Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Welcome to 50 First Dates, the podcast. This is Jolie Moore. One year ago, I embarked on a journey that became a kind of experiment. My goal? Go on 50 first dates in a single year. I'm not sure exactly what I was looking for. Validation? Sex? Maybe even love. This podcast you're listening to is a second experiment. It's been two years since that first date.
[00:00:36] It would have been January of 2019 when I wrote the memoir that forms the basis of this podcast. My editor called the book A cautionary tale. I never had the guts, exactly to ask her what she meant by that. Maybe now I do. If it's not a cautionary tale for others, at least I can say it's one for me.
[00:00:57] Let me tell you how this podcast is going to work. Each week I'm going to read a chapter, a date, as it were, from my memoir, the plot twist. I haven't read it since I wrote it. I suspect I'm going to surprise myself. After I read the chapter. I'll share with you my thoughts, essentially from my future self. They say hindsight is 20 20. I guess we'll find out together if that's entirely true. For this first episode, I was going to read the preface and introduction to the memoir. But that's just background. I'll share it with you now. If you want to read it yourself, you can certainly do that with the free preview feature at any ebook retailer. Here's the skinny. This is actually ridiculously hard to say, but I guess that's what a few years of therapy are for. So here goes.
[00:01:44] I am the product of a childhood of abuse and neglect. As I record this, I'm about 40% of the way through the book the Silent Patient. I know, I know. It was a number one New York Times bestseller, and I'm just getting to it now. Anyway, while I was reading it this morning, I came upon a passage where the protagonist talks about childhood development.
[00:02:05] He floats the idea that being a baby is probably sheer terror. Baby humans are, he says, thrust into an alien world and utterly unable to care for any of their own needs. Our mothers are there hopefully to soothe us, to help us learn self regulation.
[00:02:22] Without that, we're thrust into a life of, at worst, addiction, maybe constant anxiety as a middle ground, and at best, maybe a certain ennui.
[00:02:33] But if we start with a hole, we're going to spend a lot of time trying to fill that hole. Let me backtrack for a moment. My mother was and is someone you'd probably describe as a classic Narciss exist I was there to serve her emotional needs, fill her hole. And when I fell short, she turned to drugs and alcohol. Let's just say my early life wasn't filled with kindness and love from her. For my grandmother's yes, but not my parents. My mother was present but absent in many ways. My father divorced her and probably for good reason. He was there some weekends but spent his time mired in his own gambling addiction. Fun times.
[00:03:13] At a very young age I had a lot of autonomy and learned to parent myself. I only did a so so job. On the upside, I'm extremely disciplined and responsible. On the other I have a string of unhealthy relationships in my rear view mirror.
[00:03:28] If you're a student of self help or at least have moderate self awareness, you know how this story goes. I moved out from living with one narcissist, but it's no surprise that I married another. Like my childhood physical abuse continued.
[00:03:43] There were only nine years between the last time my mother hit me at 16 and the first time my ex husband pushed me down on Concrete at 25. Until I woke up and I mean really woke up past 40 and realized I didn't have to live this way. My entire life had been plagued by abuse.
[00:04:01] I think the result of this is that when I started the 50 First Dates experience I was not most discerning dater, this abuse survivor. This was the person I put out into the world. Maybe I hoped the man I was pursuing would fill that hole that had been long empty of love. I often fill it with writing and work, sometimes with food binges and it's corollary, excessive exercise. Maybe this was a new coping mechanism. Maybe this was the cautionary tale my editor gleaned from the memoir's pages. So here we go. Join me on my journey of 50 first dates as I look for love or maybe something just like it.
