My sister Debbie died at nine months, in the Philippines, before I was born. Something fundamental in my mother broke and never came back. A year and a half later she carried me home to the States along with all of that unresolved anguish, and I’ve wondered since whether I was meant to replace what they’d lost.
That’s where the house I grew up in started. Nineteen years in a place where nothing made sense, where the rules changed without warning, and where the people who were supposed to protect me were often the ones I needed protection from.
What a child does in that situation is build a model. You learn the tells. You watch the way the front door closes and you know what kind of evening it’s going to be. You learn which questions are safe on which days, and you keep updating, constantly, because the model has to stay accurate or you get hurt.
Nobody told me that was a skill. It felt like being permanently afraid, which it also was.
What does hypervigilance do to a brain?
It trains it to run threat assessment continuously in the background, and it doesn’t switch off when you leave.
You walk into a room and you have already read it. Who’s tense. What changed since yesterday. Which small detail doesn’t fit the pattern. Most people do this occasionally and deliberately. If you grew up predicting an unpredictable adult, you do it always, and you don’t experience it as a decision.
Pointed at people, this is exhausting and often wrong. You read threat into ordinary irritation. You over-prepare for conversations that were never going to be difficult. You’re managing a room that doesn’t require managing, and it costs you something every single day.
There was a point after which I never let my guard down near my father again. I’m not going to detail what produced it here. What matters for this argument is that the vigilance wasn’t a temperament I was born with. It was installed, on a specific day, for a reason.
The book on this: My Life in Crazytown is the whole account: nineteen years, what it cost, and the specific ways the survival habits turned into professional ones.
How do children cope with a hypervigilant household?
Into other worlds, in my case, on paper.
Jack Vance became my drug of choice. His alien worlds, a story called Narrow Land, were so completely unlike San Bernardino that they might as well have been real. Better than real, because they were places where logic and beauty could exist together and problems had solutions if you were clever enough to find them.
When my grand aunt died and her belongings filled our living room in cardboard boxes, I claimed Stranger in a Strange Land like I was grabbing a life preserver. Heinlein’s odd story about a human raised by Martians made complete sense to me. Here was somebody else who didn’t understand the rules and had to learn human behavior from the outside. I read it twelve times, until the pages were soft as cloth and the spine was held together with tape.
It was the first place I encountered that a system could have rules that made sense, and I’ve been looking for that ever since, professionally.
Why did the same habit work so well on machines?
Because a complex technical system is exactly the thing that habit was built for, and it’s no feelings to misread.
Running computer operations means noticing that something is slightly wrong before it becomes obviously wrong. A response time drifting. A log filling faster than usual. A pattern that doesn’t match yesterday’s pattern for a reason nobody can name yet. That’s precisely the skill I developed watching a front door.
The other half is systematic thinking. When you spend your childhood trying to predict an unpredictable person, you become very good at building models from partial information, holding several competing explanations at once, and updating as evidence arrives. That’s troubleshooting. That’s the job.
Twenty years running operations for a company doing sixteen billion dollars in revenue, and the underlying method was the one I built at nine years old for entirely different reasons.
Does a memoir have to be a redemption story?
Because I was never broken, and the redemption shape requires that I was.
Redemption stories go: I was damaged, then something healed me, and now I’m whole. They’re popular because they’re tidy and because they let the reader feel something at a safe distance. They’re also, in my case, untrue.
Redemption stories go: I was damaged, then something healed me, and now I am whole.Share on X
What happened was recognition. I spent years believing my differences were obstacles, and I was wrong about that. The thing everybody had treated as a defect, including me, was the thing I was best at. Nobody fixed anything. I just eventually noticed what I had.
The distinction matters practically, beyond semantically. If you believe you’re broken, you spend your energy looking for the repair. If you understand that you adapted, you can start asking what the adaptation is good for.
Does that mean the childhood was worth it?
No, and
There’s a version of this argument that says the difficulty was necessary, that it made me who I am, and that therefore it was somehow a gift. That version is comforting and I don’t believe it. Plenty of people develop excellent pattern recognition without being frightened of their own house. The adaptation was real and the cost was also real, and the cost wasn’t a fair price.
If you already paid the price, the adaptations are yours and you may as well find out what they’re worth. That’s not the same as saying the bill was reasonable.
What is the most common mistake in a childhood memoir?
The most common failure in this kind of book is the catalog. Chapter after chapter of things that happened, each one worse than the last, with no argument holding them together. It’s painful to write and difficult to finish, and readers tend to stop somewhere in the middle because there’s nowhere for them to arrive.
The books that work have a claim. Mine is that the survival habits became professional ones, and every incident in it is there because it demonstrates that or complicates it. The claim is what turns a set of memories into a book.
One more thing. Change the names, change the identifying circumstances, and have a publishing attorney read it before it goes anywhere. Not a general practice lawyer. Somebody who does pre-publication reviews and knows what identifiable means when the cast is small. That review costs money and it’s cheaper than the alternative.
What does hypervigilance from childhood mean?
The vigilance is information, not a verdict. It tells you the environment was unpredictable. It doesn’t tell you anything about your capacity.
The skill needs a better target. Aimed at people it eats you. Aimed at systems, problems, or anything with actual rules, it’s worth a career.
You don’t have to forgive anybody to use what you learned. Those are separate questions and combining them has stopped a lot of people from doing either.
Write it down before you decide what it means. The meaning arrives later and it’s usually not the one you expected at the start.
I called the place Crazytown because that’s what it felt like from inside: somewhere with its own physics that nobody outside would believe. Leaving took nineteen years. Working out what I took with me took considerably longer.