A daily prompt asked if my life today looks like what I pictured a year ago, and I keep coming back to this idea of a switch.

We hear it all the time with addiction. The person sees their kid’s shining face or hears a newborn’s first cry, and suddenly enough is enough. They put down the bottle. Their kid saves them. Cue the redemption arc.

I know those stories help people. Mary Karr is why I’m here, so I get it. I don’t mean to drag anyone for surviving or loving their own happy ending. Still, I can’t shake what gets left unsaid for the rest of us—the ones whose love wasn’t a cure.

I’ve spent years wondering what magic ingredient made those other kids the reason their parent quit. If I was supposed to be that for my dad, did I just not measure up? Why can Eminem rap about Hailie being his purpose, or Johnny Depp say his kids became his motivation, when that switch never flipped for my dad?

I didn’t resent those stories, I internalized them. They taught me that kids are supposed to be the reason someone survives. And when that doesn’t happen, the question doesn’t disappear. It just turns inward.

On page 5 of Lit, Mary Karr writes, “…because of [her son], I couldn’t die and couldn’t monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue—not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall.”

There’s a kind of quiet cruelty in the way people say, “my kid saved me.” What about the kids who didn’t?

Dad’s death convinced me: not everyone has that switch, or maybe it just doesn’t always flip when it should. The truth is, I tried. My love was as real as it gets. Blue as a bruise, sometimes. Still, my daddy didn’t make it out alive.

Some days I wonder if he ever really loved me the way I loved him, or if I just wanted to believe that badly enough. And if I ever have a kid, I worry the story might repeat. That I’ll find out the hard way I’m selfish, just like people said I was. That love alone isn’t the ticket.

The way I loved my dad felt bottomless—true blue, the kind of love that rearranges your insides and makes you believe it has to count for something. But it didn’t. That wrecked me. Not just because I lost him, but because I started to wonder what my love was worth if it couldn’t even compete with the relief he found in a bottle.

I think his death took that part of me with it. The part that feels deeply, bonds easily, loves without end. Like the circle closed, and I can’t let anyone else through.

Only by writing this memoir have I started to feel anything again.

People talk about numbness after loss, but for me, it’s more like an alarm system that won’t shut up. After my dad died, whatever part of me could love that hard locked itself behind a door. I spent years trying to be the reason he’d quit, wanting to be the switch that changed everything. It never happened. When he died, something in me died too.

Now, even with people who deserve that kind of love—my stepdad, mostly—I can feel the brakes. It’s not that Randy’s a bad guy, or that I don’t care. He’s just so close to a role that already burned me once, and my system isn’t signing up again. I know that I love him, but it’s quieter now. Like loving someone through glass. Most people, I keep at arm’s length. Safer that way.

I wish losing Dad didn’t mean losing the part of myself that could risk feeling so much. But this is me surviving: I keep the fire low because I can’t burn down again.

If my book says anything, it should be this: love isn’t always enough. Sometimes, after the fallout, you can’t give it away the way you used to. That’s not on the people who show up for you. That’s just what happens when you’ve lost too much.

It scares me. Not because I don’t love, but because I don’t feel love the way I used to. I worry that means I’m selfish, or broken, or missing whatever gene lets people be saved by devotion. I worry that I won’t have that lightning-bolt moment people talk about with my kids. That I’ll discover, too late, that the switch just isn’t there for me either.

I’m starting to get, slowly, that love isn’t always the cure. It doesn’t always rescue or transform. Sometimes it sits next to failure and loss, next to a nervous system that learned to shut things down to survive.

Maybe that’s what my book can say, without accusing anyone who got a different ending: love can be real and still not win. Kids aren’t supposed to be the reason someone survives. And when they aren’t, it doesn’t mean their love was fake, or insufficient, or wasted.

A year ago, I still believed love was supposed to change people. I’m writing this blog so I don’t turn numbness into a character flaw or loss into a moral diagnosis. Maybe the switch didn’t flip for my dad. Maybe mine flipped the other way, into protection.

That doesn’t make me unloving. It makes me someone who loved deeply once and paid for it.

inspo: relistening parts of the Depp v Heard trial // feeling like a bad guy parading around in good guy skin // what might be my final mini-revelation of this memoir // the anatomy of aftermath // being haunted by the idea that kids save their parents from addiction // softly challenging redemption-as-proof narratives // naming the quiet harm those narratives can sometimes cause surviving children // feeling like love that used to burn through me now barely flickers

Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?

View all responses

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

See Full Bio