Today marks the 23rd anniversary of my reluctant return to the east coast, from Southern California where I’d followed my father and attempted to take up permanent residence with him, some months after he left us for another woman across the country. The reasons that this plan of mine didn’t work out are hard to describe, not least because the details are somewhat fuzzy for me at this point after years of suppressing those memories. Regardless, those reasons don’t need to be detailed here and now.

There are years where this day goes by and I don’t think about it, where it doesn’t even register at all. Then there are years where I feel the weight of that pain very heavily, and I lug it around with me like short-circuiting weighted electric blanket. It operates like an undercurrent inside my body, vibrating below all the present-day business I need to carry on with, because real life goes on no matter what kind of traumatic burdens you bear. My therapist says it’s no surprise I’m having a particularly hard time with this anniversary today, given the emotional strain of recent weeks. On a day 23 years ago where I felt exceptionally alone, the isolating feelings of being Jewish and generally unsupported in the world at large are utterly underscoring those feelings. Essentially, she says, my body and mind recognize that present-day lonely feeling and go, “Oh shit! I know this feeling! Hey, remember the time…?” And so here I am, in November 2023 but also in November 2000, simultaneously.

It is so painful, today. It sucks. When she asked, I told my therapist that one of the things I need to do to process my emotions about this day is to allow myself to feel them, because for so long I couldn’t really do that, I had to bury what I felt in order to cater to the emotional health of everyone else around me. So, I’m letting myself have these feelings today. I focused specifically on the feeling of loneliness in my therapy session, but, in the two days since, I’ve identified another prevailing feeling from that time which I’m struggling to carry now.

At the time, and for many years afterward, there was this ill-formed sensation in my mind and body that I had failed. I had failed to make it work with my father and his “new family” in California, after failing to keep the “old family” together in Massachusetts. I had failed to take care of my brother when he was with us in California, and now I’d failed for myself. I had failed to stay away from the people my mother had decided to align herself with mere weeks after my father’s departure. I had failed.

Does 2023 me know this is irrational to the point of absurdity? Absolutely. How could I have failed at something that wasn’t at all my responsibility?

I was eleven fucking years old. Barely twelve when I flew back to the east coast on November 4, 2000.

But I had been taught, from infancy, that these dynamics were indeed my job to keep intact. I was my brother’s caretaker, and my father’s confidante/caretaker, and my mother’s highly coveted perfect daughter to counterpoint all of her son’s challenges and do/be anything she needed me to do/be. The weight of all our family harmony — from the original recipe to the new remixed version — always fell on my tiny shoulders.

I was eleven, and I failed.

…I was fucking eleven. Of course I failed. No person can succeed at a job they have no business being assigned in the first place, least of all a child.

I’m working on being compassionate with myself today, but one of the ways I need to do that is to accept the language that springs to my mind at face value. So while some might, in an attempt to offer comfort, say that I didn’t fail at all, I would rather recognize that choice of words for what it is, for how it feels. Yes, I failed. But — it’s not my fault.

I failed, but it’s not my fault.

Ever see the movie Good Will Hunting, where Robin Williams (who plays a therapist) works with Matt Damon’s character, a brilliant but troubled young man? It’s been a long time since I’ve watched it so I forget a lot of the details, but there’s one scene that has stuck with me for an exceptionally long time. After many sessions of little productivity, Damon’s character finally opens up to Williams’ character and makes this breakthrough, in which Williams tells Damon that what happened to him is not his fault. Damon brushes the comment off at first (like most everyone with trauma does, because it’s an incredibly hard thing to believe). Williams repeats those four words, though. “It’s not your fault.” Over and over again he says this, over and over, until Damon breaks down and sobs because he’s starting to allow the words to sink in.

I’ve had years of practice sobbing my way through accepting those four words, which now allow me to write them here with dry eyes, even while I embrace the addition of couple more words into the sentence at hand.

I failed, but it’s not my fault. I failed, but it’s not my fault. I failed, but it’s not my fault.

I failed, but it’s not my fault. Not in 2000, and not in 2023. Because the truth is, what I failed at was reaching or maintaining an unachievable outcome set for me by people who did not have my best interests at heart. I suppose that, as a former gifted kid and lifelong overachiever, that’s the only kind of test I can learn to accept failing.

Therapy has a way of helping you take a more honest look at yourself across the miles of your personal history, at least if you put work into it. I understand that this feeling of failure stems from an old, flawed perspective and is a product of the circumstances I was raised in, of the people who put me there. Not that I’ve in any way mastered seeing past this veil of misperception, but, I do hope that in reading about the challenges I’ve faced and the pain I’m processing, others may too be able to find the strength to say, I failed but it’s not my fault.

Dear reader…it’s not your fault.