Hello My Name is Chris

I found a bracelet in my old jewelry box in my storage unit. It is leather with the word CHRIS and two mushrooms tooled on either side. It is from 1979. I know this because on the inside, in blue pen, I wrote Chris + Chris. He was my crush in 8th grade. I remember wearing matching, baby blue, crew neck sweaters. He was my first kiss down by the creek.

I have been spending a lot of time in my storage unit in an attempt to Feng Shui magic it. There is also a photo I found of me in preschool, sitting on my teachers lap, with a haircut that made me look like a boy, in white t-shirt with bright red, block letters that spelled CHRIS. My battered teddy bear wears it now to cover his love holes.

I spent 18 years as Chris. Chrissy if you were my parents or my grandma. No one else was allowed to add the extra s and y. It was a term reserved for familial affection. But something happened when I went to college. I purposefully decided to show up with a new identity, CHRISTINE. It makes sense. I had left home in May and was taken in by my boyfriend’s parents. He broke up with me on the 4th of July. I continued to live there for two more months while he dated another girl with my ten speed as my only source of freedom. I would fly down the hill, three miles, to get to work. I would spend the evenings, alone in my room, exercising to Jane Fonda tapes. In September his dad took me to college with $600 in my pocket. I had walked through fire, I was a new person, I needed a new name.

On November 20th, 1983, a month or so after school started we would all be in the community room huddled around the tv, to watch the ABC broadcast of “The Day After”, about nuclear war, with 100 million other Americans. During this show a commercial for new movie base on the Stephen King novel “Christine” would come on with the trailer; “She is seductive. She is passionate. She is possessive. She is pure evil. She is Christine. Body by Plymouth. Soul by Satan.”

I was from Plymouth, MI. The entire room erupted in laughter pointing at me. I was okay with it. Don’t fuck with me is basically what it was saying and that is exactly how I felt. Christine became my coat of armor.

My freshman year of college was probably one of the hardest of my life. I was full on into this huge transition of living life on my own with no support network. I had a raging eating disorder, a fucked up self esteem where getting straight A’s was the only option AND I had to figure out how to pay for college to make sure I was never beholden to my dad ever again. I was under an enormous amount of pressure and I was starting to crack. By the end of my freshman year I had a mini nervous breakdown and I decided to take off to New York and accept a position as a nanny. I needed to make money and I needed to escape where no one knew me. During this stint I started to deal with my bulimia and I came back to college the following January with a new sense of resolve. I was learning I could do really, really hard things. I was learning that Christine was resilient and that her coat of armor was needed to protect her.

This persona served me well until it didn’t. The bulimia gave way to alcohol use disorder and the ego was strongly in control of propping up a perception of this strong, independent, doesn’t take any shit, person. My good friend nicknamed me DETROIT. The word does not evoke any positives. It was exactly because I was so tough and didn’t take anyone’s shit. I was fearless in not such a great way and alcohol emboldened me.

Sobriety has given me the gift of recovery. Recovery is a noun, which I think is weird because it is a process and one which you never actually finish. I will always be on this journey of recovery. It is a beautiful place to be. A place where you can slowly peel back all the layers and and learn to sit with yourself in the present without a need to escape or run away. There is no end goal.

Right now I am actively trying to recover this little girl that was once named Chris. To dismantle all this armor. To sit with her and just be. To love her.

I left her so long ago. She was shy and kind and inquisitive and loved to read and write plays her sisters would never perform in. She loved to bake and craft and sing and dance. She was deeply loved by imperfect people in a family where the other shoe was always dropping; unpredictably and beyond her control. And so she did, she tried to control it. She binged and purged, she thought about suicide, she drank to wash the feelings away and she gave herself a different name to act as protection. She has been quietly and patiently waiting for me to find her again. To give her permission to be soft and gentle and vulnerable and okay with not knowing what the future will hold. She is me and I was once called Chris…