Magical Thinking

The actress and author of Thicker Than Water reveals the skills she developed that helped her become a performer-at home and on-screen.

- KERRY WASHINGTON

From what I remember, most of my parents' fights were about money, and about the fact that neither of them felt like they were in the marriage they wanted to be in, or more precisely, that they were married to the person they wanted to be married to. They argued about my dad's spending versus my mother's thriftiness; my dad's failures to earn versus my mother's failure of ambition; my dad's regular absences versus my mother's obsession with me.

They both harbored deep disappointment over what their lives had become my mother was disappointed in my dad, and my dad was disappointed in the marriage. I had the sense that I was the only thing keeping them together, or that I had to try to be. I was supposed to deliver them to happiness, to avoid triggering in them any emotion even close to disappointment. So, when they fought, I took it as my failure, and felt like it was my job to fix it.

Like a lot of families, the magic trick was in the pretending. We pretended to ourselves, to each other, and to the outside world that our family was not suffering the pain of life's disappointments. We were fine-but I learned a long time ago that FINE can be an acronym for fucked-up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional.

As a young child, I would lie in bed and listen for signs of how serious each battle was and when it might come to an end. Sometimes the entire "fight" would consist of my mother slamming a door to signal that she was done. But sometimes the yelling carried on.

I developed panic attacks at night. They manifested first as a rhythm of anxiety that encircled my brain, then evolved into a rapid pulsing, a whirling frenzy of metallic thumps, like those nauseating old spinning rides at a county fair.