Before we became close, I was one of the many people Julia would love and then not. We got to know each other in the spring of my freshman year of high school, making costumes for the musical, City of Angels. I was intimidated by her at first because she didn’t try to blend in by wearing leggings and sweatshirts, like everyone else. I didn’t either, but I also didn’t dare to put on what I wanted to. When I first noticed her in the hallway of the Humanities building, she had layered a knee length, pastel colored, patterned button-down shirt over a boxy gray maxi skirt. I had gone with a white and blue striped t-shirt, lined with white flowers—not good. We began spending time together right as I developed a crush on Sofia Silkano and realized that meant I could be attracted to girls. I wasn’t scared of that necessarily but thought I might be lying to myself because I had always liked boys. When things didn’t work out between Sofia and me, I thought it might be because I was actually in love with Julia. That theory really blossomed when I cried hearing that Julia and our other friend Josie had been secretly hooking up for two months and then decided to date. But I wasn’t in love with Julia. I was pissed, but not in love. 

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For a year I had stuck by her and endured her pushing and pulling me away, telling me about how quickly she got bored of people. But still, she didn’t want me like she did Josie. I endured it though. I didn’t say anything when Julia told me how deeply they understood each other. Or when I went over to Josie’s apartment one afternoon after school because she was being cryptic in her texts. I walked into her bedroom, a medium sized space in which she had gotten too lazy to finish decorating and left the wall closest to her bed unadorned. Julia was there and they were laying side by side, backs on the bed and feet perpendicular to their bodies, resting on the white wall. They simultaneously turned their heads towards me and gave me a big smile, telling me they were on acid and that they had never seen something like this. When I asked what, Josie pointed to the wall and said it was breathing and shedding a new color with each exhale. I didn’t even say anything when two months later, Julia told me how badly they needed to break up because two mentally ill people should not be together. No shit.

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Eventually I stopped telling her things like It’s clear to me that your infectiously positive energy and big personality are masking something that you don’t need to hide from me. I kept in my theory that she has Bipolar Personality Disorder and that the longer she waits for help, the more painful it will be. I stopped telling her about my mentally ill cousin, and I stopped pushing her to admit she wasn’t okay when I picked up on it. Julia realized I noticed the things she tried to hide. I noticed it too, although I didn’t know how. 

 

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I told my therapist the acid story and expressed my confusion about my ability to read Julia after she told me she thinks I might be a fixer. Sitting on my bed in my college dorm room, speaking to her through the computer screen, I listened to her thinking with me. She began using the term OCD, but then proceeded to say I’m not obsessive, and I’m not too compulsive. The only sign of compulsion we could think of was the six months of my 7th grade in which I walked into the same store every day after school. 

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The night before, I had been at a new friend’s birthday in a house five minutes from campus. I had looked forward to it for weeks because I was told she knew how to throw a party. I danced around the table in her kitchen, linoleum floors and faux-wood cupboards. In the first round of a game of  “Circles,” I noticed my friend Meghan missing. I went to find her upstairs, thinking I wouldn’t want the game interrupted if she came down later. I found her alone in her boyfriend’s room, sitting on his bed. She hadn’t asked me to come up, or to ask her how are you or what’s going on. But no one else had noticed her absence and I was not able to play the game knowing she was up there. I hadn’t really seen Meghan cry before, but this time it was like waterworks. She told me about her obsession with perfection (no surprise there), and her fear of dying before her parents, and of her love for them matched with her fear of disappointing them, and about her brother’s role as the imperfect child. One hour into the conversation, I registered that I had missed part of this party because I could not resist getting a reading of Meghan’s brain. Fixer.

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This, I told my therapist, has got to stop. We hypothesized, I related it back to Julia. I’m lucky. My therapist speaks a lot, which I’ve heard is rare. Most people I know only get mhm or tell me more from theirs, and it drives them crazy. She agreed Julia played a role but disagreed about her being the cause. I think, she said, there is something there with your family. I’ve picked up on it a few times and am theorizing that this may lead us somewhere new. Noticing my silence, she added, I’m not saying I’m sure, or that I think this is necessarily significant, but I have picked up on a shaky layer when it comes to who or when members of your family can express certain emotions. She assigned me to pay attention to dynamics next time I spend the weekend with them, to look for any urges to fix. 

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I thought our problem was being too close. That’s what I had theorized in the past few years. My brother Andrew and my sister Chloe, for example, live in different apartments in the same five floor walkup in Chelsea. Neither of them is dating anyone and both of them have busy work lives, so they mostly just see each other. On most days they meet at the 23rd C stop to get coffee after work, because he bikes from the Financial District, and she commutes from Lenox Hill hospital on the Upper East side. The thing is, I think they’d still only see each other if their schedules were wide open. My friends have always found it strange that I’d rather hang out with my siblings and parents on vacation than with them. But that’s what you do when you know how hard it is to find someone who understands you as well, or thinks as similarly, or has the exact same taste as you. We’ll be scrolling through a clothing brand’s website and choose all of the same things. We’ll listen to the most recent episode of “Guilt and Shame” and laugh at the same moments. 

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But I said I’d try. The next time I’d spend the weekend with them, I’d try to observe the layer that my therapist called the “boundary” preventing me from completely relaxing with my family and pushing me to fix.

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My dad picked me up from the 125th street train station when I came home from college a month later. We did the usual dance to find each other within the chaos. Police cars, honks, and smells from the Burger King down the block hurried me towards him. A subtle combination of guilt and gratefulness flowed through my mind, delighted to be driven home despite having exposed his day to the irritation of New York City traffic. Finding him on the corner below the staircase leading to the tracks, I waved, and he came out to help me with my bags and greet me with a hug. After only a moment of calm, I remembered my assignment, and couldn’t decide whether to reject or focus on it. 

 

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When we were little, my dad would drive my siblings and me to school in his robe and nothing else underneath. Shoved in his bright yellow Smart car, we wouldn’t have time to talk about anything because the ten-minute ride would consist of looking at Andrew and John, my other brother, making funny faces to show their discomfort being squeezed in the world’s smallest trunk. 

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I’m the only one of the four of us who ever got to live alone with our parents. I was basically an only child for a few years because John and Chloe were at college and Andrew had gone to boarding school. They never got to see my dad not work on Tuesday nights because he needed to take care of me while my mother went to class for her psychoanalysis degree, so they never got to have our weekly cheese soufflé challenge, testing recipes to see which would be the least likely to fail. I don’t even know what we talked about those Tuesday nights, but I remember laughing at how much cheese was needed and feeling that my dad was happy spending that time with me instead of going down a late night Photoshop spiral or finishing his emails. 

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I have a photo of my childhood body in a matching pajama set, laying on top of him on the couch to show him a video on the Internet. I wasn’t afraid to hug him or to share my life with him or to tease him. But I always got nervous ten to 15 minutes before getting home because I had to think of things to talk about, not like when my mom was around. I still feel that way, actually. When he helped me put my bag in the black car, I thought of some talking points for the ride. I guess my therapist would add that to the reasons she believes he has narcissistic tendencies. He didn’t challenge himself to put his 11-year-old daughter at ease to discuss the things she’d want to, she would say. 

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When I brought this up to Chloe a few months ago, she asked questions and stayed respectful but also said part of adulthood is accepting your parents as people, and that she’d learned to accept our father that way. She said both of our parents were much better parents now than when she grew up eight years before me. That when my mom stopped being a mother in her early 20s and started being one in her mid 30s, she relaxed and learned patience and how to love us more outwardly. That they were both like immigrants to parenthood because they grew up with complicated, mostly unloving parents who they only learned to know after their childhoods. My father and his two younger brothers thought their parents were happily married until they were 15 and their mother told them she was divorcing their father, who had had his first affair during their honeymoon. My mother and her six siblings were all raised by the same nanny on the top floor of their home in Paris, which my grandmother would only visit to say goodnight. It became acceptable to speak at their parents’ dinner table only when they turned 16. But I knew all of this. I knew that my mother’s nanny cut her little brother’s stuffed animal into small pieces so he could carry it in his pocket and avoid being told that a 12-year-old boy should no longer have one. Or that my mother’s father embarrassed her every week when picking her up from horseback riding in his convertible, yelling for her to come rather than getting up to fetch her. Or that my father’s father most likely had undiagnosed Bipolar considering he once showed up to an exclusive night club entirely naked and with one high class prostitute on each arm. 

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The car he picked me up in was no longer the Smart car from my childhood, but a new black Mercedes, medium sized and chic. After sitting in the passenger seat, I feared we would settle into our usual conversation, the one Chloe suggested I should accept. As he spoke, I guiltily analyzed the way each word coming out of his mouth made me feel. We talked about adult things: my career, my English degree, his career, his employees. I told him about the design internship I applied for, and he said I would be a good fit for the agency because they would probably be interested in working with his cosmetics company. He asked if my high school internship at his office was on my resume, and I said yes, and he said good. He said it was also probably best that I didn’t use connections to get the job, because that demonstrates my independence and hardworking personality. I nodded yes, looking out the window at the Harlem townhouses morphing into the Spanish Harlem delis and then into Mount Sinai. Escaping traffic when entering 5th Avenue, surprisingly empty for 5pm on a Saturday, I observed the warm sun bathing the trees of Central Park. Knowing we had little time left in the car, I tried transitioning into a conversation about my brother Andrew’s wedding. Having proposed to his girlfriend days prior, I wondered what early planning details my father may have heard. But listening to him talk over the news podcast playing at the lowest volume, I realized I should save my more intrusive questions for my mother, suddenly embarrassed by my gossip tendencies. 

 

I hugged Bruce, the doorman on duty, when entering my building’s lobby, marble floors and mirrors on the walls. You’ve gotten taller again, he said, as he did every time I walked in. Entering the elevator, slow enough for an awkwardly long conversation with neighbors but nothing more, my dad asked me how Julia was. I told him about our most recent phone call, in which she announced her official diagnosis and her decision to take a semester off college. Before having time to hear his reaction beyond a I’m sorry, her life is unfair, we reached the 17th floor. I opened our unlocked door to the sound of my dog barking. My mom came out of the kitchen and ran down the narrow hallway, letting out an excited shriek with her arms in the air. Chloe’s still at work, she told me, but Andrew’s in the kitchen finishing up dinner.