The Space Between: On Belonging, Self-Betrayal, and Becoming

+ a little commentary on Chelsea from White Lotus

Dear Readers,

Here is the audio for the whole essay and intro….

It has been a long time. I am here. I am writing and making and processing every day. Here is an essay on containing multitudes, and how embodying paradox has felt in my life. I circle around the same things all of the time: How to let go of being good? How to love? How to be kind to myself and others? How to forgive? How to withstand the impermanence? And, I have become so okay with that, that I am ready to write my book now, so I am trying to figure out how to do that. How does one do that? Asking for a friend.

Personally, I just went through an excruciating purification process over the last few months where thoughts of not getting it right, not being the good daughter, the good everything, almost swallowed me up. But, they didn’t, and I have come out on the other side more than okay. I am stronger. I am kinder to myself. Those thoughts did not win. They were just thoughts, and eventually they left. It was as if my mind was preparing for some of what I will write about below.

In other news. Please come to India with me. There are still spots left, and there is no better time to purposefully shake up your life with a pilgrimage. Encounters with the sacred have saved me over and over again, and I expect India to be absolutely full of this kind of grace.

On to the essay. Free Palestine. Don’t give up. You got this.

Big love,

Audra

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I didn’t hear Margaret B.—resident high school cool girl, from the West Side, first person to watch Pulp Fiction, piano genius, driver of a red Jetta, and fan of The Jesus and Mary Chain—say it directly, but I heard it well enough. I was fifteen, she was maybe sixteen, and was talking to someone in the hallway about how the way I dressed was “confused.” “I don’t get her style,” she said. “She wears, like… everything.” I only ever saw Margaret eat one food, always in the back of Scripture class, saltines. What she didn’t know—and what I didn’t either, not fully—was that this was the whole point. I wasn’t trying to be anything in particular; I was trying to be pleasant—to everyone. Lovable. Approachable. Cool. The way I dressed—part skater, part preppy, part thrift-store poet—wasn’t about expression. It was a survival strategy. A way to live inside the contradictions I was already holding: immigrant’s child and Portland-raised. Pretty, but not “that” kind of pretty. Wounded and full of love. Sheltered and also deeply abandoned. Always straddling two things that didn’t quite go together.

My dad is from a rural town in New Zealand, outside of Wellington. His father, Louis Carmine, Italian hotel owner, professional gambler, and war veteran. He was in the Navy and was on multiple ships that were sunk in the South Pacific during the second world war, which is so extraordinary that I had a hard time crafting that sentence. How do we talk about a person who was on multiple different ships that each sank and survived? What kind of grace is that? I think of my son and his lifelong fear of dark water and wonder if that’s less his than he thinks. My grandmother was glamorous in a small town way that to my little girl self once seemed worldly. Driver of a pink cadillac, tattooed eyebrows, loved spending money, generous to a fault. We were uneducated, and hard working. We were rural and religious. We were growers of kiwis, and most of all drinkers. We were divorced, and abused by the Catholic boarding schools. We tell the best jokes. We were carpenters. We were athletes and coaches. We were teen parents and secret keepers. I once had a man from my dad’s tiny hometown come into my restaurant. I asked if he knew my family, and when I told him my grandfather’s name, he whistled through his teeth, and I never knew what it fully meant. That’s how my New Zealand family feels to me, I don’t know what we mean together. Who are we? Who am I? What did that whistle mean?

My mom and dad met on a ferry in Canada while my dad was on a rugby tour, and were married within the year. Though my sister was born there, I have never lived in New Zealand, but I am a citizen, and once in third grade we were there for so long that my brother and I came back with little Kiwi accents we quickly lost.

My mother, like me, is from Portland. She grew up in the center of a big Italian family, multiple generations under one roof, her dad a vegetable man, her mother working at the dry cleaners. We were dynamiters, mechanics, cooks, farmers, and bakers. We were Italians with names like Emilio and Tilio. We were immigrants who were told to bleach their skin and forget their language. We were ravioli drying on the top of the cable box, and canned beans in the basement. We were barely graduating high school and being asked “What are you, Mexican? Why are you so tan?” We were being made white, and at first it felt like success, but then we were bitter, rudderless, adrift from our roots. We hid gold bars in mobile homes, and money under mattresses. My American grandfather was also a World War Two vet, a gambler, an escape artist, and bearer of a broken hip from a malfunctioning parachute. He had nightmares. Now, like dark water, I have his nightmares. I dream that I am trapped in the family home in Ladd’s Addition, his home, and we are surrounded by military helicopters, and I have to get everyone out. We are hiding under tables. We are escaping. We are making jewelry boxes out of the Italian plum tree that crashed through the grapes during the Columbus Day storm. We are sober, except for the pharmaceuticals. We are all eventually moving to trailer parks.

The Portland that I grew up in was not the Portland you know, progressive, white, monied, in the same way that I am not the same as I was at age six. We both have changed. Meegan, my exercise teacher who also grew up in SE recently told me that she had to explain to her husband that we really, truly were working class in the 1980’s. “No one went on vacation with other people’s families,” she told him, “No one went camping, no one had been to college.” It was precious what we had, big houses in SE Portland that a vegetable man at the grocery store could afford.

How did I translate all of this? How did I become? I tried to do it all. Good Catholic girl. Little angel. Shy. Bookish, and yet also on all the teams. American. Immigrant. Surviving daughter. Tan, but not too tan. A leader, and yet also, deeply, a follower. Gabriel García Márquez wrote that “We have a public life, a private life, and a secret life.” My secret life was never knowing where and how to belong. It still is. My secret life was creating a persona I thought the world could tolerate because the two halves of me, my mother and father, were so different. Kiwi white trash, and Italian American whitewash. I became the immigrant success story who educated herself, (first to go to college), and I became a very young unwed mother. I became the family scapegoat who stayed in town just blocks away from the family home. And I became a visible success story with hidden, invisible struggles like an eating disorder and an alcoholic husband. I embodied paradox before I knew what a paradox meant. During my most aching, impoverished, and depressed years, someone stopped me on the street and said, “It looks like you and Love Hive, (my business at the time) are doing so well!!” I realized she meant from my Instagram. In AA they have a saying, “That look good is going to kill you.”

This morning, I found out my dad has liver cancer. Something in me already knew. I have been picking him up off the front lawn and carrying him to bed in my mind for weeks now, replaying a familiar scene from my teen years, trying to convince him that he could have a better life. That he didn’t have to drink like this, that he could clean himself up and get out. He could have a beautiful life, he is beloved, generous like me.

On a recent vacation I found myself convincing my now ex-partner in the same way, that it could be better, that he matters, and this is a dangerous place for me: “Get up, get off the lawn, you could be great. This life is beautiful.” In the middle of the night toward the end of our trip, I was very, very anxious, and when he woke up for a second I felt so relieved not to be alone. I told him I didn’t know how to get back to him. That I felt so far away and needed help. I told him I felt foolish in my not knowing how. This is the exquisitely painful dissonance of knowing what I want and being unable to give it to myself. He told me he couldn’t talk about it because he was tired, and it felt like I was left on one side of a bridge that was collapsing. I kept seeing my dad, over and over again. I’m scared for him. I’m scared for us. It’s too big, this cancer, for me to pick up and do anything with now. Instead I will just love him, that’s all there is to do. Put the blame down and love him.

Anne Lamott says that helping is the sunnyside of control, and picking my dad up off of the lawn, after puking up all my food into trash bags in my room was about all the control I had at that time. Puking, drinking, fucking, weeping. Repeat. I didn’t know about self-care. I didn’t know about boundaries and safety. I knew edges. I knew straddling fences. Attempting to resolve the unresolveable. I think this is what Margaret picked up on all those years ago. My secret life. To be honest, though embarrassed by her words, I had never felt so seen.

This leads us to Chelsea and Rick. Have you watched all of White Lotus season three? If not, stop reading here, or I will definitely blow it for you.

Chelsea. Our beloved Amy from Sex Education. Face of an angel, forgiving, and patient. She has a beauty that emanates from somewhere inside—glowing, and full of faith. Rick, wounded, unavailable, tormented by abandonment and the secrets of his father, and yet we can tell there is something good in there. Something Chelsea sees, something we see too, so much so that we begin to hope along with her, or at least I did. Chelsea says to Patrick Schwarzenegger’s character, "It's like we're in this yin and yang battle, and I'm hope, and Rick's pain, and eventually one of us will win."

Pain wins. There is no redemption for Chelsea, or for Rick, in the same way there is no redemption for Juliet or Romeo. She doesn’t realize his pain will destroy her. She doesn’t awaken from the trance of hoping, of helping, of believing that if she just loves him “enough” that then he will finally be okay. She abandons herself, and in homage to the structure of Shakespeare’s most famous romantic tragedy, they both die.

Haven’t we all Chelseaed, as writer and fellow substack writer Rebecca Woolf puts it? Where have you placed your hope that is so saturated with pain and yet there you are hoping, thinking that you can, with your big love, with your healthy glow, with your endless patience, with your bottomless devotion, solve it? I have. And, now I know that this is my most dangerous place, trying to solve the unsolveable. This is where I will abandon myself by the side of the road again and again. This is walking my dad back in the house from the bushes. This is dragging my ex husband’s barely breathing body to the cold shower. This is writing graduate school applications for him. This is thinking that I could make up for the death of my sister if I was just “good” enough. And, this is the bullshit I have to alchemize every day into something that resembles self-care, forgiveness, and love. What else am I going to do with my life? Hating myself hasn’t worked, and this other, kinder path is turning out to be a full time job.

So, this is my co-dependence. Helping is the sunnyside of control, and it is also a drug. A way to numb my own feelings of disappointment, loneliness, and grief. A way to be in intimate relationships where there is rarely a feeling of trust, so I am not required to be vulnerable, to risk anything. All except for one, where I practiced being authentic, where I learned to, as William Blake put it, “withstand the beams of love.” He made me coffee and bought me lemons. I practiced reaching for him and for the most part he was always there. And, in the end, I Chelsead myself. Pain won, some of his, but mostly my own. In the end I could not withstand it, but someday I would like to. I imagine it.

So Margaret, yes, I wore all the different kinds of clothes. I straddle fences. I slink around the edges, and make potions that turn a tiny bit of gold into bars. I make art out of my pain, and out of my complete and utter awe for this life. I tell the truth so I can be free. I love despite and because of the trauma that keeps me guarded.

I Love You,

Audra