I Was Rebelling Against People.
While my life was moving along swimmingly in college, my parents stayed connected. They wrote me letters, chatted with me when I called, sent my sisters to visit me overnight, and supported me financially. Not only did they give me everything I could need in college, but they supported my independence.
They didn’t know how quickly I was sliding downhill.
When I spent time with my parents during my first couple of years of college, it was nice. We went out to eat, hung out for awhile and talked, and they got to see my room and sometimes my friends. They gave me money for my sorority dues. They took me shopping for snacks. They loved me endlessly.
And then they left, and I silently screamed, Thank God! and ran out to get wasted as fast as possible.
This went on for years.
As a parent now, I wonder how I continued to do this to them. They hadn’t done anything to me. Sure, they moved me around and I had to make new friends every two years – and I wasn’t good at making friends. But they didn’t abuse me. They made sure I knew I was loved and supported.
So what was I rebelling against?
I think about this question now – as a woman in my fifties with two grown children – and I think: I was rebelling against people. All people. I believed people were cruel, because so many had been cruel to me. I believed people were destroying the natural world (which they are, still) and that they were going to eliminate the one source of peace I had.
And when I was in college, I believed that the destruction was imminent – that a nuclear bomb could drop at any minute, as they’d told me in elementary school. I didn’t take the time to educate myself about what was actually happening; I just ran entirely on fear.
And all of my fear stemmed from people.
Unfortunately, “people” included my parents. Looking back, I’d say there wasn’t one single thing they could have done differently to make me stop drinking, stop rebelling, and stop the course of self-destruction I had started.
I had to stop the destruction myself.