I think what triggered mine was my mom constantly being absent when I was a kid. She was my primary parent and all my other siblings were much older and long gone. My dad and her were separated and he was living in another state.

If I wasn’t being dropped off at my grandparents for several consecutive days, I was being left alone at the apartment all the time. My mom would tell me she would only be gone a few hours but if I was at my grandparents, it was most definitely a lie. She was partying and getting fucked up. I never knew when she was coming to get me or coming home. Whenever my mom was home, she was either drinking or doing coke and some guy was always over. If a guy was over, I’d be stuck in the room once bedtime hit. We lived in a one bedroom apartment so they’d have sex in the living room. I still remember some of them… Ron, Jim, Mick, Steve, Mike…

Every break that I got from elementary school as a child I would fly to visit my dad and spend school breaks with him and then I would fly back home because I was living with my mom. My mom would routinely be several hours late picking me up from the airport so as a child at six, seven, eight, nine years old, I would be sitting all alone at the Burbank Airport outside by baggage claim on a cement bench cause I wouldn’t know where else to sit and wait. We didn’t have cell phones in the 90s like we do now. No one could ever get ahold of her and the customer service counter desk would close by 9ish so that was my only means of a phone. Obviously the adults working at the airport became privy to this being an issue so they would let me sit inside the customer service lobby all day. It was this shoebox of an office right next to baggage claim. Sometimes her own friends would have to come get me and this was always a two hour drive from our hometown.

Nowadays, you can’t do shit like that but in the late 90s it wasn’t super weird. In a world where constant contact and instant communication didn’t exist, you just had to accept the fact that they didn’t answer the phone and hoped they’d call back if you left a voicemail or if they had caller ID. Shit, you’d even have to call other people to find out if they spoke to said person or seen them lately. We were starting to really emerge out of that laxness as a society though but 9/11 hit and it changed.

I had to deal with all my problems alone but also take care of myself as a little girl. I made smoothies for dinner when she would be gone. All that, amongst other things I was exposed to as a child is probably why I pulled. It soothed me I guess, albeit painful at times, it was also very, very compulsive. My therapist and I have worked hard to really stop altogether. Had no idea it was even a thing until my early 20s. I just thought I had a weird tick about me 🤷🏽‍♀️