STUDIO

Your grandfather has his first stroke in his fifties, before you are born. Your mother is in college. By the time of your first memories of him, he has likely had one or two more, but he is still quite functional. Your mother and aunt tell you that, as the oldest grandchild, you saw him at his best. An exacting, emotionally-volatile man, his strokes tempered him for awhile, and for your first few years he is silly and playful. He lets you paint his face. He teaches you to blow a bubble with gum. He holds your hands as you roller skate around the kitchen. He hulls strawberries with you on the back porch, while you sort the good from the bad. He builds you a wooden rocking horse, and a wood puzzle of your name. You build a snowman together. He makes you laugh. By the time of your sister and cousins’ first memories, however, he is more shut down, slow, even scary to them at times. Because you know him differently, he is never scary to you. Just sad.

For most of your life you are told that you take after your father’s mother, and her family. And largely that is true. You have her eyes, nose, gangly-ness, risk of colon cancer, depression, emotional sensitivity and cynicism. This narrative–mostly perpetuated by your mother–that everything about you comes from your father’s side is so predominant, that it never occurs to you that you could inherit the clotting disorder from your mother’s side. You take birth control with estrogen for decades with no issues, even have a doctor tell you you’ll never have to worry about blood clots. But then suddenly in your forty-second year you have two in your lungs and a cluster behind your left knee. You can’t breathe and your leg feels explosive. The doctors now say, “With your family history you never should have been on estrogen.” You roll your eyes. They take you off the estrogen and say, “You’ll be fine now, but here’s six months of blood thinners just in case.” At six months they do follow-up bloodwork to punctuate the end of the course, but it comes back showing your clotting factor even higher than when you had your “event.” “Huh,” they say.

Your family doesn’t really know how many strokes your grandfather had during his last twenty years or so. Each one chipped away a little more. He became mostly nonverbal and physically slow, but he never lost the ability to walk, to feed himself. He was on blood thinners for decades, and finally it was a brain hemorrhage that killed him. You wonder now at the strength and will that kept him alive and functional for so long, with so much brain damage. You wonder if you’ll be called upon to achieve the same feat, and you don’t believe you’re up to it.

Your whole life it has been intelligence that has defined you. Your mind. You knew you weren’t beautiful. You knew you weren’t selfless or devoted to others. (You knew these things because you were told, implicitly and explicitly, over and over again.) Intelligence was your gift, and anything good in your life that happened would have to be the result of intellectual discipline. When you ask your mother why she married your father she says, “I knew that no matter what, our children would be smart because his family was smart.” She was eighteen when they married, and he was twenty. But both of your parents are smart and both sides of your family are smart, relatively speaking. One side has a reserved, traditional version of intelligence. One side has a sarcastic, critical version of intelligence. But for both sides, a lack of intellectual curiosity or a perceived tendency to make “poor decisions” are treated as failures of character.

You realize now that this upbringing created in you a pathological need to be seen as intelligent. When anyone says anything to you that suggests they doubt your knowledge or judgment, you shift immediately into “fight” mode. You cannot stop yourself from correcting them, while putting them in their place besides. Even being asked if you’ve registered to vote feels like character assassination. “Of course I’m registered to vote,” you think. “Do they think I’m an idiot??” You’ve even managed to find yourself a niche career where you can excel by understanding–to a degree–all research. Literally all of it. It fills you with pride knowing that you are so intelligent that you can do this. Your parents couldn’t do it. Your mean, condescending school friends who thought they were so smart couldn’t do it. You bask in the knowledge that you are the smartest person you know; nothing else has the ability to make you so proud of yourself.

This is why the suddenly real possibility of stroke, of brain damage, is so shattering for you. Who are you without your steel-trap mind? Who are you without your pathological independence financially enabled by your intelligence? A person without mental acuity is a dependent. A burden on others. A sad case. One without a purpose, beyond a losing battle for survival. You realize you can’t need others in the ways this would necessitate, because doing so would be self-annihilating.

Your parents taught you one foundational lesson above all else: Learn how to take care of yourself, because no one else will. It takes you decades to see this lesson at a critical remove, to recognize its isolating and self-fulfilling logic, and the biographical implications it holds about your parents, their parents, and your generational inheritance. By the time you see it, buried deep within you, it feels like the fatal flaw in the keystone of your personhood. How many relationships in your life have you burned through like a wildfire, believing they were all too flimsy to survive? How would you even go about unlearning this stance towards others? Your parents are no models. Your romantic relationships have predominantly been people attempting to take care of you, and you being unable to accept and reciprocate. You have no trust in people at all. And no belief that you have a capacity to care for others. Because in a way, you don’t: you are fully responsible for taking care of yourself, and even at that you are a failure. The broken math in this equation is only now becoming clear to you.