I lost our house key at least three times growing up. Phones, too. Money, toys, whatever wasn’t nailed down. I never noticed these things were gone until someone else did, and even then it didn’t really land. I had my head in the clouds and I liked it there. Looking back, I think I was thriving.
Then consciousness arrived, as it does, uninvited.
My dad started telling me not to be messy like my mom. My mom started telling me not to be angry like my dad. And somewhere in there, everyone else’s opinion of me started to matter more than my own experience of myself. Which is sad, when you actually sit with it. Two people who were supposed to raise a confident young woman ended up, without meaning to, raising someone whose main instruction was: don’t be like the other one. Not “be yourself.” Be neither of them.
I don’t think they did this on purpose. I don’t think most parents do. But a kid doesn’t need cruelty to absorb a warning — she just needs to hear it enough times, from the two people whose opinion she has no way of questioning yet.
I’ll admit the ending isn’t all bad. Being a type A adult comes in handy, especially now, single, living a life where everything runs through me and only me. I keep track of the bills, the appointments, the small logistics of a whole existence, because there’s no one else keeping the second list. Some days that feels like competence. Other days it just feels exhausting, like I’m running a household of one at the staffing level of two.
But I try not to forget that this isn’t just who I turned out to be. It’s who I became.
Because here’s the part nobody puts on the motivational poster: becoming type A usually means you were missing something when you were younger. Not always in some dramatic, capital-T Trauma way — sometimes just a quieter kind of missing, the kind where nobody was reliably catching things for you, so you learned to catch them yourself. Type A isn’t really about ambition. It’s about control. And you don’t get obsessed with control unless, at some point, you didn’t have enough of it — or enough help, or enough stability, or enough of someone else doing the worrying so you didn’t have to.
I don’t want to turn this into a full psychological excavation. I don’t think I need to know the exact shape of what was missing to know that something was. That’s usually what it means, when a person who once lost her keys monthly turns into a person who double-checks the lock from the car.
What I keep coming back to is this: the version of me who lost everything and didn’t care was not a worse person than the one who tracks everything now. She wasn’t more free, either — just less aware. I don’t think there’s a way to go back to her without going back to not knowing what I know. And I wouldn’t, actually, even if I could.
So I’m trying to hold both at once. The woman who needs to be in control because no one else is going to run this life for her. And the girl who used to lose her house key and still made it home fine, because somebody always let her in.
writing from my backyard is my fav writing spot
Be kind to yourself, A.
This really resonated with me. The line, "This isn't just who I turned out to be. It's who I became," says so much. I think we often mistake adaptations for personality traits, when they're really the ways we learned to feel safe. There's something deeply compassionate about honoring both the person we became and the child who did the best they could with what they had.