I Needed Courage to Leave the World My Parents Created
By: Maryam Abolfazli
Tags: Life Lessons, Courage, Emotions, Family, Self

I Needed Courage to Leave the World My Parents Created

The Stuck Place was a place where honesty and emotion couldn’t survive

Photo: Robert Couse-Baker/Flickr

I grew up in the Stuck Place. The main difference between the Stuck Place and any other place is that in the Stuck Place, you can’t really be your whole self. Strangely, the Stuck Place is the safe place, the love place, the family place, the “home is where the heart is” place. You simply can’t find happiness in the Stuck Place.

The Stuck Place — though I was born into it in Nashville, Tennessee — followed me to Washington, D.C., Afghanistan, and New York. Right when I thought I’d arrive somewhere new, I’d run back to the Stuck Place. Cozy up to all the confusion, indecision, and claustrophobic Stuck Place vibes.

The Stuck Place, was home and home is the best place. Even when you can’t be yourself, even when you have to hide things, even when your voice is quiet and your heart is hiding — even then—it’s home. It’s where the embrace of your mother is, where the laughter of your father is, and where the meals are. It’s home.

So what? I’m gonna choose the other place over the Stuck Place?! No way!

Until now.

But to leave the Stuck Place, to really leave it, I have to tell its story. It’s sweet, but it’s also a bit yucky. So I prefer not to tell it.

A key aspect of the Stuck Place was the meals. They were these sort of quiet yet loud events. We loved to eat; my mom loved to cook. Cooking was how she loved you, and your eating was how she felt loved.

The four of us (my sister, my mom, my dad, and me) sat around the table, focused primarily on eating and definitely not on sharing our thoughts or feelings or opinions because we knew that those — if they were true and different — could be misunderstood at best and offensive at worst. And who wanted that kind of blow? It was almost as if certain truths or words brought physical discomfort, and so you had to be careful who you harmed or, worse, the attack it would bring on you.

So instead, Mom and Dad did some nitpicking and some criticizing of each other. My little sister told some story about her life because she was a source of light to me. And we ate. Not in silence but not in honest expression either. Stuck someplace in between.

The Stuck Place was a place where emotions couldn’t live.

In the beginning of the Stuck Place, I performed. From the ages of three to five, I turned almost every meal into a show for the members of the Stuck Place. They loved it. I loved it. We were happy in the Stuck Place, eating together.

But later, the Stuck Place meals changed. I was an emotional kid; add to that adolescence and an early period and a mother that doesn’t do emotions. She does food, naps, and lots of play, but emotions she doesn’t do. So the Stuck Place was a place where emotions couldn’t live. Being such an emotional, intuitive person, I was very uncomfortable in the Stuck Place.

Now, it wasn’t all-or-nothing misery. No. There was laughter and freedom, there was making a mess, and yummy snacks, and bedtime stories. There was the smell of freshly cut grass, and fun on the Slip ’N Slide. There was lots of playing with my cousins and imagination and laughter. Especially when we were little, the Stuck Place was magical. Despite the fights and the crying and the door slamming.

There was this one lunch at the Stuck Place when I was about 16 and my sister was about 14. We sat there; I don’t remember what we did or didn’t do. Did we talk? Maybe my sister did; she was always freer with her words than I was. If I was flight, she would fight. Either way, all I remember is the moment Dad took the mic and said:

“Your mother and I are getting a divorce.”

We hadn’t yet fully diagnosed our father like we would in the 20 years that followed. We wouldn’t know that he was temperamentally explosive and it had nothing to do with the target of his anger being deserving. All we knew was that he was our dad, and he made the rules. And he was saying they were getting divorced.

They never got a divorce.

Because in the Stuck Place, you stay stuck. Naturally.

The person who loved the Stuck Place most was my mother. She was a fun, upbeat, generous cook, and a small-business owner. She gave our garbageman a Christmas present every year. She showed up for the funeral of a girl who died while she was our classmate in high school even though no other parents did. She was just loving in that way.

But she was driven by the rules of her ancestry. She loved the image of success because that’s what she was taught. What people see and think of you is very important. And somehow, we all began conforming to her definition of happiness. Not because we were forced but simply because we all wanted her to be happy. She sacrificed so much for us; she was so kind and thoughtful; she deserved that. And yes, she would also make you feel, well, weird for not caring about how people thought of you. So we all fell in line.

She did not think the individual self was important. She thought money was important. She thought being elite was very important. She didn’t think being complex was very important. But most importantly, whatever weird you do or are, make sure no one knows.

Years later, I watched a documentary about the shocking presence of Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century. How Viennese culture was all about not showing emotions and displaying grandeur. It helped me understand my mother.

And who are we if we aren’t happy when our mom is happy? The two are inextricably linked, no? That’s the reason the Stuck Place is so seductive. It’s the place of home, of my first home, my mother. If she’s in the Stuck Place, I’m going to be there too. Because I love her. But mostly because she loves me so much. And how could I ever betray that? Even if it means finally leaving the Stuck Place?

Ultimately, I learned 20 years later when I lived with my parents again that they created the Stuck Place, so they liked it. It was their home. It was how they liked to be. I left the Stuck Place to go to a college in Atlanta — a place I had never visited. I was lonely there because the Stuck Place follows you. The Stuck Place, it turns out, is in you.

I couldn’t get free from the Stuck Place. While my friends from high school were doing fun college things, I was mostly alone, spending endless days in the library studying or in the computer lab writing emails.

Since the Stuck Place followed me after I had escaped, I used my imagination. And my imagination led me to romance.

Love was my dream, my desire, everything I wanted. I wanted the movies’ version of it. I wanted my neighbor’s version of it. I wanted the 90210 version of it — anybody’s version of it. I wanted the feeling of romance, being swept off your feet and the magical rush of all of that. That feeling could keep me away from the Stuck Place from anywhere from 24 hours to six months. I was consumed by love and romance as I had scripted it in my head. I was no longer in the messy chaos of Stuckness but instead in a messy chaos of hopes and highs of romance. The more my feelings were unrequited, the more scripting I could do and the more emotionally consuming it could be.

And so, all of my romantic relationships in high school and into my twenties were about unrequited, unreturned, chased-after love. Waiting for calls, dates, signs, any indication that I would be chosen and forever and ever relieved from the Stuck Place. My ticket out of the Stuck Place was love.

It was remarkable how quickly I could script a whole set of feelings and intense emotions around a person I knew for a few hours or a few days. Poems and emails would flow. In that way, I felt I, too, was irresistible.

And in my thirties, when I started getting some love in return, they were in long-distance relationships, far away. Long flights and long silences and months off characterized how love went, still giving me plenty of space to script in my imagination my feelings of tension, fear, angst, and all the things. I created insecure moment after insecure moment.

Even though I was escaping, I would always find myself back in the Stuck Place. Stuck with someone who didn’t have an interest in being with me; stuck in relationship feelings that were familiar and not resulting in anything lasting or supportive. Even in my attempts to escape with the drugs of romance, I would return to the Stuck Place.

In my late thirties, it became clear that love wasn’t going to happen for me. I didn’t know how to change my patterns despite years of therapy and my seemingly deepest desire to do so. The love I knew was a sham in its excitement and thrill and unhealthiness. To find a new escape as a woman coming into the power of her sexuality in her thirties, I found sex as my new escape. In sex, everything Stuck turned off, and all there was was the immense sensations and pleasures and physical sense of life. I was good at it. I had control and power. It became the place where I could ignore that there was no love in my life.

I used sex as a way to make me feel normal and empowered and connected — though temporarily and superficially — to someone else. But I started to understand that the oxytocin released is very confusing and makes you want to attach to someone even though you don’t know them well enough or even if you know they’re a bad match or everything else you know. It didn’t matter that the drugs of physical intimacy were strong and could convince me of many things.

What was I hiding from, escaping from, avoiding with all this mess and shenanigans? The shame of it all. The shame of being me, of the things I felt and knew, of the Stuck Place and being in it, of it being in me, and wanting to not be.

So how did I get unstuck? Did I get unstuck? Yes, I did. It wasn’t because I had a child or got married or found love. Well, that’s a lie. My son was the biggest impetus to push out of the Stuck Place. It was because I had nothing else to lose. I wasn’t scared to look at the truth and see the damage it had done. I wasn’t scared of telling it. I was terrified of hurting those who didn’t like the story. But I wanted out. I could feel how small I was living. Was it 20%, 40%, or 60% of my potential? Why was I hiding? What was I afraid of?

I decided to leave the Stuck Place. But inertia was strong, and old habits can be generationally handed down, so you can’t leave just like that. Nope. The universe will want to know: Do you really want to leave? Really?

Ultimately, we’re all tested like this. Will we go after it — truth — despite how uncomfortable it is?

We have to say yes to get out of the Stuck Place or, rather, to remove the Stuck Place from within us. If we’re playing small, if we’re avoiding or judging our darkness, if we’re suppressing our feelings or thoughts, we will keep the Stuck Place inside. If we’re ignoring or avoiding a thing, we will be stuck.

I wanted to be comfortable, but mostly, I wanted to be perfect. I wanted to will myself into being a certain way. But I was dying in the Stuck Place, so I had to become deeply uncomfortable to get out. I had to speak up. I had to step into my future self who was laughing at my meek childishness, telling me to get on with it.

Somehow, pursuing my own true self, and saying it all, allowed me to finally see all of my youth, rather than just the wounds.

There’s a true sacrifice to getting out of the Stuck Place. I had to see and say all that I didn’t want to. And then I had to create a new place—one that I knew nothing about. It was a blank slate and I had to look within. If not the Stuck Place, then what? A place of freedom, truth, courage, and a place of no shame. How does that work?

I had to find out. So I did.

After I said my peace, after I allowed myself to pursue what I cared about and who I was, the Stuck Place and the past cleared up. What had ached and held me back wasn’t the cumulative bad experiences but rather my own inability to tell the truth, cut cords, and move on. In essence, to heal, and let everyone off the hook, I had to mature myself.

When I look back now, the past isn’t a string of negative, untold memories any longer. My view had become cloudy and restricted by what I was afraid to do. Somehow, pursuing my own true self, and saying it all, allowed me to finally see all of my youth, rather than just the wounds.

And the truth was that we had so much joy. I realize this now while living in a pandemic and watching my own child’s isolation. As I am getting flashbacks of playing with dandelions, making necklaces and dirt mounds that served as the setting for our make-believe games. I’m reminded of the joy that was part of my nature-centered youth. I appreciate the immense backyard that they were able to provide for us—the one I dream about providing for my own child. I remember the barbeques and parties. But for all that my parents gave me, they couldn’t give me one thing I had to give myself: courage.

Ultimately, the Stuck Place is there because there’s something that we’re afraid to say or do. Something we fear might happen. But it’s at the cost of being stuck, unseen, and unfulfilled. So one day, we do it anyway.

And after I did, I was able to also see my own shadow, my own underdeveloped self. Essentially, by removing myself from the Stuck Place, I had to get about the business of being me. Life becomes more accountable when you get brave. And you realize, it was you that was holding you back all along.