The Story I Couldn’t Stop Telling: How I Turned Obsession Into Delight

When my daughter Azalea was born, I loved her like crazy and felt fiercely protective.

The problem was that I feared I needed to protect her from me!

Why?

Because I believed I was broken and so was my love.

Feeling broken, unlovable and unable to love well was a story I had been telling for a very long time.

And by “telling” I mean creating.

Several years before Azalea was born, my life changed when I stumbled upon Zen in a Barnes and Noble, and I knew that sitting still with my thoughts about how effed up I was would be just the thing I needed to help me feel less at the mercy of my fears.

Not that it would help me feel LESS. But to feel more stable in feeling everything I was feeling.

But that wasn’t enough.

Meditation and years of hardcore Zen training (living in a monastery, silent retreats, koan study) helped me regulate, go deep, see into the nature of things (including my own mind,) in beautiful, subtle, powerful ways.

And yet, the story persisted.

There’s something off about you. Other people know how to do this. You’re missing something.

Ten years of letting go of my thoughts wasn’t enough.

When Azalea was born, as solid and connected as I felt in some ways, I was still telling the same old story, insulting, criticizing, shaming myself for all my failures in patience, in tolerance, in compassion, in holding my tongue.

That’s when I discovered the science of attachment.

That’s when I began to really wonder: what good is my love if it won’t protect my beloved from my edges?

I began to need to know more about how love actually works, like for real. Like the science it.

I had to let go of the ocean beneath the thoughts.

But how?

I wasn’t sure, but I was drawn into the story of attachment, and of Mary, which forced me to look at myself and my own attachments, my own loves.

I had no choice but to become intimate with myself and the story I couldn’t stop telling.

As painful as it was.

I spent ten years reading about Mary Ainsworth and trying to understand the Strange Situation, not to mention statistics! Science, studies, data, pages and pages of observations, boxes of notes, and letters.

I began my journey obsessed, in kind of a tight, fearful-of-what-I-would-find kind of way.

And then, somewhere along the line, I realized I loved Mary and her brilliant work, and studying the Strange Situation so much, my obsession turned to delight.

And then the whole thing opened up.

I didn’t know yet whether the book I was writing would ever be published, but I did know I had no choice but to write it.

My first day of Strange Situation training with Dr. Alan Sroufe at the University of Minnesota, in 2015

We’re a culture that worships choice. Autonomy, independence.

But some of the most important moments in our life choose us.

Here’s to being sensitive enough to know when our story is knocking on our door.

And to opening it.