A narrative review of It Didn’t Start with You by Mark Wolynn
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
-T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
January has been the darkest month in memory.
This is odd, if you consider the fact that I live in Australia, and it’s the peak of the southern hemisphere summer.
Despite the earth’s axis tilting my place of residence toward the sun’s radiance, I have felt shrouded in the cold and unforgiving winter of depression. It has been a long season of ice and bones and starvation and dearth, but only in my mind.
Australian January is, as ever, dry and sunny, a month of record-breaking heatwaves, of beach days and poolside Slushees and afternoons spent reading in my underwear, spread out underneath the humming air conditioner.
It’s also been a month of staggering hopelessness, of chest-crushing guilt, of raging, screaming anger, of churning shame. It’s been a month frozen in the paralysis of indecision, my internal landscape painted in the stark monochrome of a wintry wasteland.
T. S. Eliot said April is the cruelest month, but he didn’t live through January 2024.
During the first week of February, however, I read It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Wolynn, and it the lilac-scented warmth it brought began to melt the crust of ice in which I was locked, the freshening breath of spring.
I don’t say this lightly. In fact, I hesitate to say it at all, at risk of sounding trite. But I think this book changed my life. At least it hastened the turn what I feared would be a never-ending season of desolation and despair, a season that Wolynn would argue didn’t begin the previous year with the death of my father, but really, decades earlier, before I was even born.
2023 was a bumper year.
My Dad’s funeral was in the second week in January. From there, I filled my time with traveling back and forth from Australia to America to settle his estate, ending my twenty year marriage and starting a new relationship, and finishing the first draft of a novel I’d been working on for three years. Before I realized it, the holidays were upon us, and 2023 was over.
Then January hit and everything stopped.
I stopped.
And that’s when it all caught up to me.
All the feelings I had been moving too quickly to avoid having to experience caught up to me.
And they wrapped their frigid fingers around me and froze me to the core.
It did not occur to me in the depths of my darkest suffering that the pain I was experiencing was related to my dad’s death just over a year ago. In fact, I hardly ever thought about it. Just as I hardly thought about my mother’s death, twenty years ago.
I never bothered processing my middle-aged orphanhood.
I never thought my family history could be the source of my ability to make healthy and meaningful changes in my life, to close the gap between the person I was and the person I want to be, until I read Wolynn’s book. Why should the past, and the people I firmly left in it, continue to have such an icy grasp on my future?
Following Wolynn’s guidance, finding my Core Language, the words that lead me to the source of my pain, was easy as sighing.
I felt trapped. Unheard. Unseen. Insignificant. I was terrified of never living up to my potential. Of all my time being wasted on meaningless tasks. The drums of existential dread beat a constant rhythm that drowned out the beat of my own heart.
In the process of cataloguing the myriad traumas my family endured, I remembered Ronnie.
Ronnie was my dad’s younger brother by about ten years. I never met him. He died in 1970, a decade before I was born, when Ronnie was in his early twenties.
When my dad was 22, his father died, leaving my dad to support his mother and Ronnie. They lived together in a house in Berlin, Connecticut, and my dad worked at a bakery to pay the bills (as a kid I was always impressed when he broke eggs one handed), while attending university, and subsequently teaching full time once he had completed his Masters degree.
My dad rarely spoke of Ronnie, so what little I know, I’ve had to scavenge from fragments of memory. I know that Ronnie was “troubled”. I remember my dad saying once, “He was so lazy he couldn’t even be bothered to chew celery.”
Apparently, what Ronnie did love was watching cartoons. I recall my dad saying he was like a kid, even as a full grown man. He either couldn’t or wouldn’t get a job. He did like to draw, which my dad, who was an art teacher, encouraged, but “he just couldn’t make something of himself” and my dad opined that it was “such a waste”.
In hindsight, I’m pretty certain that Ronnie was neurodivergent.
Like me.
Let’s also take a minute and realize we’re talking about the 1960s here. The understanding of autism at that time was virtually nonexistent. Little wonder, then, that Ronnie was perceived as lazy and childish, a stubborn ne’r-do-well who was a burden on his family, whose extra support needs were stigmatized. It draws a heartbreaking parallel to my own experience of late diagnosis, of difficulty with employment, of depression. And we now recognize that there is a slew of negative social outcomes associated with lack of diagnosis and support, including addiction.
Which is relevant, because the family lore, as best I can recall, is that Ronnie died of an overdose.
I’ve always had a feeling, however, a gut-deep certainties that’s less niggling suspicion and more unwritten gospel, that Ronnie took his own life. Which would have been fervently denied as an unforgivable sin and never spoken of again, of course, since my dad’s family was also staunchly, grievously Catholic.
Wolynn relies heavily on visualization as a method of bringing awareness to the body’s physical language of trauma. When I visualize my dad and Ronnie, I feel a tightening around my throat, a stiffness in my jaw. And I recall that in his later years, my father would grind his teeth, would work his jaw from side to side when he was feeling anxious.
I wonder if Ronnie hanged himself, and this pattern could be a visceral echo of Ronnie’s suicide.
And I wonder, was it my dad who found him?
Regardless of the specific details of Ronnie’s death, it had a tremendous impact on my father. A year later, he built his own house, the house I grew up in, and moved out of the place he shared with his mother. One way or another, Ronnie’s death changed the course of my father’s life, and my own life as a result.
I’ll never be able to corroborate certain elements of this story, now that my dad is gone. My remaining cousins don’t know any more than I do. Ronnie’s tragic death was too much for the family to bear, so he was effectively erased from the dialog.
All I know is that Ronnie’s story seems to resonate across the decades at the same frequency as my own pain.
All I know is that through breathing recognition into the history of trauma my father and his brother shared, by speaking words of understanding and compassion toward their memories, I found a sense of peace, a physical and emotional release that allowed me to see through my pain and anger and resentment for the first time in a month? To taste the green-ness of new life on the other side of my coldest winter?
Does the uncertainty around the story that heals me negate its therapeutic effect?
No, it does not.
There’s probably more to my fears of being insignificant, of wasting my time, of not living up to my potential, of being unheard and unseen, than can be explained away simply by invoking my forgotten uncle and his tragic death. But there’s something deeply comforting about realizing that pain was written into my DNA, was coded into my father’s cells and then passed to me before I was even born, that I am simply the latest one in my bloodline to be tasked with carrying it. That I don’t have to carry it, and the act of visualizing passing it back through the generations is an enormous relief.
Through the practices in It Didn’t Start with You, Wolynn’s work has shown me the path through my own personal wasteland, has helped to coax new growth from the bulbs sleeping beneath the soil of my unconscious, to raise fresh shoots of awareness and understanding from ground that had seemed barren under frost.
In shining a warm, vernal light on my relationship with my dad, I have managed to release the resentment that had settled into my bones like winter’s chill. I have found a reprieve from the cycle of anguish I had been blind to, and discovered a love for my family that I didn’t know I needed at a cellular level, a wound that needed healing.
While I have found a measure of relief in recognizing that a portion of my pain derived from of inherited trauma, while I am grateful to not have to carry that pain alone, I also realize that my journey is far from over.
Cycles, by their very nature, repeat. It is a biological necessity, encoded in my DNA as certain as seasons, and I know the darkness of winter will come again.
Outside, February promises more dry heat, the afternoon wind a furnace breath that shrivels leaves in my garden, raises ghostly plumes of dust, coaxes salty rivers of sweat down my face. The southern hemisphere summer clings relentlessly, the heat so absolute that from inside these sweltering days, it seems as though it may never break.
But a month is just a collection of days, as a life is a collection of moments, passed from hand to hand, from breath to breath, like the stories we tell or the blood we share. Shadows turn and grow relative to the light that casts them. For now, I am deciding to let that light warm me, knowing the days won’t always feel so long.