College

In the summer of 1998, I returned home to Myrtle Beach after my first year at Appalachian State University in the mountains of western North Carolina. Academically, it had been a grossly unsuccessful start to college.

I was raised to go to college right after high school, and I chose App State because it was featured in High Times Magazine, a publication dedicated to marijuana culture that’s been around since 1974. I was one of those kids who was born in the late 70’s on the tail end of the hippie movement and grew into being part of a second generation of what you might call neo-hippies in the ‘90’s. By the time I entered my senior year in high school, I had been smoking pot since I was 14, sewing my own patchwork wardrobe, and had a river of hair that was so long I had to pull it up when I went to the bathroom so it wouldn’t hit the toilet seat. These descriptors don’t have much to do with me being who I was, but you get the picture.

In no certain order, who I was had to do with who my parents were, me being an older sister to my sister, Katie; crippling, intermittent depression that had set in at age 13, and being born with what I might now call a sort of poetic perception. It had to do with having a low score on the DISC personality assessment for a personality trait called compliance, my parent’s life-altering divorce when I was in elementary school, being physically beautiful by popular standards, and growing up at the beach. It also pointed to me developing love addiction by 4th grade, being an artsy, moody 4 on the Enneagram, and some really influential classic rock/folk records of my parents' that I grew up listening to.

By the end of my freshman year in college I was on academic probation and would be kicked out for failing to meet probation requirements. “I was throwing away my potential." But, Boone was a dream for a staryy-eyed, suburban hippie like me. Tucked in a valley in the Blue Ridge mountains, it was 6 hours from home and felt like it was insulated from the rest of the too harsh world. It felt like freedom. But I was flunking out of school on my father’s dime. This was next to an act of treason. My father was a dominating figure who believed in the power of money and had built his identity around financial and business success. Any parent would be disappointed, resentful, and angry about what appeared to be self-centered negligence on the part of the child, but to my father, life was money; money and something he used to call “the power of the pen”. I had shit on all of that.

Besides that, my father, whom I once put on a pedestal, had come to feel like a tornado in my life. By adolescence, but really throughout childhood, I was already lost in a cyclone of his dominance and neurosis. I would learn the words associated with his particular brand of dysfunction and our relationship later in life as I got further down the road on the healing and spiritual journey. They would include words and phrases like: narcissism, verbal abuse, OCD, bipolar disorder, emotional IQ, attachment disorder, childhood trauma, gaslighting, ACON (adult children of narcissists), and codependency. In this way, my father would actually become one of my primary spiritual teachers, mostly by suffering through and reconciling with the unhealed aspects of his authoritative personality. At that time in my life, I felt it would have been easier if my father was just not here, as in, on the planet. I had no language for the unbearable love I felt for him combined with the absolute necessity to save my own life by getting out from under his thumb and controlling, "old school", emotional volatility. My father has changed much since then, but this was my experience of him at that time.

So, Boone was a haven for me in the early days of fighting for my autonomy and need to reclaim and reinvent myself. Being a successful student was not priority in this search for inner freedom and my true self. I was gasping for air and it seemed more clean and available in the western NC mountains. When my mother and stepfather took me up to Boone during my senior year in high school to view the campus, we stopped in a country restaurant on the edge of town that faced the covered porch of an old house across the way. On that porch there were about a dozen people picking banjos and guitars, having an old fashioned, mountain bluegrass sing-in. Something told me that I had found my second home. And “that something” felt spiritual, like a call coming in from heaven. There was a promise of heaven on earth somewhere in these sounds; and my inner ear was laser focused to something bigger than me whispering, “Here. Here. It’s all right here. This is where you belong.”

When I left home at the beach, where I lived with my mom and stepdad, I had sworn I would never come back to visit. Though my mom was nothing like my domineering father, our relationship had devolved into a contentious battleground of wills as I went through high school. I hated the term “teenager” back then, but I was an angsty, strong-willed, stubborn teenager who could not be bothered with the rules set by my mom and step-father. In retrospect, some of those rules, like curfew, probably saved my life on several occasions.

When they made an exaggerated fuss about one thing or another that I was or wasn’t doing, I remember thinking of that familiar refrain from my early childhood, “If you want something to cry about, I’ll give you something to cry about.” In my mind, I wasn’t nearly as "bad" as other kids I knew at the beach and partied with. There were two middle schools that fed into our high school, and most of the “bad” kids had come from the other middle school where they had been raised by beach bums, alcoholics, siblings, struggling single mothers, and parents who worked in the local restaurant, hospitality, and adult entertainment industries. This is a gross overgeneralization, but I had seen some of it with my own eyes. Regardless, I was on restriction for most of my high school years for being mouthy, disrespectful, entitled, and manipulative, and for committing a combination of indiscretions like sneaking phone calls to boyfriends after hours, not doing my chores, missing curfew, and allowing my grades to slip. To be fair, I would not have wanted to parent me either. I occasionally stole my parent’s car before I had my license, had sex all over their house, and had a party or two while they were out of town. I was crass and unruly, and both too old and too immature for the skin I was in.

Understandable to me now, I experienced a level of meanness in my mother during that time that was startling to me because she was also nurturing, soft, and compassionate in a quintessentially motherly way. The meanness had come only later in my childhood as a response to the aspects of me that she could not control or manage. A decade later, I would learn about the Enneagram, a personality typing system that describes patterns in how people perceive and navigate their world and manage their emotions, and this dichotomy would make more sense. My mother is a Type 2 with a 1 wing “The Helper with perfectionist tendencies" who digresses to the negative traits of Type 8 “The Leader” when under stress and anxiety. At that age, I was the source of most of her stress and anxiety, and my mother overpowered me with her sometimes cutting and caustic words, control, and intolerance. What I know now is that she was attempting to set boundaries and keep me alive and well.

Many years later, while I was a single mother, I had attended a parenting class at a progressive church I was frequenting in order to help me survive a toxic love triangle I was in. The instructor said that when we are under parenting stress, we open up the very bottom file cabinet of our consciousness where the unhealthy parenting habits of our own parents are stowed away. Whatever poor coping skills they adopted from their own parents ends up in our bottom drawer too. This had alarmed me and also explained why I wasn’t the flawless mother I had dreamed of being to my own child. My mother’s mother, who was beloved to me, had been a cruel, physically and emotionally abusive parent at times to at least two of her three daughters. By the time I knew her, this quality in her had settled and was a thing of the past. But, when my mom was pushed to her edges by me, her own mother’s weaknesses came through, though not physically. Psychical abuse was an intergenerational trauma my mom had not passed on to me or my sister.

Nevertheless, leaving home was about escaping all that teenage unhappiness until I had better answers for fixing it. It wasn’t about getting an education, though that’s what I was reminded I was there for and what they were paying for. Away at college I found new, fascinating minds who I could easily identify by the music they liked, their outdoorsy, haphazard appearance, their sardonic humor, love of reefer, and where they sat on the main lawn of our campus. There was a hill, and we all gathered there between classes as a family of shoeless young adults lounging around in puppy piles or playing frisbee or hacky sack in corduroy and overalls. There were girls braiding boys’ long hair in the afternoon sun, friends playing chess on the grass, people dancing when there was no music, and hugging as the primary way of saying hello. There was always talk of hiking somewhere, group camping coming up on the weekend, a potluck at someone’s apartment, a party happening outside of town at someone’s barn or cabin. This was utopia to me, and it didn’t include me going to class. What I was feeling was something I had been searching for for a long time. It was resonance. There was no one telling me who to be or what to do or how to do it. And though I would crash and burn, I was experiencing autonomy for the first time in my life. Away from my parents and hometown and in the company of many seemingly free spirits, I was stepping into the chance to self-govern my life.

Needless to say, all the pieces did not come together as planned, as Appalachian State was giving me my final warnings. And though it was the happiest time of my life up 'til then, drugs and depression were also wreaking havoc on my ability to function with any measure of success. My friends at school seemed to be able to keep it together, to do what they actually went there to do and fulfill the promises of a paid for education. Not me; for me it was all or nothing. It was success or failure. I was slipping into the nothing. I was failing.

The thing about slipping into the nothing and "failing" is that sometimes that's where we have to go to find out who we are on our own terms and to step onto the path of our dharma. I was flunking out of college and enrolling in the school of hard knocks. What they don't tell you then, because they aren't certain that you'll make it, nor do they have the language for it, nor is it the path they want for you, is that this may become your temple. Hard knocks crack open the egg of awakening. The knocking didn't start in college, it just got louder because the stakes seemed higher. However, what I thought was at stake wasn't really what was most important: disappointing them, hurting my father, wasting his money and dreams for me, getting the university education and paper to prove it. What was at stake was me discovering me and an ocean of healing and consciousness that I would chart for the next two decades, and counting, to find the guiding light inside.