More than ten years ago, I saved Wear Sunscreen to my YouTube Favorites; a video that implored me not to waste my precious time worrying so much about the future.

Then I promptly forgot about it, which feels important, seeing as I spent the next decade worrying about the future. There’s something funny about that, considering past-me thought the video was important enough to preserve for over a decade. That’s on-brand: document first, emotionally process at some unspecified later date. Only recently did I recognize this pattern of mine, that I treat insight like paperwork. I identify, file it someplace in my mind, and automatically assume the matter has become settled law.

I saved the advice, forgot the advice, then lived long enough to understand why I’d saved it in the first place. Put that way, it’s considerably less funny.

I must’ve understood something in it back then. Enough to click the little save button, anyway. Enough to think, This seems important. Better keep it. I just didn’t know what I was keeping. Not until I went out and learned it all hard and slow. The longest way possible, which means some people are no longer around by the time I understand what it all meant.

Listening to the video now feels strange because so much of the advice sounds familiar in a way it couldn’t have back then.

Don’t worry so much. You can’t know what’s coming. Your parents won’t always be here. Your friends will change. Your body will change. You will change (on the inside). Chance will rearrange your life without asking for your permission first.

And instead of finding any of that ubiquity comforting, some ancient part of me immediately turns it into evidence against me. You knew.

There it is again. The same little courtroom I’ve been building inside myself for years. You knew Dad was drinking. You knew you should’ve called. You knew worry was eating you alive. You knew you were losing yourself to him. You knew better. Therefore, that part of me insists, you should’ve done better. That logic is older than the video. It might be older than most things I consciously remember believing.

The structural spine of my memoir traces the same belief from childhood forward: if I’m good enough, careful enough, attentive enough, maybe I can keep Dad from leaving. What begins as a child’s magical thinking eventually becomes vigilance, self-blame, adaptation, documentation, and the ironclad conviction that love means carrying responsibility for another person’s life.

I’ve spent years trying to dismantle that belief.

Apparently, I’ve also gotten real good at rebuilding the Lie, just using better vocabulary. Now instead of saying, I should’ve saved him, I can say something more sophisticated, like, I recognized the pattern and still failed to change it. Maybe that’s why Wear Sunscreen is getting under my skin like another scratch-proof itch. It’s physical evidence that I encountered some of these truths before I ever learned them for myself.

I heard the warning. I even saved it as a pithy song. I still forgot it. Then I lived long enough for parts of it to stop sounding hypothetical. And now I’m tempted to punish my younger self for not understanding advice that only makes complete sense from this side of what happened.

That temptation is familiar too. I wanted the memoir to change me. Desperately. Actually, I wanted more from it than that. I wanted the memoir to fix me, to save me from myself.

I don’t think I admitted the full size of that expectation when I started writing. I told myself I just wanted understanding, accuracy, a record I could trust. The truth about what happened and what I’d been responsible for. But somewhere under all that respectable literary language was a bargain.

If I understand this thoroughly enough, I’ll stop hurting. If I can cut every wire, I’ll finally shut off the alarm. If I can just find the beginning of the false belief, maybe I’ll finally stop believing it’s true.

I’ve caught myself doing this before. In one of my mini-revelations, I realized I was an “intellectualizer^[1].” I turned Dad’s death into variables and kept rearranging the math, hoping I’d eventually find the version that made everything bearable.

It was a useful realization, but it didn’t stop me from intellectualizing.

I can spend years writing toward a conclusion, recognize the pattern in childhood, follow it through adolescence, even watch it mutate in adulthood. I’ve found the exact places where love became vigilance and vigilance became responsibility and responsibility became guilt. I can write a damn near perfect sentence. I can even believe that sentence is true. And yet… Nothing happens inside. No internal click. No rush of release. Just bland recognition.

Intellectually, I know worry isn’t control. I know loving somebody doesn’t make me responsible for keeping them alive. I know another person’s addiction can’t be managed into submission with sufficient vigilance. I know I can’t retroactively become the daughter who noticed everything at exactly the right moment and said exactly the right thing and somehow altered the entire trajectory of another person’s life.

I know. I know. I know. And yet some other part of my soul—something deep and primeval, below language—doesn’t give two shits about what I know.

I’d already noticed this split years ago. In yet another mini-revelation^[2], I wrote that I shouldn’t worry about things outside my control (like, duh), then immediately admitted that I knew I didn’t believe that “in my heart.” I could explain perfectly why another person’s choices were not mine to control while still feeling, viscerally, that I should’ve done more for my daddy.

So this isn’t a new problem for me. Maybe what’s new is that I thought I’d solved it, or at least that writing the memoir would solve it for me.

Before I even finished the book, I caught myself worrying that if I couldn’t prove I had healed, then the whole thing would be a waste. Then I wrote something I apparently still need to learn. Healing isn’t the point. The point was showing what was real.

The structural spine of the memoir eventually said the same thing more bluntly. The book was never meant to end in forgiveness or recovery. It was always supposed to examine emotional inheritance, family silence, and the cost of confusing love with responsibility.

My longer narrative spine doesn’t promise healing either. It promises clarity. (I know, it’s a lot of scaffolding documents. I find it hard to delete anything, and I kept changing my mind about things—y’all should see all my outlines.) The memoir ends by separating love from power and trying to make an accurate accounting of what was and was not within my control.

I wrote toward that conclusion for years, yet when I finally got there I still wanted more.

I thought total clarity would make me feel better. Maybe that was silly or naïve; a memoir can show you the pattern. It can help you understand how you got here and why you keep repeating bad patterns. It can show you when you first wandered inside that cage (i.e., way of thinking), which parts were built around you, which parts you reinforced yourself, and why staying within it feels safer than leaving.

Maybe that’s the strange cruelty of insight. You can know the cage door is wide open now and still sit inside it. You can understand exactly why you’re there and remain there anyhow. You can even write a whole damn book describing its architecture yet still remain inside it.

This is the part I keep trying to think my way through, because perhaps the old Lie inside me isn’t really: Dad’s death was my fault. That belief is almost too easy. I have evidence against it. I have chronology. I have years and years of writing.

The deeper Lie might be closer to this: If I love someone, I’m responsible for noticing danger early enough to stop it. And beneath that: If I relax, something bad might happen while I’m not looking.

That Lie explains more. It explains why worry can feel almost virtuous. Why stepping back can feel cruel. Why letting another person suffer the consequences of their choices can feel suspiciously similar to abandoning them. Why “you couldn’t control it” can make perfect sense while providing almost zero comfort.

It even explains why a piece of advice telling me not to waste my life worrying can make me sad instead of freeing me. Because some part of me is still asking, Fine, but who’s watching everything while I’m doing that?

I wish this ended with the answer finally sinking in. It doesn’t. That would make a cleaner essay. It might even make a cleaner memoir. But grief doesn’t have to resolve simply because the page is ending. I want my writing to resist false catharsis and preserve emotional contradiction rather than polishing it into something prettier.

So here’s the less satisfying truth: I still don’t believe it. Not where it counts. I can explain why I wasn’t responsible. I can defend that conclusion. I can cite the evidence. I can recognize the childhood logic underneath the guilt and watch it replicate itself in adulthood.

I can even recognize what I’m doing right this instant, turning a YouTube video I saved more than ten years ago into another exhibit in the case against myself. Still, somewhere inside me, the old machinery keeps running.

I don’t think that means my memoir failed. Maybe I just gave it a job no book could possibly perform. I know that writing it helped me. I understand the pattern now in a way I didn’t before. I can see where I confused vigilance with love and responsibility with devotion. It just couldn’t make me believe what I’d learned.

More than ten years ago, I clicked “Save to Favorites.”

I don’t know what the younger version of me thought she was saving. Maybe she only heard something that sounded important. She was right about that, at least. Things happened that neither version of me could’ve predicted.

And now I’m back, listening again. Still worrying, still trying to turn knowledge into true blue belief by sheer force of will. Still learning advice I already saved once. The fucked up part is that I understand it now, or almost all of it. I even understand why I learned to believe otherwise. I just don’t feel any of that to be true. At least, not yet.

I don’t know how long it takes for something you know to become something you believe. I only know they’re not the same thing, and apparently knowing that isn’t enough either.

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[1] Intellectualization is a defense mechanism in which people reason about a problem to avoid dealing with the uncomfortable or distressing emotions triggered by it. By channeling mental energy into a logical assessment or abstract discussion, an individual can avoid painful emotions or remain distanced from beliefs that challenge their sense of self. (Source: Psychology Today)

[2] I think this is why I call them “mini” revelations: the insight is so painfully obvious, most of the time. It feels dumb to call them true revelations. Like, shouldn’t I have known that, already?

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inspo: an essay called “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” written by Mary Schmich, published in the Chicago Tribune in 1997 // an Australian filmmaker, Baz Luhrmann, who set a reading of the essay (read by voice actor Lee Perry) to a remix of Rozalla’s song “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good)” // grieving the distance between knowing something and being able to live it // the painful cruelty of retrospective knowledge // realizing wisdom (or advice) isn’t just something you can obey, which must mean it’s something only time & experience can translate into something useable // reviewing my memoir’s scaffolding docxs, some of which I created before writing, others during the writing process, e.g. my character arc docx, which I built using a template from Creating Character Arcs by K.M. Weiland // mostly, the impossible fantasy that knowing better should’ve made me live better

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