Tae Yoon: Life from 2006-2021

"I am the child of alcoholics. Two alcoholics actually, but more importantly my mother. And I was 11 when my parents became alcoholics and my sister was 14. And my younger sisters were I guess, Haley 4 years younger than me and Amy 5 years. I believe that nobody has the same parents, that you're born into a family at a different time, that your parents relate to you differently depending on what your personality is and how they connect. I was 11 when this happened, and I really had much more time to live in that house. And when you're the child of an alcoholic, you are worried all the time. All you think about is, are they going to start drinking tonight? My parents were---this was the hardest thing I wrote in the book by far writing about my mother---and I felt it was so important because of the isolation you have as a child like this. You're always keeping the family secrets and I just, don't keep them---I really feel passionately about that. So I became someone who was always trying to figure out what was going to happen. I was a watcher. I was on hyper-alert. Were they going to fight tonight? Were they going to drink tonight? What did that movement mean? Why did she pour the glass so quickly? Why did she drink it so quickly? Why did she throw the jacket over that chair in that particular angry way? What did it all mean? And what happens is you grow up, and you're still worrying. You're still knowing that when you're looking left that something is coming at you from the right. So you're trying to look two directions at once which we know is completely impossible as we all know. But those things you develop as a child, these survival things---they hang on. And they stay in your life. And I really needed to write a lot about that to sort of exorcise the demons of it."

Said by Delia Ephron in her NPR Fresh Air interview from December 9, 2013.

This is so relatable that it's giving me goosebumps.