Bio: Emily Ransdell

I learned early on that keeping peace meant keeping secrets.  I was the only child of a narcissistic mother with the neuro-toxicities of undiagnosed ADHD and rejection sensitivity dysphoria. In public my mother appeared charming, witty and much admired as a newspaper columnist in our small community. Everyone knew us but no one knew the chaos in our home— dirty dishes and stinky ashtrays, sour laundry and juice glasses of watered-down whisky weeping rings on the furniture. I tidied up and kept my mouth shut. 

No one knew of her door slamming and stony silences, her jealous accusations and schemes to keep my father and I at a distance from each other.  No one knew what ADHD was then, either, much less that it was hereditary.  After I left the Midwest, I spent decades fighting the ways in which I realized I was like her, feeling like I worked twice as hard as everyone else to accomplish half as much.  Masking all the ways I didn’t measure up. 

I thought at least when she died I would stop being angry.  I didn’t. What a shock that you can be pissed at someone dead!  When I started ADHD treatment, I started writing. I’m not saying writing is therapy, but it does make you look at things. Now I see what my mother never did: being different does not have to mean being broken. Being outside “the norm” doesn’t make a person an outsider. Writing has helped me find the grace to learn this, as has the beauty of this landscape I write from, the Pacific Northwest. I didn’t see a mountain until I was 24 years old. Now I only have to look out my bedroom window to I know am not broken.  I belong here.  I belong.