The Comfort of a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

At the age of 21, I went to a therapist. I had seen therapists before, but never of my own volition. Therapy had always been an unwelcome response to a bad event - I had to see one when my mother was ill, when I started having anxiety attacks, when I could no longer manage my impulse to restrict my food or make myself sick. I hated all of them, never worked with them. I tried to find ways to outsmart them, tell them what they wanted to hear so they would leave me alone and discharge me from their service. And it worked.

But when I was 21 it was my decision. I started to be honest about why I was there and what I needed to figure out, and for once the counsellor said exactly what I had always been thinking. In our second session, as I sat rattling off the events of my life as though I were reading a grocery list, Dr. J paused, drew in a breath and said matter of factly "I know you are struggling right now, but you are better off than I might have expected you to be. A lot of people who have dealt with those issues have ended up with drug problems or completely unable to cope." I feigned shock at her statement, while deep inside I felt relief at someone pointing out what I had feared from the age of 13. You see, I had been walking a tightrope up to then. I knew the life I wanted, and I knew the life I was afraid of - but I was certain I was destined for the latter. Later that year, I could no longer sustain my tuition payments and was forced to drop out of college. Finally, I thought, proof that this better life is not for people like me.

The next two years were a blur. I moved into a bedsit and distanced myself from the idea of ever going back to college and my dreams of doing something great. After years of refusing to touch alcohol or cigarettes I started drinking every night of the week and smoking a pack a day. I made no plans, I saved no money. I had one night stands and cut myself off from my college friends. This was it, this was the life that people like me were meant to have. I was lonely, depressed, self-loathing and self-destructive. But I was calm. For once in my life I was able to shed the anxiety that everything good I had was about to be taken away from me, that someone would identify me as trying to 'pass' as a normal person and tell the world I was an impostor. Now I could fit in with the family who used to give us Pepsi in shot glasses at parties when we were kids, so we wouldn't feel left out. Now I wouldn't have to attend stupid classes and seminars with people who had accents and clothes more posh than mine, who drove cars more expensive than my mother's house and whose parents were doctors and lawyers. There was a reason no one in my family had gone to college before my mom, right? And look what good my mom's college degree did her. For once, I could relax. I had finally stopped fighting my destiny.

What is it that makes failure feel so much safer than success? Why do we feel undeserving of happiness? I suppose for me it was because it seemed so foreign. In my life, drama and crisis were commonplace. Struggling was the norm, and therefore it was comforting. If you grow accustomed to fire-fighting, living a fire-free life is unfamiliar. Crisis is unpleasant, but at least it isn't the unknown - at least there isn't that low level anxiety underpinning happiness as you wait for everything to blow up in your face.

I know now the ridiculousness of that way of thinking. To not strive for something better in life because you don't think you deserve it or you're afraid it will be taken away is the height of madness - it is also the antithesis of everything I was brought up to believe. My parents never stopped telling me all of the great things I was capable of, things that they expected from me. But for whatever reason I let the chance that I might not do those things hang like an albatross around my neck. Looking at my father now, I wonder has he fallen into the black hole of his self-fulfilling prophecy - finally let his albatross drag him overboard.

Dad watched his biological father abandon his life and family for alcohol. Before he was even school aged his father chose drink over him. His mother married another alcoholic; a functional one, but an alcoholic none the less. Dad's half-brother has two failed marriages, a failed business and a laundry list of DUI convictions behind him as a result of his alcohol addiction. His uncle, with whom he is close, spent time in prison on drugs charges. No one talked about these things in our family, except my dad. He was the one who finally said "no more" when my grandfather continually called me by the wrong name and drank in front of us, he was the one who told my uncle that his drinking - and not his wife - was the cause of his divorce, he was the one who told his step-father that his drinking was ruining his health. My father never drank in front of us, regularly condemned alcohol in excess and told us in no uncertain terms the consequences we would face should we become involved in drug or alcohol abuse. But maybe, like me, he grew tired of staving off the life he believed he was condemned to given the circumstances around him. Maybe he too felt like an impostor as he attended PTA meetings with wealthy soccer moms, tried to scrape together money he didn't have to buy clothes for his children so we would fit in amongst the children of well-off mothers and fathers, or attempted to maintain friendships with men and women educated to post-graduate level knowing he had not finished high school.

Thinking about this brings to mind a time when I was 18 and I stood in our kitchen singing Landslide to my father in preparation for a school talent show. He teared up as I sang. I thought then he was crying because he was proud of me, but listening to that song now I wonder if it was the words that moved him. Was he facing a fear that the people he was remaining strong for, the two children who gave him reason to remain firmly rooted in the "good life," were about to leave him? Did he believe that without us he would no longer be able to hold it together? Perhaps my father believed that ending up like his father(s) was inevitable, just as I have always worried that I would eventually succumb to the same mental health problems that torture my mother. Maybe those first nights of heavy drinking and drug use gave him the same sense of relief that those two years of chaos gave me - you no longer have to be afraid of becoming something once you have become it.

I could just be making excuses, grappling for answers to a question I never thought I would have to ask myself - why is my father choosing a life he so vehemently condemned? A life that could (and is starting to) take him away from the people he loves most? But if I am right, if he has let himself ease into the comfort of his perceived destiny, then maybe there is hope. There has to be hope because I didn't get strong enough to see the light through the trees all on my own. Someone gave me that quality - he taught me how to see that something greater awaited me. Maybe what dad needs most right now is for AJ and I to remind him of the man we know him to be, remind him that that is his real fate: being a father to two women who love and cherish him, and who expect from him all of the same wild and wonderful things he expects from them.