My obsession with stories.
My obsession with stories.
On inching my way from rage to acceptance to gratitude for my narcissistic father.
When I first ventured into entrepreneurship in 2019, I began in the marketing space. My first (and only) consistent part-time subcontract was selling automated email marketing campaigns to businesses. I was horrible at sales. Actually, I take that back. I was awful at selling email marketing campaigns I didn’t care about, not sales. I’ve started to think anyone who believes they’re bad at sales is just selling the wrong thing. But I digress. This is not a business and marketing essay.
Let’s just all agree that I sucked at selling email campaigns, unlike my bosses, who loved the rapid-fire back-and-forth negotiations. They (the male duo running the company) put me in onboarding; I would interview the clients they closed and create their email campaigns—the perfect role for me. Because our emails were GDPR compliant, Australian mid-size SAAS (software as a service) companies loved us. (Don’t ask me to explain exactly why because I genuinely do not know.) These CEOs and Managers would get on a Zoom call with me, giving me 5-minute answers to a question that required 1-2 sentence answers about their document management systems or the intricacies of their CRM (customer response management) software.
What struck each of them when we met was that my eyes never glazed over as they spoke. These people (let’s be honest, they were 90% men) were surprised that anyone not in their techy world of jargon and lingo wouldn’t be bored to tears by it. I wasn’t bored; I was fascinated by their ideas and what they wanted to bring to the world. Mostly, I was enthralled by how much they believed in their work. My interest didn’t stem from a love of SAAS but a love of understanding why people felt, thought, and lived the way they did.
I wanted more conversations like those and to get paid more for having them. So, at the beginning of 2021, I officially left that company to build my business. I focused on my Storytelling Guide—a branded PDF with key messages like the brand origin story, elevator pitch, purpose, vision, and mission statements. I’d gotten into the business of discovery, writing stories about why they created their businesses and how they served their clients so they could deeply understand their unique purpose and mission.
I was annoyed with myself through 2021-2023 as I struggled with my purpose, vision, and mission. I wondered why I could so easily do this for others but not myself. Yet some of the best social media marketers have low followings on their accounts, health coaches still eat junk food, and writers still have writer’s block, so I cut myself some slack. My ability to see others so clearly came from a distance I lacked with myself. Give it time.
As we headed to the last stretch of 2023, I was still wandering and wondering through my story, spending the bulk of my time on others’ stories as I expanded into coaching. At the beginning of 2024, I finally sat alone in my back room, with my six-foot whiteboard on the floor and soft music playing, willing my mind to be quiet enough to hear what arose. In the stillness, the truest answer to the question of my obsession with stories smacked me over the side of the head with its simplicity.
“I am the child of a narcissist.”
My biological father was and is a narcissist. I’ve spent the better part of a decade grappling with what it means to operate in the world after receiving these messages from a parent who does love me in his way but could not support or love me in the ways I needed most. My parents split when I was one year old, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. My mom was miserable with my dad. The only thing worse than growing up between two houses would have been growing up in one and witnessing the inevitable pain my dad would have caused my mom. By Christmas of the year I turned sixteen, I’d done enough therapy to recognize the role my eating disorder played in separating me from my dad, whose words and behaviors then were utterly unbearable for me without the crutches of anorexia and bulimia; I finally stopped seeing my dad at all.
We had sporadic phone calls and practically zero interaction until much later. I remember selling coffee from a truck parked in a Chinatown block party at seventeen and seeing him in the crowd. I hid below the counter, realizing, Oh right, my dad is out there somewhere living his life.
He didn’t mean to hurt me the way he did.
In the years between sixteen and nineteen, I would go to another inpatient program on Maui (where I’d also turn twenty) and spend that time unwinding myself from the heartache and rage locked in my body from all the things. My dad necessarily became a villain in those years.
I learned that his ideas and beliefs were so deeply ingrained in me that the only way to unravel them was to totally and completely separate us. My dad became a tyrant, a monster, a horrible person, not because he was but because I’d spent so many years calling myself those things. I needed to externalize before I could let go, and forgiveness was a bitter, vicious road paved by tears and anguish.
Unless you’re in treatment, you rarely hear about this concept that completely changed my life.
My eating disorder, however much of my life it absorbed and reduced and controlled, also saved me, gobbling up all the noise in my head to focus solely on one simple, straightforward, emotionless thing: food and the lack or excess thereof. Disordered eating made chaos tangible and, more importantly, promised the possibility of soothing my spirit.
If I could just follow my eating disorder perfectly, day after day, everything else would be okay. This is what my eating disorder gave me.
But no one can follow an eating disorder perfectly. I believe that’s called dying. Because I know now what I did not realize then—my eating disorders weren’t promising me a way through … only a way out.
I promise this is going somewhere; bear with me.
Stepping away from my eating disorders first required me to step away from the idea that my dad knew what the hell he was talking about. He didn’t, and he needed to become someone bad long enough for me to recognize that I was good.
Then, from twenty to twenty-five, it was a matter of repeatedly reminding myself that I am a decent, worthy person who deserves love and compassion and beginning to accept that my dad is, too. My understanding of forgiveness was a place of being where I could understand myself and my dad without one negating the other.
We began to sporadically reconnect sometime in 2017 or 2018. I think, eventually, he wished me a happy birthday. To understand my dad’s narcissism, let’s talk about my wedding planning.
I was doing the budget for our wedding, realizing it would be tight because we wanted a relatively big wedding (and because, like, Hawaii). My dad’s love language is money, so I asked if he’d like to contribute some time in mid-2022, partly out of forgiveness, but, let’s be honest, mainly because it seemed like an easy way to get back just a tiny sliver of what I felt I’d lost.
“Of course,” he texted, “Put me down for five thousand.”
I was thrilled and giddy, grateful. At this point, I’d accepted I would never get a decisive apology from my dad, his only penance in checks and cash envelopes—this isn’t a complaint; there are worse things, and I’ve embraced the truth of that.
Then, it dawned on me that, despite being functionally estranged for over eight years, he agreed to contribute based on the understanding that he would walk me down the aisle. I texted back, letting him know that would not be how the day went, but he and his girlfriend would have seats if they still wanted them.
He asked for a phone call, which I agreed to, where he proceeded to run through all the ways my mom had isolated and manipulated him away from me (when I was fifteen, he gave me a handout on Stockholm Syndrome, encouraging me to see the parallels between myself and prisoners). After all this time, he still couldn’t conceive of a world where I’d chosen to stop seeing him entirely of my own volition.
But I knew all this. I was prepared. What I wasn’t prepared for was how we ended the phone call. When I reiterated that he had an invite to sit but not to walk, my dad responded, not missing a beat, “Well, why would I?”
To see your only daughter get married, maybe? To celebrate ME and my soon-to-be husband, perhaps?
I had several months of sobriety under my belt and enough wherewithal only to feel sad for him and how he couldn’t move past his fears, insecurities, and bitterness enough to show up for our big day. It hurt in the way that seeing someone you care about sabotage themselves hurts. He’d been the villain in my story long enough for me to stop being the victim. There was a need for me to be a victim; it was part of my healing, and now there was just me, an adult, and him, a grown-up cutting himself off from celebration of his kid because he was too much something I don’t know what and can’t pretend to know or understand.
This time marked the beginning of seeing myself as a separate human in the world, just trying to figure it out and knowing my dad is, too. We are two people doing our best, surrounded by other people doing theirs. Sobriety saved me, allowing me to feel through the last vestiges of ache and rage and resentment. I could sit with everything long enough to find out what I wanted it to mean.
And I did, which is how I arrived at the realization—so boringly obvious now—that I am obsessed with helping people know, celebrate, and share their stories because mine was so consistently negated, questioned, and denied.
A lie told enough times with certainty becomes worse than truth. It becomes a belief. I was convinced I didn’t know what I needed, always looking around for others to tell me what to think and feel. Now, the times when I am unsure of my truths are the exception.
Addiction was me—the frog—sitting in a pot of water, slowly rising to a boil until I was almost cooked alive. Healing from a narcissist parent has been incrementally turning the volume from twenty thousand to zero, decibel by decibel, until, suddenly, it’s mostly silence, long enough to hear myself say, “I am the child of a narcissist.”
Then, I heard Siri Lindley speak at the end of March 2024.
She was twenty-three, consumed by brutal obsessive-compulsive disorder, and realized she was a lesbian. Somehow, her dad found out before she could tell him, so when she finally called, he was afraid, disappointed, and angry. Devastated by his rejection, Siri clawed her way through life, finding out who she was in her new sexuality, becoming a world champion triathlete, and surviving cancer—just being a total badass, no big deal.
In all that time, she didn’t forgive her father. Even as he called and called, trying to apologize, she kept herself trapped in resentment.
Until one day, she realized the trajectory of her entire life would have changed if she’d received his acceptance. Could her life have been easier, gentler, and happier if he had? Maybe, but his rejection changed her. A fire ignited. Siri described finally finding not just forgiveness but deep gratitude for how her dad let her down. It showed her what she was capable of; she found herself within the contrast.
Part of me was disappointed I hadn’t heard Siri sooner, wondering if I might have rewritten my story earlier had I been encouraged by hers. Yet I believe in divine timing, and I imagine if I’d heard her speak even a year earlier, I would have felt only anger and judgment—great for you, Siri—massive eye roll—thanks for rubbing it in. Instead, I felt the missing piece fall into place as forgiveness morphed gently into gratitude.
If someone told me to be grateful anytime sooner than this, I would’ve wanted to punch them in the throat. I know this is true because a couple of people have, and I wanted to punch them in the throat. (If you are reading this and want to punch me in the throat, I see you, and I understand.)
Yet now, there’s a settling in me, a recognition that this pain led to the things that now bring me the most joy, leading me to recovery and rooms of women fighting the same fight I was, showing me the power of reclaiming our bodies and stories. The hurting led me to sobriety and counselors and books and podcasts that shifted me, inch by inch and decibel by decibel. Longing for what I needed led me to create a business I love, serving people in connecting to their stories and finding their voices through discovering and writing them.
Without the suffering, I would not be leading a workshop series for women to create and speak their stories out loud, and I wouldn’t be writing this. I might not even be a writer. Were it not for my dad questioning my story and my beliefs, I wouldn’t have known what it means to choose what I believe and the stories I tell.
I would not know the joy of finding myself had I not abandoned myself first.
I would not have become the person I am without this sorrow.
On my most aching and hopeless days, when the volume turns back up, I still wish I didn’t have to know this aching—this battle for my truth and my life that is no longer against my dad but against myself—yet on my brightest days I know this is what created me.
My dad was not the worst of them; neither was he the best. He was just my dad. I stepped through unraveling into recovery into sadness for him into acceptance into forgiveness into gratitude, unwinding all the old stories knot by angry knot until there was only a thread of my truth left to create anew from—rewriting my story in each moment of each day until it was my own.
