Introduction: Why We Need to Talk About Codependency (And Why You Don’t Need to Be Fixed)
Let’s just get one thing straight at the jump: I never set out to be a codependent. I didn’t even know what the hell that word meant for the longest time. I just thought I was “helpful.” The “responsible” one. The “see a need, fill a need” kid.
For a while, it was just life as I knew it. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin—which, in hindsight, wasn’t the worst place to land, but as a kid I was convinced it was purgatory. We heated with wood. You hear people talk about chores, but you don’t really understand until you’ve spent every godforsaken spring, summer, and fall splitting, stacking, hauling, and restacking firewood, knowing winter is coming and there’s always more. There’s always more wood, and always more work. I hate wood. (I did buy a house later with a wood stove, so apparently trauma loops are real.)
I don’t know if I ever had a single “aha” moment about being the helper. It was more like this slow, creeping realization—why did it seem like everyone else got to be a kid, and I was the only one clocking into a job I never applied for? My mom or dad, who struggled with their own pain and addictions, always had a project for me. If it wasn’t cleaning something, it was fixing, fetching, smoothing things over—always on, always useful, always needed.
And God, the lies I told. Not just little harmless things, but the kind of whoppers that make you cringe when you remember them. I used to lie in school so the other kids would like me. One year it was “my cat had kittens” (never owned a cat), another year it was “my dad owns a snowmobile dealership” (he absolutely did not). Years later, in relationships, the lies got sicker. I once told an ex-boyfriend I had cancer just to keep him from leaving. That’s the kind of desperate, grasping move codependency drives you to—the kind of story that pushed people further away instead of pulling them close. Looking back, I see now just how warped things got, and sometimes I have to laugh: who the hell did I think I was kidding?
