Please, God,” I prayed. “Please. Please, I’m desperate. When I get home, you have to make the phone ring. You have to make them call today. Please, God, you owe me this.”
I was walking back from a grocery store on Ventura Boulevard, having just spent my last five bucks on ramen noodles and frozen burritos. When the food in my grocery bag ran out, I would starve to death. After everything that had happened to me, I didn’t have much faith left in God. But He was my only option now. Getting my life back on track was going to take a miracle.
The miracle I sought was a job, which doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that should require divine intervention. But a year into California dreamin’, things felt more like a nightmare. Steve and I were living in a craptastic one-bedroom apartment in the Valley that shared a wall with the 101 freeway. The few pieces of furniture we owned were all procured via Dumpster. I knew absolutely no one, which was probably for the best, as a gazillion streets with crazy names made it impossible to find anyone or anything anyway. I suppose transitioning to postcollege life in a new city is challenging for everyone. But being penniless, estranged from family, and preprogrammed with endless fear triggers really turned up the heat for me.
So did having undiagnosed dissociative identity disorder. Try as it might, my psyche just couldn’t get a handle on what identity was going to help me triumph in LA. The Preppy was too traditional and uptight to hang with laid-back Angelenos, and the Student had lost her one and only purpose in life. The Writer should’ve been able to fit in; lots of Hollywood writers are former theater-loving New Yorkers who eventually grow up and move west in search of grown-up wages. My alternate personalities, though, are not real people. They are caricatures drawn from external images. Like cartoon people, they never seem to age, change, or grow. They are trapped in time. (My wife, in fact, calls me Homer Simpson because I continuously make the same stupid decisions!) As a result, the Writer, who was originally conceived as a New York playwright, had a hard time envisioning herself in La La Land.
Despite all this, things in LA started out well. Within a few days of arriving, I scored a job interview with the head writers of the NBC soap Days of Our Lives. The meeting went well, and I was asked to intern in the writers’ offices, which is the common launch pad for budding TV scribes. It was a dream opportunity, the kind every young writer wants after college. Things were going great, and within weeks, I was asked to write my first script. By all objective measures, I was on the fast track to a lucrative career as a Hollywood writer.
But it never happened.
I started having flashbacks.
And just like that, my bright future got snuffed out by my dark past.
—
MY BREAKDOWN WAS TRIGGERED by the move to LA. People with DID are prone to psychological decompensation when they are removed from the original traumatic situation. Once I was three thousand miles from home, I started to feel a sense of danger that I couldn’t explain. Needing to feel safe, I decided to cut off all contact with my parents. I went so far as to get an unlisted number and a post office box. I didn’t know why, but I wanted to hide from anyone I’d ever known.
Once I felt safely disconnected from my old life and assured that no one could find me, I started to see things in my mind. The first image was of the American flag hanging above the blackboard in Gary’s classroom. After that, other images would randomly flash: the sign for the Revolution Motel, a man’s calloused hand, my parents’ green bedspread. These pictures were seemingly innocuous and random. They held no meaning for me. So why did they fill me with dread?
Dread turned to horror as the images became more explicit. Genitalia, blood, and scenes of torture would randomly pop into my head like persecutory Whac-A-Moles. I had no idea why I was seeing these things, nor could I explain the phantom sensations that were happening in my body. Often, I’d feel like my wrists were tied together by a rope that was pulling me along, or I’d feel like my arms were tied to the headboard of a bed. I’d have the sensation of being gagged or held down. But, of course, none of these things was actually happening. What’s worse, I started having violent mood swings. Most of the time, I felt terror or sadness, but there were also flashes of crazy rage. One time, I screamed at Steve and threw a six-pack of yogurt across the apartment because he’d bought the wrong brand. Other times—many times—I curled into a frightened ball and begged him not to leave me.
When this all started, I had no idea what was happening to me. It felt like I’d completely lost control of my mind and was going insane. Terrifying. As different visions, feelings, and shards of knowledge started to coalesce, and I realized that what I was experiencing were memories, it only made things worse. Imagine waking up tomorrow and learning that the whole life you thought you had lived was a lie. Your loving grandma really beat you senseless. The older brother you idolize stuck his dick in your mouth. This is how it was for me. While I certainly knew my parents were mean, I had no idea I’d been molested. And by my own father! The truth was a total shock—like finding out Dr. Huxtable was a rapist.
The whole thing sent me into a tailspin. I became obsessed with figuring out what else I didn’t know about my own life. In order to document the things I was remembering, I started to write in my journal.
11/19/90
What I Remember So Far
They are all vague. They are all dreamlike, and they are not all.
But I have memories. I must get them all out, every single one.
I remember wrestling on the bed. I remember him putting his hands on my ass. I would tense up. And he would go “la dee dah” and laugh. So amused . . . I remember him forcing his hand down between my thighs . . . I remember a motel in King of Prussia. I remember swimming in the pool at night. I remember him holding me. Maybe touching my breasts. Maybe pulling off the top of my bathing suit . . . I remember another motel in New York. The Revolution Motel . . . I remember more about the hotel in King of Prussia. I remember the room. The inside of the room. I remember him teasing me when I undressed. Telling me I was silly to act modest. What hadn’t he seen before?
—
THIS IS HOW my memory started coming back to me. In strange bits and pieces. Some things, little things, just seemed to suddenly appear as normal everyday memories—Gary’s hands on my ass, a time he put ointment on my genitals. They were so obvious, so complete, that I wondered how I ever could have forgotten them. Other things, bigger things, were more hazy—sexual play on my parents’ bed, being fondled by Gary in his classroom. These were more dreamlike and foggy. They didn’t feel like normal memories at all. And then there were the teasers, the little shards of knowledge that seemed to foreshadow memories to come. Like suddenly remembering certain hotels but not knowing why. Or certain men my father had known.
It’s important to know that the recovery of my memories didn’t happen all at once. They came in clumps over a period of about fifteen years. In this first round, I didn’t yet realize I’d been used in prostitution or kiddie porn, nor did I remember any of the S/M stuff. Hell, I hardly remembered anything! All that came to me was the daily run-of-the-mill molestations by Gary—in his classroom, in motel rooms, on my parents’ bed. But that was plenty to freak me out! I can’t say for certain why the memories came back in stages or why I generally remembered the more “normal” abuse long before the really kinky stuff. I assume my psyche gave me what it thought I could handle, which was very little at the time.
I realize that for someone who has not experienced the recovery of repressed memories the whole thing must seem bizarre. It was bizarre for me too.
One minute, I was a normal college grad trying to start a career. The next, I was some incest victim. What the fuck?
—
TRYING TO MAKE SENSE of what was happening to me, I went to the source of all knowledge in the days before Siri: the bookstore. Prominently displayed was a recent bestseller called The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. It provided answers in plain black-and-white. It said I was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse like countless other women, and that my flashbacks and mood swings were par for the course. It explained that my history of depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts were means of coping. Most important, it said I could heal and told me how.
Nowadays, there are many books about child sexual abuse. In 1990, though, when I began to regain my memory, talking openly about incest and molestation was still very new. In the ’70s, the women’s movement opened the can of worms when it dared to speak out against rape. Speak-outs on incest soon followed, and the movement to publicize and prevent child sexual abuse was born. By the mid-1980s, child sexual abuse became a major focus of American culture.
Groups popped up to help victims while law enforcement cracked down on perps. Sensational stories about satanic cults and abusive preschools dominated the news. In short, child sexual abuse became a very big deal—some say to the point of national hysteria.
In a bizarre twist of fate, my personal history coincides precisely with America’s “discovery” of child sexual abuse. In the 1970s, at the height of the kiddie-porn market, I was forced into those films. In the 1980s, during the fervent hunt for child molesters, my father was prosecuted. By the 1990s, when the term recovered memories hit the mainstream, I was just beginning to have flashbacks. Yet despite being the poster child of an era, I was completely unaware of the larger political and social machinations surrounding child sexual abuse.
So when I bought The Courage to Heal, I didn’t know there was a controversy surrounding its discussion of repressed and recovered memories. In the book, the authors, who don’t hold degrees in psychology or any other mental health field, encouraged readers to unearth their repressed memories of abuse through regression therapy. They urged readers to trust the veracity of their recovered memories even if there was no objective proof of abuse. Most controversial, the authors told readers that if they felt they were abused they probably were even if they had no memories of abuse.
This loosey-goosey approach didn’t sit well with some people. A few readers claimed that upon following the advice in the book they recovered memories that later turned out to be false. Around the same time, an organization called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was formed by a group of parents who claimed that their adult children had falsely accused them of child sexual abuse. The FMSF worked hard to build skepticism about recovered memories of abuse—claiming such memories were either the result of media influence or misleading therapists who implanted ideas in their patients’ heads.
While there is certainly evidence that false memories can be created under certain conditions, the idea that hordes of women are routinely duped by self-serving therapists reeks of an Oliver Stone–style conspiracy theory. It harkens back to the 1890s when Freud’s colleagues accused him of implanting false memories in his patients, as well as the 1980s when skeptics claimed therapists were creating false cases of multiple personality disorder. There’s a theme here: In all of these instances, people uncomfortable with the divulgence of widespread child sexual abuse try to discredit and silence victims. They do this by calling us “confused” or “manipulated,” but what they are really calling us is “liars.”
To this day, many people believe that recovered memories of child sexual abuse are never real. Upon hearing my story of recovered memories, I have no doubt that skeptics will try to discredit me. At worst, they’ll say I’m a charlatan who’s making the whole thing up for money. At best, they’ll say I’m confused, that my “memories” are false and were implanted by The Courage to Heal or some Rasputin-esque therapist.
The thing is: My memories started coming back to me before I ever bought any books about child sexual abuse or sought any kind of therapy to deal with the memories I was recovering. In addition, while pursuing a civil case against my parents, my lawyer managed to collect quite a bit of evidence of the crimes committed against me, including medical records and eyewitness accounts.
Is it possible for people to repress and later recover the memory of a horrible event? The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, all mainstream organizations that specialize in the study of trauma, and a vast clinical literature say yes. In contrast, false memory syndrome is not recognized as a diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association or any mainstream psychological organization.
If one needs more proof that a person can repress and later recover traumatic memories, there is also ample anecdotal evidence. Take, for instance, the case of Alicia Kozakiewicz. When Kozakiewicz was thirteen years old, she was abducted outside her Pittsburgh home by a man she had met on the Internet. She was held hostage, tortured, and sexually assaulted for four days before being rescued by the FBI. When agents entered the dungeon where Kozakiewicz was being held, they discovered her chained to the floor with a leather collar around her neck. Despite this acute trauma—probably because of it—Kozakiewicz could not remember the horrors she endured during her ordeal. In addition, the teen also suffered huge chunks of memory loss for the years before her abduction. By the age of nineteen, Kozakiewicz said she had come to recall “bits and pieces” of her life and the trauma. Slowly, over time, she appeared to be recovering the memories of what had happened to her.
—
KOZAKIEWICZ AND I SEEM to have suffered similar traumas. We were both taken by sadistic men, locked in basement dungeons, bound, tortured, and raped. We both dealt with the trauma by blocking out the memory of it, by repressing it. Repressed memories, though, rarely stay that way. They creep in as frozen images, phantom pains, confusing dreams.
When my memories started coming back, I was thrown into an emotional crisis. Some days, I felt so terrified that I would hide inside my closet for hours. Other days, I cried uncontrollably and couldn’t get out of bed. Unable to function, I was forced to quit my internship at Days of Our Lives. I could barely write a grocery list, much less a script!
Recognizing that my life was falling apart, I knew I needed help. Exactly how to get help, though, was a bit of a mystery. I knew I needed a therapist, but good ones cost good money. Now unemployed, I was SOL. This is one of the catch-22’s of severe abuse. Healing from it takes a lot of time and money, but traumatized people are often too damaged to work steadily.
Eventually, I found a nonprofit counseling center in Van Nuys that offered low-cost therapy to poor folks. These sorts of clinics are all over the country and are the primary source of care for the sickest patients, who generally lack money or decent insurance. The way these clinics are able to offer cut-rate fees, however, is by staffing green therapists. These are mostly students in their first or second year of graduate school working for free to earn the hours they need to become licensed.
It’s a sad reality that therapists with absolutely no experience and very little training are routinely thrown into rooms with patients suffering from serious mental health issues, including borderline personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder, and other forms of dissociation. New to the game, these therapists often have no idea what they’re dealing with, which helps explain why patients are routinely misdiagnosed for years.
I was paired with a therapist in her midfifties. Ethel (Therapist #4) was a second-year student in a master’s program who was starting her second practicum. Despite her grandmotherly looks, she was cold and hard. Like most graduate psychology students, Ethel was probably overworked, undersupervised, and overwhelmed by the serious cases being assigned to her. As an older person, she also seemed to resent being forced to work for free. Ethel clearly lacked knowledge about psychological problems. Her biggest shortcoming, though, was a complete lack of empathy. The ability to be empathetic and nonjudgmental is essential for a good therapist, yet it’s stunning how many I have met who lack these qualities. Ethel was certainly lacking. When I tried to tell her about the awful flashbacks I was having, about my crippling anxiety and dark thoughts, she couldn’t seem to grasp the pain I was in.
Week after week, as I tried to share the anguish I felt about memories of molestation, she offered dumb platitudes about nothing being as bad as it seems and looking on the bright side of life. One evening, when I told her I was feeling gravely suicidal, she suggested I try knitting to distract myself. (I’m not kidding.) After that, I decided to stop seeing Therapist #4.
Instead, I started attending a free group for survivors of child sexual abuse. Still shocked and struggling to believe that I was a survivor, I initially found the group comforting. As time wore on, though, it became difficult to relate to most of the other women, who seemed to lead far grittier lives. Many of the unmarried twenty-somethings already had a few kids, and one had an extensive criminal record. None of them had been to college, nor did they seem interested in bettering themselves through education or careers. It was a pessimistic bunch, and, frankly, their lack of ambition and hope scared me to death. I’d joined the group to hone my identity as a survivor, but what I found were people who saw themselves as victims of circumstance.
At twenty-two, I didn’t have words to describe any of this, but I instinctively understood that this kind of negativity was a dead end. You can’t get well and find happiness if you don’t believe it’s possible.
One woman in the group did impress me. She was in her forties and married. She’d been steadily working all her life until, in her late thirties, repressed memories of abuse started to emerge. Shaken, the woman had to quit her job and take some time to heal. For the past few years, she’d been seeing an experienced private therapist, and it really showed. Unlike the rest of us, she seemed to accept her past and had real insight into how it had affected her adult life. What’s more, she was able to cry freely when she felt sad, which was something I couldn’t do.
In the group, this woman eloquently expressed her regret at facing her demons so late in life. In her twenties and thirties, she’d been afraid to deal with her past, choosing instead to distract herself with work and relationships. Lost in self-deception, she’d made some poor choices. One was her husband, whom she’d sought for protection, not love. The two were in the midst of a divorce. The woman’s biggest regret, though, was never having children. Always running from her feelings, she’d never looked inside to realize she wanted to be a mother. Now it was too late, and she cried about it with such anguish that it scared me. At twenty-two, I couldn’t comprehend the finality of menopause. Still, I could see that an unwillingness to face one’s demons in a timely fashion was a recipe for misery.
—
STRUCK BY THIS WOMAN’S PROGRESS, I asked for the name and number of her therapist. She was seeing a guy in Altadena, about thirty miles from my house. Despite the distance, I called him. Clinic-style shrink roulette had rarely worked out for me, so I was willing to go out of my way for someone who came recommended and whose good work seemed to be evident by what was in front of me.
After chatting on the phone, Javier scheduled an initial appointment. A few nights later, I drove east on the 134 with high expectations. Javier’s office was in a small medical building mostly filled with dentists. His waiting room wasn’t plush, but compared to Bellevue and the clinic in Van Nuys, it felt like a palace. After a few minutes, the door opened and a tall, sturdy man stepped in. He was in his late thirties, with a mop of dark hair and a shaggy moustache. His jeans, moccasins, and sweatshirt all gave off the impression of a laid-back dude.
Javier’s office was an enormous space with vaulted ceilings, beat-up couches, and an oversize desk. On one side, there was a fish tank sitting on a dark wood stand. The whole look reeked of the 1970s. Javier seemed like something out of the 1970s too. He had a relaxed, warm, whatever-goes vibe—another Free to Be . . . You and Me therapist.
Because Javier seemed so open, it instantly made me want to be open too. Truth be told, I was so overwhelmed that I was dying to pour my heart out to someone who might understand what I was going through. I told Javier about the hard move to California and my sudden flashbacks. I told him about the awful memories, skin-crawling anxiety, debilitating depression, and dark thoughts of suicide. I told him how desperate I was to find a good therapist who could really, truly help.
During all of this, Javier listened patiently. He nodded at appropriate moments and offered comforting, empathetic comments. He seemed to understand the hell I was going through, and he clearly knew a bit about child abuse and trauma. I silently prayed a thank-you to God for finally sending me the right therapist.
Then we talked about money.
When Javier found out I wasn’t working, had no savings and no insurance, he abruptly cut off my monologue. He told me his hourly fee, which I already knew. But I was so desperate that I had decided money shouldn’t be an impediment to getting good help. I asked him about a lowered fee or seeing him on credit until I could find work. Javier’s warm demeanor immediately gave way to a businesslike iciness. He started shuffling papers on his desk; his body language told me it was time to go.
Distraught, I burst into tears. I rushed over to Javier’s desk and begged him to take me on, promising I’d pay him back when I could.
Javier sighed, looked me straight in the eyes, and spoke with a weary resolve. “Look, Michelle, healing from sexual abuse is hell. It requires a lot of time and strength to get through it. You’re not in a position to deal with this right now. You’ve got to get your life together.”
—
I RETURNED to the free group at the clinic. But shortly after, I got a phone message one day from a member named Amy. While I knew who she was, we’d had no private conversations, no personal relationship of any kind. Amy said she was calling at the behest of her therapist and that she was seeking information. It seemed Amy had something called multiple personality disorder and couldn’t remember parts of her day-to-day life. Amy was calling all the women in the group because she wanted us to tell her what she’d said and done. I didn’t know much about multiple personalities except that it was some crazy, weird shit.
I didn’t call Amy back. In fact, the whole thing freaked me out so much that I never returned to the group.
I mean, what could I possibly have in common with a nut job like that?
Unable to find the help I needed to heal, I did what I’d done many times before: I walled off my feelings and tried get on with life. Pulling myself up by the bootstraps was definitely more difficult now that I remembered some of the sexual abuse. Still, I had to do it. I had to earn money to surivive.
Finding a job after Days of Our Lives, though, proved difficult. I applied for a playwriting fellowship at the Mark Taper Forum and didn’t even get an interview. An agent suggested I become a sitcom writer, so I penned a Doogie Howser, M.D. script to act as a sample of my work. It was so bad, she refused to send it out.
Around the same time, a short film I had written the year before finally had its industry screening. Some important people came, which was unfortunate as the film totally sucked. Unable to catch a break in entertainment, I returned to journalism as a theater reviewer for the Los Angeles Reader. But the Reader didn’t pay much. Sorry, did I say “much”? I meant “nothing”! I was now knocking out six hundred words a week for the privilege of a free ticket.
Since I couldn’t make money as a writer, I applied for any sort of job I could get. I sent resumes to every appropriate want ad in Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and the Los Angeles Times. However, on the few occasions when I actually scored interviews, I tanked. This wasn’t like me. In the past, I’d always been able to ace meetings. One of the great things about having multiple personalities is the ability to subconsciously summon whatever identity will do well in a given situation. It’s how I got through life. But once the flashbacks started, everything changed. I lost my mojo.
—
THAT’S WHY I was praying hard as I walked back from the grocery store. After much searching and several interviews, I was waiting to hear back about an entry-level clerical job at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. While typing and filing and running packages around town was no dream job, it now felt like one to me. Feeling this was my last shot at a job with any kind of growth potential, I turned to the Almighty for help. “Please, God,” I prayed, as I rounded the corner in front of my building.
“Please, God,” I begged, as I entered my building and climbed the stairs.
“Please, God,” I pleaded in desperation, as I entered my apartment and homed in on the answering machine. There was no blinking light. No job offer had miraculously appeared. As usual, my prayers went unanswered. God hated me; that much was obvious.
I was just starting to drown my sorrows in a cup of ramen noodles when the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Michelle! Hi! It’s Lynne from the Theatre Center. Congratulations! You got the job!”
I was ecstatic and thought God was finally coming around . . . until I heard the salary. But beggars can’t be choosers, so I accepted enthusiastically. I was genuinely excited to get a job at a theater. I just had to figure out how to make ends meet.
As luck would have it, the Broadway musical City of Angels was about to start an open-ended run at the Shubert Theater in Century City. I managed to get a minimum-wage job as an usher. Suddenly, I was commuting an hour every morning to downtown LA, working nine to five at the Theatre Center, driving an hour and a half across town at rush hour, and working six thirty to ten at the Shubert. On weekends, City of Angels ran twice a day, so I worked from about noon to ten.
With such a hectic schedule, there was no time to focus on the past. The constant barrage of flashbacks and feelings that had plagued me since moving to LA blessedly stopped. This would become a pattern for years to come. In times of extreme stress, usually brought on by life changes, my psyche would unleash a storm of new memories, throwing me into emotional instability. Then, as I pulled my life back together, the memories would stop coming, allowing time to process and integrate the new things I’d learned about myself.
The new jobs made denial easy; I was too busy to think about the past. The Los Angeles Theatre Center turned out to be both boring and stressful. I spent my days at the office doing mind-numbing tasks like answering phones and stuffing envelopes. The other part of my job involved delivering packages all over LA, which, in the age before GPS, involved the use of a three-hundred page map. (Again, not kidding.)
The biggest problem with LATC, though, was not the work. It was the lack of pay. Literally. Just a few months into the gig, I stopped receiving paychecks. I worked for more than a month without pay before the theater finally announced it was bankrupt. Just like that, I was out of work again. The job hadn’t even lasted long enough to qualify me for unemployment.
Unaware of the theater’s financial woes, I had already signed a lease on a more expensive apartment. My ushering gig had already ended, leaving me broker than broke once again. Any peace I had made with God got flushed down the toilet with my job made in heaven. To offer up a blessing only to take it away was cruel. God was an asshole, and I hated Him for it.
But that was the feeling of a young girl who had yet to see the bigger picture. I now understand that the Lord really does work in mysterious ways. Looking back now, I can see that losing my job at LATC was a blessing. It turned out to be the thing that led to the thing that eventually fixed my whole life.
—
AT THE TIME, though, I couldn’t see the silver lining. I needed money, so the morning after the theater closed, I bought a newspaper and vowed to find a new job. In the want ads, I found a job that seemed strangely alluring. It offered a high hourly rate and an immediate start date. The good news: It was walking distance from my apartment. The disturbing news: It involved phone sex.
In my head, this didn’t seem like a big deal. You get on the phone. You talk to guys. You say dirty things. Blah. Blah. Blah. I have no moral objection to it, nor did I then. On the contrary, I held a weird fascination for sex work and assumed I might become a prostitute someday. On the surface, such thoughts were strange coming from a good girl like me. Underneath, though, my fascination with the sex trade made perfect sense. Unfortunately, I had not yet remembered my history as a child prostitute, so I had no idea why I was so keen to be a phone-sex worker.
I don’t remember much about my first night on the job except walking into an office space filled with cubicles and seeing lots of women in sweats and jeans with phones in their hands. As I was ushered through the room, I overheard one woman saying, “Oooo, baby, you making me so hot, I gotta get off.” Then, she picked up an electric toothbrush, turned it on, and let the vibrating sound entice the listener.
After filling out my W-2 forms and getting an education on how to physically work the buttons on the phone, I was shown to my cubicle. Since it was my first night, I was assigned to a “chat” line—meaning I was to flirt with guys, not get them off. When a button on my phone lit up, I grabbed the receiver.
“Hello?” I said, in a voice I barely recognized.
The voice on the other end sounded like a young man in his twenties. He had a southern accent and was shy and polite. I can’t say what we talked about because I wasn’t really there. Some other part of me had taken over the conversation while I listened passively from a far-off distance.
The voice—my voice—was flirtatious and giggly with a slight drawl, which delighted the young man. She spoke of her riding lessons, her love of horses, and the grand farm where she lived. The details suggested a life in the southern aristocracy.
The customer was so charmed by this girl that he stayed on the phone for the full half hour allowed by his credit card preauthorization. When the phone cut him off, he called back again then again. He did this for my entire five-hour shift.
During those hours, the young man remained polite. He was flirty but not overtly sexual, as that was beyond the scope of the “chat” service. He did, however, seem obsessed with figuring out where his new love interest lived. He asked over and over, offering to drive or fly anywhere to meet her—me—in person.
It was harmless enough. There was no way the man could ever figure out where I lived; we used fake names on the phone. Still, when I went to bed that night, I had horrible nightmares that he was after me, abducted me, and held me as a sexual hostage.
The next day, I quit my job as a phone-sex worker. The dreams were too terrifying and, though I didn’t yet realize it, too close to real life. The part where I wasn’t really me was weird too, but I didn’t think much about it. My mind had a way of letting me see things about myself without wholly allowing me to be conscious of them. That’s the nature of denial and dissociation.
—
A FEW DAYS LATER, out of the blue, I got a call from Center Theatre Group, the biggest and richest theater company in LA. They got my name from a former LATC colleague who had recently started working there. Without so much as an interview, I was offered a job in the fund-raising department. Lucky for me, it paid just as well as phone sex.
The next morning, I began working for one of the country’s most important theaters. CTG ran both the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theater, and routinely sent its plays to Broadway. Every day, the halls were filled with notable actors, directors, and playwrights. Within a few months, I’d set eyes on many of my idols, including Stephen Sondheim, Neil Simon, and Marvin Hamlisch. If I couldn’t be in New York, this was definitely the next best thing.
So was I finally happy? Of course not!
Although the job offered financial stability, free theater tickets, lavish opening-night parties, and a chance to hang with world-renowned artists, it didn’t require me to be artistic at all. I spent my days in a windowless cubicle typing donor names into a computer. It was soul-crushingly boring. It didn’t help that in my free time I wasn’t writing. Since leaving Days, I’d been blocked, and I lacked both the drive and the hope to change.
Lacking is actually an apt term to describe this period in my life. Although I had a job that could’ve led to greater things, I lacked the self-confidence to take full advantage of my luck. I also lacked friends but lacked the social skills to make them. It’s not that coworkers didn’t try to befriend me. In the beginning, people invited me to lunch. But I was so awkward and self-conscious that I rarely got a second invitation.
I could also be downright rude. After a few days on the job, for instance, the woman who had put me up for the position invited me to lunch. We had worked together before, so I knew her a little. I certainly knew that she’d done me a big favor, so the proper thing to do was invite her to a nice lunch, foot the bill, and thank her profusely for her kindness. Instead, we went dutch. I talked very little and asked her nothing about herself. Worst of all, I don’t think I ever thanked her for getting me a job!
My bad behavior frequently led to self-sabotage. A few months after starting my job at CTG, I was accepted into the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. In New York, this well-respected training ground for musical theater writers includes alumni who wrote A Chorus Line, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Book of Mormon. While the LA group wasn’t quite as venerable, getting in was still a coup and gave me a solid shot at getting my writing career off the ground. In the workshop, lyricists like me are paired with composers to write a series of assigned songs. I got paired with Rob, a recent USC grad who worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Downtown News. Right from the start, we were a good match. Our first few assignments garnered high praise, and Rob and I began to form a friendship.
Things were going so well, in fact, that we were invited to participate in the workshop’s 15 Minute Musicals festival. Our short original musical would receive a full production, complete with professional actors, lights, costumes, props, the works. It was an incredible opportunity. So what did I do? I quit. Rob didn’t show up for a writing session one day. He was usually a reliable guy and had simply forgotten the appointment, but I felt slighted and turned into the hypersensitive, chip-on-her-shoulder psycho from high school. How dare he disrespect me! I will not be ignored!
When I finally calmed down, I realized that I’d made a terrible mistake. I told Rob I wanted to continue our collaboration, but he had already found a new librettist for the project. Kindly, the new partners offered to make it a threesome. I gladly accepted, then spent the next few weeks being difficult and complaining bitterly about anything and everything Rob’s new partner did. I hated her script, her song cues, the way she parted her hair. I was acting out my anger at having been replaced so easily, but I had no awareness of this. I just played the part of a prima-donna douche bag while Rob tried helplessly to keep the peace. His reward for the effort was that I quit again, just a few days before dress rehearsal. As money was now involved for actors, costumes, musicians, and sets, the director of the workshop stepped in. He told me that if I dropped out at such a late stage I’d be barred from the group forever. I loved the workshop. It was my only artistic outlet at that time. So true to form, I dug in my heels and ditched the group. I could always find a way to ruin anything good that came into my life.
—
BACK IN THOSE DAYS, I came off as either a weirdo or an asshole. It wasn’t my intention; it just didn’t occur to me to act any other way. When people are aloof or impolite, others often judge them harshly, saying it’s a sign of poor character. We think, He’s cold or She’s rude or He’s odd when, in actuality, the cold, rude, odd person doesn’t always realize they’re being that way. Social skills are learned, not inherent. No one is born with the knowledge that they should chew with their mouth closed or say thank you when they’re given a job or treat their collaborators with respect. We pick up these rules of human behavior through direct instruction and by watching others. The patterns we learn can be changed, but we often believe they are who we innately are.
Having been raised by a narcissistic psycho, I had a lot of patterns that needed changing. My poor manners, suspicious nature, and chip on the shoulder, as well as the self-consciousness I felt at not fitting in, all combined to make me not so great at relating to those around me. I was a hard worker, though, and highly driven to succeed. So despite my social shortcomings, I began to work my way up in the theater world—from a data-entry temp to Equity stage manager to assistant director. I even toured with a show that had a run at the New York Shakespeare Festival, allowing me to achieve the dream of working professionally in Manhattan.
During those years working in theater, I began the long process of healing from my childhood. As I was now safe from abuse, some of my worst fear triggers naturally subsided, and I was able to enjoy malls, motels, and sunsets again. Through work, I made friends and began to experience something like a normal social life.
I began to write again, selling three short stories to anthologies and penning a play about my experiences with the legal system.
Most of the time, I got up in the morning, went to work, came home, and lived an uneventful life. For most people, this isn’t something to write about. But for me, normalcy and predictability were very new experiences.
One day, I was washing dishes at the kitchen sink when a warm, calm, happy feeling enveloped me. This is contentment, I thought. It’s the first time I’d ever felt it. I was twenty-five years old.
Credit for that contentment and any other progress I made to that point must be given to Steve. We’d known each other for seven years by then and had been living together for four, so I’d had a lot of time to soak in his lessons. Steve comes from about as normal a family as one can imagine: working dad, stay-at-home mom, two kids, two cars. He grew up with nightly family dinners and annual family vacations where no one hit one another or even yelled much. As a result, Steve developed a steadfast, even-keeled, patient personality. When trouble comes along, he’s able to think things through rather than act things out, and he spent countless hours teaching me to do the same.
Every night, as I histrionically relayed the crisis of the day, Steve would calmly talk me through it—asking how things made me feel and why I felt that way. Most people take knowing how they feel for granted, but the ability to recognize and name one’s feelings is also learned, not innate. Generally, children learn these lessons when they’re very young.
On the first day of kindergarten, a nervous child might say her tummy hurts, and the mother responds with “Are you feeling scared?” Over time, the child learns to associate her bodily sensations with the names of feelings. This is the beginning of emotional intelligence.
Like social skills and emotional intelligence, moral values are also learned at a young age. That works out fine if your parents are on the up and up. But when you’re raised by a sociopath, basic issues of right and wrong get kind of fuzzy.
Steve possesses an impeccable moral code. He knows right from wrong and knows himself, so he can’t be manipulated into doing things he doesn’t believe are good. In our nightly conversations, Steve tried to help me develop my own sense of ethics. I’ll never forget the first time he asked me what the “little voice in my head” was telling me to do. Little voice? What the hell was he talking about? It took a long time and a lot of late-night talks before I developed the inner voice that most people recognize as their conscience. Whatever good that conscience possessed was due to Steve, who taught me what it meant to be a decent human being who treats others with respect and kindness. That’s why, when I decided to stop using Gary’s last name, I chose to honor him by changing my name to Stevens.
—
WHILE MY FRIENDSHIP with Steve remained solid, our romantic relationship did not. As the years progressed, I grew to love him more and more—but not in that way. As a couple, we were not compatible. We were both too introverted and staid. I yearned for more adventure. I wanted to explore the world, and I needed to be with people who would coax me out of my shell. For a long time, I kept my feelings to myself. I was deeply attached to Steve and didn’t want to hurt him in any way. But I was also bored and increasingly lonely. I felt stuck and didn’t know what to do.
Then one day as I was exiting an off-ramp on my way to work, I had another epiphany. That clear, strong, authoritative voice that had helped me out in the past said, “Michelle, you’re gay, and today’s the day you’re going to deal with it.”
This came as a bit of a shock. I mean, I’d been living with Steve for years, and before him, I’d gone out with a few other guys. But I’d never dated a woman. Hell, I didn’t even know any lesbians! (Though I certainly enjoyed the Victoria’s Secret catalogue more than any straight girl should.)
Truth be told, I think that I’d simply been too preoccupied with surviving to think much about my sexuality before that moment. Most people start to become aware of their sexuality and sexual preferences during adolescence, but I was being raped and prostituted during those years. Later, I was trying so hard to look and act “normal” that I dated boys just to fit in. It was only after I began to heal that I gained the energy necessary to focus on my sexuality. It’s not unusual for survivors of child sexual abuse to deal with their sexuality later in life. But I’m guessing most people don’t figure it all out in one moment as they’re exiting the 101!
Sitting at my desk that day, I wondered what to do with the new knowledge I had gained about myself. Oddly enough, I knew right away that it was true. I was gay; I just knew it. I also knew I had to do something about it that very day, so I picked up the phone, called Steve at his job, and asked him to meet me for dinner later that night. Sitting together at Bob’s Big Boy, I watched him chow down on a burger, completely unaware of the storm about to hit. I knew that telling him would be a major blow and that he would probably want me to move out of our apartment that very night.
I waited till he was halfway through his chocolate cream pie before breaking the news.
“Steve,” I said. “I have something to tell you. I’m gay.”
He pulled the fork out of his mouth mid-bite, then spat chocolate pie into his napkin. “Are you seeing somebody?” he asked.
“No, of course not! I would never cheat!”
“Then how do you know?” he asked.
“I just do.” I shrugged.
Steve started to cry.
I felt awful. Here was the first person ever to treat me well, the first person to teach me anything about love, and I was breaking his heart. God, I was a real shit!
“Look, Steve,” I said. “I know you’re upset, and I don’t blame you. I don’t want to make this any harder on you than it has to be. I’ll move out tonight.”
“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t have to move . . . I think I’m gay too.”