Dreaming of backseat driving

When it comes to a familial support system, I still feel like a passenger in a car with no driver

Happy 2024, everyone! I always have such enthusiasm and excitement beckoning in the new year; it’s the holiday I genuinely crave after the consumerist mess of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I enjoyed my Substack break although I have to admit that I’m a little intimidated to start writing consistently again. My creative muscles feel slack, but my strength will come back to me soon enough.

While I’m still abundantly proud of myself for sharing an essay with you every week in 2023, I don’t think that frequency will be sustainable going forward. From now on, you’ll be getting bimonthly emails—which is to say, twice a month—starting this week; still on Mondays, still at 10 AM.

Thank you for being here another year! Here’s to more feelings <3

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I had a recurring nightmare when I was young that I was sitting in the backseat of our family car, watching blurred trees whip past the windows with two obscured figures—presumably my parents— seated in the front.

I’m content in my car seat until the conversation falls silent and I crane my neck to look closer at the driver’s seat, only to find it empty. The stiff, gray seat belt across my chest tightens, constricting me to an aimless car speeding off of the highway. That was always when I would wake up, the jagged sense of panic still stuck in my chest as I stared up at my familiar ceiling.

Remembering this dream as an adult makes me think about my relationship to my parents; how despite being responsible, loving and protective guardians, they were emotionally illiterate. Two pendulums swinging between the extremes of highly reactive or outright dismissive, I was unsafe in their emotional care.

Passive aggression ran rampant in our household like recurring chicken pox; stomping, slamming and huffing as contagious as itching. Either parent’s foul mood was a case for quarantined communal hardship, completely saturating whoever else happened to be home. The length of these quarantines always varied, depending on how reluctant the rest of us were to admit an uncertain, empty apology and how dedicated the person was to maintaining their own petulance.

With this being our system for emotional regulation, I was never taught how to apply balm to my own angry, frustrated wounds; to properly cool the irritation. Instead I mirrored my parents’ behavior—as a child and well into my adult life—inflicting indirect harm onto others and feeling worse instead of better.

I learned to self soothe not by any intentional curriculum but circumstance, because approaching my parents emotionally always made me feel like I was in trouble for a disruptive outburst. I turned inward for reprieve because nothing outward seemed helpful, like opening a mirrored medicine cabinet full of expired ointments but nothing that would ease the ache. 

When it comes to a familial support system, I still sometimes feel like I’m in the backseat of a car with no driver, particularly in this season of grief when I feel expected to mitigate the emotional burdens of the people who never taught me how to seek support for my own. The disappointment and frustration we often have for each other is the same, genetic like an ugly birthmark. 

Feature Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash