The Girl Who Slept On A Newspaper

Anxious attachment is a thing we hear a lot about these days. Attachment theory is a buzzword bingo selection. Like narcissism and gaslighting. But the story of how I learned to chase avoidant men like a defective compass needle that only pointed toward storm systems is one in a million. And yet, the dynamic may be the most common model of all relationship issues today.

I learned to tell time by trauma. Not by clock hands or digital numbers, but by the rhythm of footsteps on stairs that meant someone was coming. By the click of locks that turned me into a prisoner. By the twenty-eight minutes I watched tick by on my pepto pink digital alarm clock while I was in the process of having my virginity stolen.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First Memories

My first memory isn't of my mother's face or a favorite toy. In fact, first memories have always been fairly vague and elusive, like smoke curling through cracks in a foundation. But I do remember the earliest years and the reaching of hands—my brother's, my grandfather's—teaching me that my body was not my own before I even knew it was supposed to be. These were my first lessons in the currency of love: that affection was something you earned through submission, that attention came with a price, that the people who claimed to care for you were also the ones most likely to hurt you.

I was less than two when my mother divorced my father, and the parade of men began. I had a stepfather, but all parental figures were consistently absent and unavailable—ghosts who drifted in and out of focus, never staying long enough to provide safety, always leaving before I could trust them completely. Sometimes we'd visit my Dad in strange places for weeks, then nothing for months. This intermittent reinforcement, this unpredictable pattern of presence and abandonment, was programming me for a lifetime of chasing what I couldn't catch.

In between, there was my grandfather, a retired man who lived in a trailer and who'd collected friends from his work with the carnival. These people were exactly what you'd imagine when picturing carnival workers—twisted curiosities collected from the margins of society, damaged souls who recognized other damaged souls and clustered together like debris after a storm.

My Mom entrusted her father as my caregiver when she worked or was away, which was most of the time. My Mom's own paternal grandfather had molested her too. It was a deep pattern in the family, passed down like a cursed heirloom. And while my Mom was this beautiful force to be reckoned with in so many ways—magnetic, charismatic, impossible to ignore—she was also very broken. She was always (until the day she died) hypersexual and drawn to elaborately dysfunctional relationships. Her compass needle only pointed toward chaos. By the end of her life, she had been married three times and had some damaging long-term relationships in addition.

Her first marriage was to my father, a gay man who came out of the closet officially after their divorce. Her second marriage was to a much younger man from a wealthy family who had no children of his own. And her last marriage was to an odd intellectual—an inventor and member of MENSA who died of cancer only a few years after they married. Each relationship followed the same pattern: intense attraction to someone emotionally unavailable, followed by desperate attempts to make them stay, followed by inevitable abandonment. She was teaching me, without knowing it, that love was supposed to hurt.

I grew up in Texas and I remember it first through my nose. Heat itself had a smell: thick, heavy, baked into the asphalt like desperation made manifest. The deeply acidic aroma of the pecan tree in the backyard; its shells that collected under the shade until they turned black and decayed into a sour musk—the smell of things rotting while they still hung from the tree. Window units rattled in the walls like broken promises, pushing out air that was dense, mildewy, clinging to our sticky skin. The house was messy and cluttered. The neighborhood unsafe. There was simply never any trustworthy person guarding the edges of my life, never anyone who stayed long enough to become a constant.

"You sleep here," my grandfather would say, spreading newspaper on the hardwood floor beside his bed like I was a dog he was house-training. I wet the bed well beyond what was a normal age, and he treated me like an animal that needed to be broken. The floor was cold, the newspaper crackling beneath my small body like whispered threats. No pillows or blankets. This man never drank or did drugs. He was never impaired by anything but pure evil—the kind of calculated cruelty that comes from someone who has learned to find power in others' powerlessness.

These are the spaces of memory for a child of incest—inside them, you remember all the places you were trapped and assaulted. The basement was dark, wet and dank, like the inside of a grave. Sometimes it was the attic, thick with insulation that made me itch, made my skin crawl with invisible bugs. Once, the crawl space under a stranger's porch where I could hear footsteps above me and wondered if anyone would remember I was there, if anyone would come looking when I disappeared.

Finding Sanctuary in Broken Places

A block away from my home, there was another house. Small, square, ordinary from the outside. Inside, it held the evening rituals of a local Alcoholics Anonymous group—an odd thing to have in a residential neighborhood, but it was like its own type of hidden speakeasy. Filled with sober working-class, chain-smoking men who spoke in the particular cadence of the reformed: desperate, grateful, always one day away from falling back into the abyss.

I would sneak in for a Dr. Pepper from their old "coke" machine, lean against the wall like a shadow, and let the smoke curl around me while men confessed their wreckage. Broken marriages. Lost jobs. Bottles hidden in glove compartments. Their voices were gravel, scraped raw by years of drinking, by years of choosing substances over stability, chaos over calm. I didn't belong there, but invisibility was safer than home. In those moments, I was no one's prey.

What I didn't understand then was that I was witnessing my future—not in their addictions, but in their pattern of being drawn to what hurt them, of choosing the familiar pain over unknown peace. These men were teaching me, without knowing it, that recovery was possible but that the pull toward destruction was magnetic, that some people spent their whole lives fighting the urge to return to what was killing them. I was learning, in those smoke-filled rooms, that love and pain could become so intertwined that one felt impossible without the other.

School and Survival

School became a hazy endurance test, a daily performance of normalcy while my body betrayed me with its secrets. I'd arrive hollow-eyed from another sleepless night, my stomach cramping from hunger and stress, and try to focus on multiplication tables while my body fought infections that no child should have. The pediatrician prescribed antibiotics with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd decided not to ask questions. My teacher noted my exhaustion but never called home. The system, I learned early, was very good at looking the other way—another lesson in the unreliability of adults, another brick in the wall I was building between myself and the world.

The carnival men came and went, ghostly figures who materialized in our living room and vanished just as quickly. My brother's friends discovered I was available too, and I learned that boys could be both predators and victims simultaneously, that trauma creates trauma in an endless, expanding circle. The neighbor boy my age found corners—his closet, the alley behind our houses—where no one would hear. I lost count because counting made it real, and I was already disappearing, becoming less solid with each violation, a ghost haunting my own life.

Eventually, I got older and the molestation seemed to have stopped. Time, once again, became a concept. But I was programmed to have confusion between reality and fantasy, trained to doubt my own experiences. I questioned the nightmares every day. What was real? I remember seeing a public service announcement between commercials on TV suggesting that children should be safe from the things I had endured, that we should tell an adult. But who could I tell when the adults were the ones hurting me, when the system designed to protect me had already failed so completely?

My trauma hung over me as I entered puberty like some kind of curse, manifesting in all the awkwardness of adolescence but amplified, distorted. I acted weirder than the other kids. I responded more strongly to the growing attention of boys, craving their validation while simultaneously fearing their touch. I wrestled with boundaries I'd never been taught to set. I said strange things. I lied a lot—not maliciously, but desperately, trying to construct a version of myself that might be worthy of love.

Twenty-Eight Minutes

Then came the last year of middle school, and time suddenly mattered with brutal precision.

Twenty-eight minutes to be exact. I know because I watched every one of them pass on my digital alarm clock while my classmate pinned me down, my blood staining his white t-shirt red, while he raped me. The next morning, he'd turned that shirt into a trophy, passing it around school hallways like show-and-tell. "Look what I did to her," the blood said. "Look what she let me do" is what I heard—because by then, I had already learned to blame myself, to see my victimization as evidence of my own worthlessness.

The hallways pressed in. Laughter echoed off lockers like gunshots. No teacher grabbed the shirt. No principal called an assembly. I floated through the rest of that day like I was already dead, and maybe I was—maybe that was the day the part of me that could trust, that could believe in safety, finally gave up and went to sleep.

Breaking the Silence

I told my best friend what had happened. She told her mother because she was taught to tell adults scary things—a luxury I'd never had, the assumption that adults were safe harbors rather than storms themselves. Her mother issued an ultimatum: tell your mother or I will. So I told. My mother screamed obscenities for an hour straight, her voice shredding like she was the one who'd been torn apart. I did not hear any of the words. She had always screamed at my brother that way, but never me. When she finally went quiet, I filled the silence with everything—her father's abuse, my brother's violations, all the strangers she'd failed to protect me from.

Losing my virginity was not my first experience with assault, and for some reason I decided to tell her about the many years of abuse. But I did not tell her I was raped. I just told her I lost my virginity. She assumed it was my choice and I let her, because even in my trauma I was protecting her from a truth too big for her to carry.

Her solution was to commit me, as if my victimization was a mental illness that could be cured with medication and confinement. Two months in an adolescent psychiatric facility where broken children writhed against straightjackets while nurses pushed syringes full of quiet into their veins. They put us all on heavy sedatives and antipsychotics, whether or not they fit our needs. Children screamed, writhed, foamed at the mouth as they were injected, strapped down, wheeled away to isolation rooms. I learned to stay very still. I agreed with all the labels available to choose from. "I am here because I have anger management issues. I am here because I got into drugs and alcohol." These were like team slogans, acceptable explanations for the unacceptable reality of our lives.

"I am here because my grandfather, brother and countless strangers molested and abused me. I am here because a classmate raped me and told all his friends my pussy was built like a racetrack" was a high-pitched and melodic whisper I only said inside my own head, the real truth too dangerous to speak aloud.

For an hour a day they let us go into a windowless room to play volleyball, a pathetic simulation of normalcy. Kids were sneaking off into janitor closets to have sex. No one was watching. No one stopped them. The kids who really did have anger issues would sometimes erupt in the mandatory group therapy sessions like volcanoes, all that rage and pain spilling over the careful boundaries the staff tried to maintain. One day one of them threw a chair at a window and broke it, and for a moment we all saw what freedom looked like—sharp, bright, and dangerous.

The price of my release was public confrontation—performance art where I'd accuse my abusers while family members watched like it was dinner theater. This form of therapy was accepted in the 90's, this brutal exposure of wounds that needed time and gentleness to heal.

Confrontations and Consequences

My grandfather denied everything with the practiced ease of a man who'd done it before, who'd perfected the art of making his victims doubt themselves. Then his second wife's granddaughter came forward. Then others. A constellation of damaged children finally visible in the dark, our stories weaving together into an undeniable pattern. My brother admitted it while my stepfather raged at all of us, as if we'd conspired to ruin his family tableau rather than simply spoken the truth about what his family actually was.

Days later, that stepfather—the only father I'd really known—packed a bag and vanished. No goodbye. No forwarding address. Just absence where a parent should have been, another lesson in the unreliability of love, another confirmation that speaking truth leads to abandonment. My Dad came to family therapy every week, offering me a more regular schedule if I wanted it. That eventually led to every other weekend and me living with him for a short time—but by then, I was already too damaged to trust even genuine kindness, too programmed for chaos to accept stability.

My mother unraveled like a cheap sweater after my stepdad left, leaving me to continue to raise myself through pure instinct and terror of becoming her. Whatever strands of sanity she had left disintegrated. She exposed me to her own traumas, but never taught me how to be a mother, never showed me what healthy love looked like. Later, I would raise children by instinct alone—desperate to protect them, failing in some ways, succeeding in others, always wondering if the poison in my bloodline would eventually surface in them.

Building a Life on Broken Foundation

Life carried me forward, unevenly, like a car with misaligned wheels that always pulled toward the ditch. I went to a performing arts high school where more damaged children on the fringes of life got collected—artists and actors and dancers who wore their pain like makeup, who understood that performance could be both survival and self-destruction. I dropped out shortly into my sophomore year, unable to maintain the facade of normalcy that school required.

I got my GED at sixteen, enrolled in junior college. Men older than me took what they wanted without fear of consequence, and I let them because I had been trained to see my body as currency, my compliance as the price of attention. I was already following the pattern that would define my relationships for decades: choosing men who were emotionally unavailable, then exhausting myself trying to make them stay.

We moved to Colorado when I was 17, running from another one of my Mom's failed relationships. My Mom was working and typically distracted, her priority always dating and getting into a relationship, always searching for the next man who might fill the void that her father had torn in her soul. She found one quickly. Then she was gone all the time, and I was alone again, supporting myself with odd jobs wherever I could earn money.

I started working as a pizza dough prep person and met the first girl my age who became my friend. She lived with her Dad who bred pit bulls (not the nice kind) and kept piranhas in a tank—danger disguised as domesticity, violence masquerading as hobby. Eventually I decided to enroll in college again and moved up to the mountains, still believing that education might save me, that distance might heal me.

By then I had slept with a lot of boys and men, chasing connection through physical intimacy because I didn't know any other way to feel valued. There was one guy up at the college I was attending who did a lot of drugs. All the girls at the college liked him—he was beautiful and damaged and unavailable, exactly the type I was programmed to want. I was the first one to sleep with him. Shortly after we slept together, I was told he had a girlfriend back home. All the girls who wished they had been the one to be with him turned their backs on me, and even my dorm roommate who I had been friends with stopped talking to me. I was alone again, my pattern of choosing the wrong person and paying the price already fully established.

I met some older guys who lived in town and developed a relationship with one of them. He was one of the few kind people I remember ever being with, genuinely gentle and caring. His roommate was very kind too. But I was so damaged, so programmed for chaos, that I couldn't accept their kindness as real. I told untrue stories about my life to avoid anyone knowing who I really was. I made up ailments and diseases, creating elaborate fictions because the truth felt too dangerous to share. These antics pushed everyone away, and I told myself it was better this way, that I was protecting them from the poison I carried.

So I went back to my mother's house, tail between my legs, another failed attempt at normal life behind me. My best friend from Texas decided to come up to Colorado for a summer and we lived together in Aspen. I worked at the newspaper and we enjoyed a few weeks of wonderful experiences—real friendship, honest laughter, the kind of intimacy that didn't require performance or payment. They were cut short by a serious injury to my knee after hiking, which required surgery, and necessitated my move back home again. Even happiness, I learned, was temporary, always threatened by circumstances beyond my control.

The pattern repeated—searching for stability, finding brief moments of connection, then watching everything collapse under the weight of my unhealed trauma. I was entering my twenties and still didn't know how to build a life that wouldn't crumble, still choosing people who would leave before I could disappoint them, still more comfortable with chaos than calm.

The Marriages: Patterns Made Manifest

Then the marriages came like seasonal storms, each one following the same psychological script I'd been handed in childhood.

My first husband had been adopted out of the foster care system at the age of five—another damaged soul who recognized my damage and found it familiar. He was kind but unprepared for the depth of my wounds, the way trauma had taught me to sabotage anything good before it could be taken away. When one of my closest friends died one month after the birth of her daughter, something in me recognized the proximity of death and life, how they dance together in the spaces where love lives. Then, ironically, I almost died delivering my first daughter, as if my body was trying to tell me something about patterns and inheritances, about the way trauma passes through bloodlines like a virus.

I had my baby and recovered, but after the loss of my friend, the near-death experience of my daughter's birth, and the death of my Mom's third husband, the fragile foundation I was trying to build my life on fractured like ice under too much weight. I left my husband when our daughter was one year old and I was twenty-six, convinced that my presence in their lives would poison whatever chance they had at happiness. And, also, selfishly searching to feel something beyond the safety of my husband’s lack of passion and sexual interest.

My second husband arrived with awakening—my very first orgasm came at twenty-seven, the first time I understood my body could be mine, could feel pleasure instead of just endurance. By then I had already been married and had a baby. But I had never had an orgasm. He gave me one. But he also brought punishment, the familiar dynamic of intermittent reinforcement I'd learned to mistake for love. He cheated on me while I was pregnant with our son, introducing me to a world of swingers and sexual chaos that felt too familiar to be adventure. I decided to divorce him, now the mother of two very young children with two different fathers—already accumulating the kind of statistics that would follow me for the rest of my life.

He dragged me through courts, bogus tax fraud accusations, and made-up stories leading to CPS investigations. I bled money and spirit, but I was always determined to be a strong and good mother, even if I had no idea what that looked like. I kept falling on my face. And standing back up again. This became my rhythm: collapse and recovery, failure and resilience, an endless cycle of trying to build something stable on shifting ground.

Then my third marriage: It was an accident born of loneliness and poor judgment. I got pregnant with my third child, felt obligated to get married to the father, and then spent twelve years with a man who collected addictions like my grandfather had collected carnival friends. Alcohol, drugs, conspiracy theories, prostitutes—he hoarded dependencies while I paid the bills and lived separately, too exhausted to divorce again, too stubborn to completely let go. He was exactly like those men I'd watched in the AA meetings of my childhood: brilliant and broken, charismatic and unavailable, someone who would always choose his substances over his family.

I got pregnant by him again when our daughter was only six months old. I knew I could not have more children, could not bring another soul into the chaos of that relationship. So I took the abortion pill. Several weeks later, I was on a business trip and felt very sick—morning sickness type of sick. I went to the doctor when I got home. They told me I had been carrying twins. One had already died, and I heard the very faint heartbeat of the other. I was told that since I had taken the abortion pill, the baby would likely not survive, and if he did, he would likely have severe birth defects from the medication I’d taken. So they took me in for a D&C. My OBGYN told me that I had to agree to her lie that I had miscarried. She said she did not perform abortions because she "did not want to be shot."

I heard, in my third husband's rants and his apologies, the echoes of those AA voices from the Texas house—the same desperate promises, the same cyclical failures. Only he never chose the folding chairs. He never wanted redemption. He went to multiple rehabs and never stayed sober longer than six months. He only lived in our home about half of the total years we were together. Eventually his mind became so infected with paranoia and addiction that there were no signs left of the person I had fallen madly in love with. He was gone, replaced by a stranger who wore his face but spoke only in accusations and conspiracies.

Judgment and Perseverance

Divorces tangled into barbed wire, sharp and unforgiving. Co-parenting with resentful men who, by some cosmic cruelty, became friends—united not in love for their children but in their resentment of me, their shared conviction that I was the common denominator in all the chaos. My first husband remarried a girl he met when she was barely eighteen, who moved into my old house and tried to remake herself as "mom" to my daughter, as if love could be replaced as easily as furniture. Carrying all the scars of her own intense trauma, she acted out all kinds of cruel theatre and antics, ultimately scarring my oldest child so deeply. An innocent girl being chased down by the trauma of too many competing parental figures. The patterns still playing out.

And still, I showed up. I was the room mom, the volunteer at the charter school where every other parent seemed pressed and polished, married, stable—living the kind of conventional life I had never learned to build. I was the anomaly with three children by three different fathers, my reproductive history worn like a scarlet letter across my chest. Every smile I offered was met with the silent arithmetic of their eyes—counting husbands, counting children, tallying failures. Men can live this story without shame; money and power varnish the cracks, make serial relationships look like success rather than pathology. For me, it was only judgment. I bore it quietly, never saying how it burned, never explaining that I had been trained for this chaos, programmed for it in rooms that smelled like peed on newspaper and desperation.

Through it all, I built things they said girls like me couldn't build. Dropped out of high school after dating a guitarist who lived on LSD and rage, got that GED, started college when others my age were getting driver's licenses. Graduated on time. Started a master's program. Had babies. Built a career, bought houses, lost everything six times over in divorces that included financial violence designed to finish what childhood had started.

I was raised on survival, trained in endurance. I knew how to sleep on the floor and go hungry, how to make something from nothing. Corporate certifications were nothing compared to confronting my grandfather. Executive positions felt easy after institutionalization. Every house I bought with my own money was a fuck-you to the basement prisons of my childhood, proof that the girl they tried to break had grown into a woman they couldn't control.

Present Day: Learning New Patterns

It is 2025 now. I have lived alone for the last eight years, learning to be comfortable in solitude after a lifetime of chaos, teaching myself that peace doesn't have to be boring, that stability isn't the same as stagnation. I have had relationships that have not lasted—still drawn to the unavailable, still trying to love people into loving me back. I have fallen in love with people who could not or would not love me back, and conversely, many people have wanted me that I did not feel the same way about. The irony of anxious attachment is that we reject the people who are actually available, dismissing their interest as evidence of their inadequacy.

Yet sometimes I have found rest—not in men's arms, but in the friendships of women who did not ask me to chase them, who offered their presence without conditions or games. Nights of laughter. Shoulders offered freely. Secrets held without judgment. Proof that not all intimacy requires pursuit, that some connections can be stable and nourishing and real.

I saved my youngest child from the cycle, pulled her out of my third husband's chaos before it could take root in her soul. We stand on land I own, in a home I remodeled with my own hands, looking at plane tickets to places that my grandfather never imagined his newspaper-sleeping granddaughter would see. I am breaking the pattern, one choice at a time.

The Story I Choose

When I tell people I have attachment issues, they nod like they understand, but they don't. They think it's about fear of abandonment, but for me, everyone already left. My attachment issues aren't about being afraid people will leave—they're about believing I deserve to be held by someone who sees these vines of history wrapped around my throat and wants to help me untangle them, not because I need saving, but because they're proud to know someone who saved herself. Because they are so strong in their own right that they know the reward of being loved by and loving me is so much greater than the risk of my uneven foundation. Or any other one of the challenges we will both find in life.

The burden of loving me is not on anyone else. I've carried myself this far, drowning and swimming, serving as a life raft to my children while learning to float myself. All I've wanted, in the quiet moments between surviving and thriving, is to rest against someone who understands that my love comes from depths most people never have to explore, that my strength was forged in fires that should have killed me.

This is my story. Not of what was done to me, but of what I refused to become. Every morning I wake up in sheets I bought myself, in a bed I own, in a house with locks I control. I am rewriting the ending that was scripted for me, line by line, choice by choice. The girl who slept on newspaper now owns land. The child who was passed around like property now runs boardrooms. The fourteen-year-old who wanted to die lived to save her own children from the cycle.

Maybe that is why I still hear those AA voices in my head—the smoke curling in the air, the old machine spitting out my Dr. Pepper, gravel voices confessing their wreckage. They told their stories to survive, and I am telling mine for the same reason. They were teaching me, without knowing it, that recovery is possible but that the patterns run deep, that some of us spend our whole lives learning to choose differently, to love differently, to break the cycles that were handed to us like inheritances.

Against the odds? No. In spite of them. With middle fingers raised to statistics and stereotypes, to every person who should have helped and didn't, to every system that failed, to every man who took what wasn't offered. I'm still here, not just surviving but growing—reaching toward a sun that I've learned to trust will rise, even after the darkest nights, even when the moths in my chest still beat their wings toward flames I'm learning not to follow.

Especially after the darkest nights.

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If you or someone you know is struggling with trauma or thoughts of self-harm, please reach out for help. Resources are available through the National Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-656-4673) and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (988).