Live like a narcissist. Stare at your own navel for years, trying to figure out why your stomach always hurts. Think about yourself almost all the time. Wonder who you are. When other people talk about things other than you, get mad or frustrated or confused. Act out or get sick so the attention goes back to you. You might also pretend you are invisible and refuse to think about yourself ever. Any of those ways are fine. They’ll all get you to the final goal.

Cheat in classes sometimes because focusing is hard, and you want that A. Or never cheat because you know you have to be perfect. Either way is fine. There are so many options when it comes to getting through school as someone who doesn’t always have both oars in the water—or if they do, it’s often the wrong water.

Appreciate your need to either not be at home or be at home as much as possible. You do you. Cry when your parents go out for the night because you know in your heart they will probably never return or don’t think that way and be fine. The great thing about trauma is that it is like art—it has so many forms of expression. The other way trauma is like art is biblical: If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Cry and have no idea why you are crying. Over- or under-eat and have no idea why you do those things. Fill your garage with stuff you don’t need and have no idea why you are hoarding. Or have nothing in your garage and no garage and have no idea why you are trying to leave no footprint. But just keep doing those things, whatever they are.

You keep doing you. Something is trying to come through your body.

That is called TERROR.

Or RAGE.

Or SOMETHING UNFIT FOR DINNERTIME CONVERSATION.

Stuff like that takes time to process unless you are Sigourney Weaver in Alien and then it just shoots out of you and causes a lot of damage and scares the shit out of a lot of people.

Write your story. Don’t worry about punctuation or grammar rules. No one worried about what might happen to you when you were taken away from your mother in a time frame everyone knows would destroy puppies and kittens. Who gives a flying fuck about commas or run-on sentences when you are writing to bring yourself to life?

Walk eight miles a day for years because you can’t focus enough to hold down a regular job because, like a woman in labor, you have to do something to help move this thing through you. Or have a job but always leave time to go into the bathroom and cry or rip doors off the walls or tear at your clothes.

Get married and divorced and married and divorced because your partner is not your mother. Or don’t. Just keep doing you. It’s coming.

Do MDMA and psilocybin with a therapist and experience the fatal car wreck that was your birth. Feel shocked your body could hold that much pain still, 57 years later. See that the you, the you that is motherbaby, died because the bond busted. See that what is left, you, is something you have never experienced—you are like the peanut inside a peanut M&M. All these years you’ve been covered in chocolate.

Watch the pain move through your body and dissipate. Become the nut that you are.

Go live by a forest for a year. Barely work. Let feelings have their way with you. Let feelings pass through you like rusty nails, like clouds, like fingernails down a chalkboard, like feelings. Do not make stories about them. Just let your body do its thing: feel. Feel like puking. Feel great. Feel like you will not make it. Have the best day ever. Feel like you are floating. Feel like you are learning a foreign language which is the language of you. Have a dog and bond with him like you are both creatures of the world. Fall in love with your dog. Walk for miles in the woods every day. See the light between the trees. Make friends with people who are also walking their dogs in the forest. Tell stupid jokes. Talk about fury and kindness and everyday things. Be a beatup real person, the Velveteen Rabbit of no-Botox living. Your worry and joy are on your face, and you don’t hide either.

Walk around stunned that it’s okay to be you.

Try to remember who told you it wasn’t.

Then forget about it.

Who gives a shit.

There are better things to think about. Like, what’s for lunch? and What nice thing can I do for myself today? Like, What nice thing can I do for my dog? Like, What nice thing can I do for the guy at the gas station?

My father called last night to ask me if I knew where my (deceased) mother was. “Am I going crazy?” my father asked. “Is she alive?”

Something cracked in me. We are all children, walking each other home.