The First Disappearance: What I Learned in the Dark

I’ve been writing lately about the depression I carried through my marriage — the quiet kind that settles into your bones when you’ve spent too long being unseen. But as I’ve been exploring that part of my story, another memory has been pushing its way to the surface. A much older one. A root system I didn’t realize was still alive under everything.

It was during the first couple of years after my parents divorced. I was twelve, maybe thirteen. Those years were marked by a kind of emotional loneliness I didn’t have language for at the time. My mom was doing her best to rebuild a life after a painful ending, and I was trying to understand a world that suddenly felt unfamiliar. We were both navigating things we didn’t know how to talk about.

During that time, someone in our home often made me feel small — too dramatic, too sensitive, too much. He wasn’t physically violent, but the verbal and emotional jabs were constant. The mocking, the belittling, the comments that made me want to disappear. I didn’t understand why it affected me so deeply; I just knew it did.

I remember coming home from school and going straight to the living room. I would draw the curtains closed and sit in the dark. It wasn’t a dramatic gesture — it was the only place I felt like I could disappear. No one asked why. No one wondered what was happening inside me. He would come into the room, throw the curtains open, and announce that I was “a vampire.”

I learned early that being unseen felt safer than being noticed.

I didn’t know the word depression then. Back in the early nineties, it wasn’t something people talked about unless they were whispering about someone who needed to be “put away.” I just knew I felt heavy and lonely and wrong. I knew I didn’t fit anywhere. And I knew that the adults around me were carrying their own storms, unable to see mine.

Looking back now, I can see that this was the beginning of my disappearance — the first time I folded myself inward because the world around me didn’t have room for my pain.

This is where the pattern started.

This piece is part of my series, Disappearing: A Story in Three Parts.” [Return to the series overview →]