality, the more your reality starts to shine and sparkle like your fantasies once did. You just have to feel everything. That’s the hardest part, really. You have to keep exposing yourself to the enormity of everything — the heaviness of guilt, betrayal, decline, death. Allll of it.

When you face these things, when you let reality in, when you soak up the despair and joy and fear and pain you’re facing, when you let your body show you exactly how sad and afraid and anxious you are? You don’t feel worse, actually. You feel better.

Why? Because being in touch with your body makes those feelings so much less scary. And because you, specifically, are a person who’s good at doing hard things. It’s time to notice that. It’s time to celebrate it.

And it’s time to stand up for yourself with clear words. Tell your mother that you can’t stay. You’ve loved being close but you need to stand on your own two feet and suffer through the difficulties of returning to NYC. You would like her help, but either way, you’re going to return to the city and build a life that’s sober and boring and steady and good. Not perfect, not easy, but romantic. Romantic because it’s hard and it’s dark and it’s beautiful and you are finally capable of living in that city, where you absolutely belong, at least right now.

You don’t have to stay there forever. You don’t have to do anything forever. You just have to trust yourself right now, and respect your deepest desires today.

Maybe you could try to visit your parents every six weeks. Maybe you could ask your parents to visit you, too. I think you’d like to honor your strong ties to your family, even as they continue to navigate this crisis. To me, that’s what steady, healthy, sober living looks like: You don’t avoid people you love, even as you build firmer boundaries. You see them through realistic eyes for a change, and you love them all the more because your realism makes you more and more compassionate for how hard it is to be alive.

You can feel compassion and love and still work on firming up your boundaries. Go to Al Anon if you haven’t been yet. You have enough on your plate without worrying about your parents’ marriage or their happiness. Be kind to them, but tell them: We all have hard work to do right now. We all have to reckon with where we are. We all have to figure out how we’re going to accept our flaws, have compassion for our mistakes, and look for joy in spite of everything.

I think your whole family is built for joy. I think this might be the start of the most joyful time any of you have ever experienced. I know I sound just like that intuitive healer lady now. The funny thing is that lessons can come from anywhere at all, including the most wretched and reckless sources. Just when you think you’re all washed up, it’s all over, you’ll never feel good again, inspiration appears in the shape of wildfires and lost rings, heartbreaks and hurricanes, sunken boats and falling stars.

You spend a sleepless night believing that your whole life is over, and you wake up the next morning feeling like a newborn baby, full of wonder and hope.

That’s reality. Life is surprising. Just when you’re truly numb, you fall in love again. Just when you’re absolutely paralyzed, you get up and dance and punch your fist into the wall and then laugh out loud.

You signed your letter “Desperate to Move But Afraid to Move.” Don’t you see how literal that is? You’re afraid to define yourself as separate, distinct, and independent from your family. You’re afraid to get more distance. You’re afraid to face forward and move forward and embrace the unknown. But listen to me: This bad year is the start of everything good, for your parents and for you. Believe it.

You’re strong enough to live in reality. You’re a million times stronger than you realize. That’s why your mother wants you so close. She thinks you’re leaning on her and you’ll fall apart without her, but that’s a fantasy. She’s leaning on you. You’re the strongest person in this picture. It’s time to own that instead of fearing it.

Polly

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Oh my god, I feel so sorry for the LW’s mother now!!! Remember, you can love anyone from a great distance! Keep showing the people you love how much you love them! Setting firm boundaries and telling people what you need (directly, honestly, calmly) isn’t a way of rejecting or abandoning them. It’s a more real, compassionate, vibrant way of loving them.

If you’re the designated patient in your family, you might also be the strongest one of all. Don’t buy into your family’s myths or let them project their own unmet needs onto you. Living in reality means noticing that most people’s interpretations are just convenient ways of not looking closely at their own mistakes and flaws. Keep daring to face your own flaws without shame, because — strangely enough — nothing will bring you more happiness than that.

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