Seen: A Memoir

By Leah Zaccaria

From the outside, Leah Zaccaria appeared to have it all: the picture-perfect family, the stylish suburban home, the blossoming corporate career. But on the inside, she was still the lonely little girl hiding under the dining room table. The girl who hoped that, if she did everything right, someone would come to her rescue. That someone would finally see her.

It wasn’t until she started practicing yoga that she realized achievement isn’t the same as worth, and that conformity can’t buy love. Seen is the story of Zaccaria’s life, her transformation from exhausted overachiever to openhearted vulnerability seeker. Now, as a yoga teacher and owner of hauteyoga Queen Anne and shefayoga Roosevelt, she wants to share her journey—the wounds and the joys, the self-deceptions and the self-realizations—so that others will feel free to do the same.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leah Zaccaria
• Release date: Oct 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732678620

Leah Zaccaria

Leah Zaccaria is a former certified public accountant with a master’s in taxation turned yogi entrepreneur. She took her first yoga class in 2006 and later decided to marry her business expertise with her passion for yoga and opened her first studio, hauteyoga Queen Anne, in 2009, followed by shefayoga Roosevelt in 2013. She created Sendatsu Evolution in 2015, a teacher-training and leadership program that hosts several trainings, retreats, and workshops annually. She lives in Seattle with her daughter.

Book preview

Introduction

What gives light must endure burning.

—Viktor Frankl

I can hear my dad pounding on the front door. He is screaming for us to let him in. I know he’s drunk, and I’m so scared. I don’t know what he’ll do next. I don’t want him to find me if he manages to get inside, so I crawl under the dining room table to hide. It’s late, and I’m wearing my Strawberry Shortcake pajamas.

After what feels like hours but is probably just a few minutes, I muster up the courage to crawl back out and grab the phone off the wall, then rush back to my hiding spot, the long, curly cord stretching between me and the wall. I am shivering with fear. With a shaking hand, I dial the number to the restaurant where my mom works as a cocktail waitress. She finally gets on the line.

Mom, I say, please come home! Dad is drunk and I’m afraid. Please, Mom. Please! I don’t know what to do. Help me.

I can’t leave. If I do I’ll lose my job, she says, then hangs up the phone.

We all want to be seen. More than that, it is our divine right to be seen.

What I mean by seen is to feel loved and accepted, to stand fully in our truths, to be naked in vulnerability, to live in the most authentic way. It is refusing to be what others want or think we should be, and instead being who we are in every facet of our lives.

I believe true freedom lies in being and feeling seen; that through living in truth we can embody love and acceptance of both our own uniqueness and that of others. Then and only then can we fully realize our purpose and serve the world through the gifts we bring.

In order to be fully seen, we have to let untruths die, a lifelong process of letting go and rebirth. This process can be painful, and most of us hide ourselves instead of seeking the truth, out of fear of rejection, judgment, failure, or loss. To come out of hiding takes a great deal of courage, strength, and vulnerability. It is a hero’s journey, an adventure into the unknown in the hope of transformation.

I share my story in the following pages because we all go through the same things. None of us are alone—though we may feel lonely at times, we are all facing this together.

Throughout my journey, I have come to the conclusion that the human experience goes through what I call Seen Cycles. The Seen Cycles are the processes by which we try to be seen and, hopefully, are ultimately seen. I call them cycles because within each of them, there are patterns that are repeated over and over if we are not transformed. Phases are temporary stages that typically run their course, whereas cycles reoccur unless broken. Cycles take much more effort to move through than phases do.

There are five Seen Cycles: Primal, Struggle, Conform, Transform, and Purpose. The first three cycles—Primal, Struggle, and Conform—are the cycles in which we seek to be seen by sources outside ourselves. The last two cycles—Transform and Purpose—are the cycles in which we seek to see ourselves from within.

I believe that we all go through the first three cycles, that no one is exempt. But we don’t all go through the last two cycles. Many of us get stuck in the Conform Cycle, looking externally for validation for the duration of our lives. Getting to the Transform and Purpose Cycles takes great courage and action. It takes effort and the willingness to feel, endure, and commit to growth and exploration.

My mission for this book is to share my journey through these cycles in the hope that you will be able to relate to and apply the lessons I learned to your own life. I hope to inspire and empower you to see yourself and to be fully seen. I hope you will give yourself permission to let some things die for the sake of rebirth. To truly show yourself can make you feel scared and vulnerable. But if you pay enough attention to the brief glimpses you have of your true self, listen to the whispers from your inner knowing, then you will finally see and be seen.

Please note: some names have been changed to protect the guilty and the innocent.

The Primal Cycle

Don’t turn away from what’s painful. Examine it. Challenge it.

—Steven Spielberg

We can’t avoid the Primal Cycle. From day one, we are under the care of another human, whether it’s a nuclear family, group of loving adults, or series of sometimes overworked, underpaid caretakers at a children’s home or other institution. These early relationships are essential for determining how we will feel seen and be seen. I have a mother and father, so I will share through that lens.

It starts in the womb. Did our mothers want us? Were they able to take care of themselves during pregnancy? Did we share the womb with a sibling? Was there stress? Nourishment? Did our mothers sing to us, dream about us, pray for us? These all are important factors in how we feel, and how we interpret the world.

When we are born, our lifeline is our mother or another caretaker. For the sake of simplicity, I will use feminine pronouns, though a caretaker doesn’t have to be female, and hopefully there is more than one. We depend on her to keep us alive. In a perfect world, she feeds us, bathes us, and nurtures us. She is our protector. She keeps us safe from harm.

We seek to love and be loved by her. It is primal and innate. Everything we seek we seek through her, because we do not yet know how to find it for ourselves. If we do not feel seen, accepted, or loved by our mother, if she fails us or abandons us, we will seek protection from other sources. There is no way around it.

Both my mother and father came from big Catholic families. They grew up going to Catholic Mass in their Sunday best and living the Catholic lifestyle. My mom went to an all-girls Catholic high school, and my dad went to an all-boys Catholic high school, both in Spokane, Washington. My mom was beautiful. She had long, flat-ironed blonde hair, blue eyes, and a curvaceous body. My dad was also a looker. He was an all-star football player with muscular legs and a medium build, jet-black hair, and piercing blue eyes. My parents’ schools often came together for dances, and that was where they met. When they were both eighteen years old and still in high school, they got pregnant with my sister Holly.

After graduation, they moved to Missoula, Montana, so my dad could study to be a doctor. But two years after Holly was born, I came along, and he dropped out of school and we moved back to Spokane. There my parents bought a house and started working, my dad as a chef and my mom as a waitress.

My parents did not have a lot of money, but they had support from their families. All four of my grandparents were successful professionals, a rarity in that day and age. My maternal grandmother was a communications executive, and my maternal grandfather owned a construction company. My paternal grandmother was a nurse, and my paternal grandfather was a well-known general surgeon. Though my parents had mostly good relationships with their parents, when my mom and dad were kids their parents weren’t home a lot, and other family members or nannies had been responsible for most of the childcare. My mom credits her grandmother with raising her, while my dad had various nannies, not all of whom were kind to him. One caregiver put him in a high chair inside a dark closet for hours when he was just a toddler.

When I was four, my status as the baby was updated to middle child with the birth of my other sister, Miranda. My parents were only twenty-four years old, with three young daughters to raise!

There is such an interesting dynamic that comes with being the middle child. There is real truth in the adage that we get lost in the shuffle.

Like most people, I do not recall much from my first four years. My memories begin around age five. (Oh, how I wish I could remember my first four years, to understand how they shaped me!)

One of my earliest memories is my first day of kindergarten. It was only a half day, and I remember being scared and uncertain, looking forward to noon, when I could go home. After we kids had settled in, the teacher asked me if I knew the ABCs. Who doesn’t know the ABCs? I thought. I recited them confidently, already sure that I would be a good student.

A few hours passed, and it was time to go home. Parents began to arrive, and the classroom grew noisy with kids shouting and running into the arms of their moms and dads as though they hadn’t seen each other in years. I waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually everyone left, including the teacher, and I was all alone, sitting on the steps outside my classroom. I remember being scared and crying quietly. Where is everyone? I thought. There was not even one teacher still around to help me.

Finally, after what felt like a century, my mom came. With a shrug she told me she’d forgotten that she had to pick me up. I’d been forgotten.

When I was about six years old, my family dynamic started to change. One night, I went outside to find my dad trying to drive his motorcycle up a tree. His eyes were wild, and he was saying strange and incomprehensible things. Frightened and confused, I ran inside to tell my mom. She did not seem surprised, which made me feel even more perplexed. She shooed me off and told me to not worry about it.

My dad’s alcoholism and drug addiction ramped up. My father was not a happy drunk or functional alcoholic. When he was drinking, he became full-on psychotic—volatile, violent, and unpredictable. Even though he never laid a hand on me or called me names, I was always terrified, afraid he might hurt me or even kill me, never sure of what he might do. He’d be black-out drunk, acting crazy and totally unaware of what he was doing, and my older sister, Holly, was the only one who could calm him down. She had a way with him. She was a lot like him; she even looked like him. She would talk to him, hold his hand, stroke his hair, and settle him down. She could get him to a peaceful state. But she wasn’t always there to protect us.

My mom was very rarely there to rescue us. Though I would call her at work and beg for her help, she never came.

The day after a blackout, my dad wouldn’t remember anything. The previous night’s craziness was never mentioned, like it never happened.

My family home was unstable and unsafe. My mom was not around most of the time, either out working or doing whatever it was she did to escape. Now, as an adult, I know that she was doing her best to survive. Still, in those moments, she abandoned me and my sisters.

When I was about seven, my dad took my younger sister, Miranda, and me out to dinner at a restaurant called Geno’s. It was one of those hole-in-the-wall, dark Italian restaurants that always smelled of cigarette smoke. Miranda was only three years old at the time, a little redhead with bouncy curls who was always up for an adventure and still oblivious to the danger of our situation. My dad ordered one carafe of wine after another, and he quickly started getting loud and making a scene. Soon enough, the owner came over and asked us to leave. I looked around at the other diners, hoping that someone would step in. But no one stopped him; drunk as he was, they let him get into a car with a seven-year-old and three-year-old. He backed out of the parking spot with a jerk, swung the car around, and pulled out onto the road. As he sped down the street, I saw oncoming headlights as he swerved toward the guardrail. I started crying, certain that we were going to crash, that we were going to die. He slammed on the brakes.

You don’t like my driving? he said. Then why don’t you drive?

Now, on top of being scared, I was confused. Was he really going to make me drive? No, that’s OK, I told him, holding back my tears.

By the grace of God, we made it home. I didn’t tell my mom. For a long time, I didn’t tell anyone.

That was hardly the worst of it.

My sisters and I shared a loft bedroom upstairs and partitioned it off to give the illusion of having our own rooms. One time, while my mom was away in Mexico with one of her girlfriends, my dad had a friend over. She had a nice smile, plump rosy cheeks, and curly blonde hair. She seemed to really like my dad, and she was nice to me. She included me in the conversation, gave me hugs, and told me I was pretty. I really liked her. The next morning, I found her and my dad in my sister’s bed (my sister was at a friend’s house). I jumped on top of them, only to discover that they were naked. They laughed at my shock. I didn’t truly understand what was happening, so I just stayed in bed with them.

My mom called that afternoon. I told her about Dad’s new friend. I did not know something was wrong until I heard her reaction. She started crying and told me to go get my dad. In that moment, I knew I’d just revealed a secret. A secret that would unleash an infidelity war.

After that episode, my mom found a friend named Mitch. I believe he was in love with her. He helped my mom financially, and though I think she was fond of him, he was more her escape than anything. And she needed him. He would buy us gifts and take us places, and more importantly, he was kind.

One time he took me to the store. He put the car in neutral. I’ll be right back, he said, then got out and closed the door behind him. As soon as he walked away, the car started rolling backward, picking up speed. He ran back as fast as he could and pulled up the parking brake. I remember the look on his face, how concerned he’d been. I wasn’t used to that. Then, one day, he was gone.

My parents tried bouts of separation. Often, we stayed with my dad at my dad’s parents’ house when my parents were trying to work things out. There I felt safer and more taken care of because they always had food around. One weekend, however, my grandparents were out of town. After my sisters and I went to bed, my dad left to go on a bender. In the morning, I woke up to find Janet, a longtime family friend and my grandparents’ cleaning lady, standing outside the closed door of my grandparents’ bedroom.

Honey, don’t go in there, she pleaded. I pushed past her and opened the door. My grandparents had separate single beds with their own televisions. My dad was passed out on my grandma’s bed with an African American woman I had never seen before. Both were naked. I was so embarrassed.

What does Janet think? I wondered. In my limited experience, I had never seen an interracial relationship, and it added to my confusion and shock. Not only did I have to deal with the disappointment of the affair, but I had to process what all of that meant and what Janet thought.

My dad was a master manipulator and a liar. He would tell us that he was going to the store to get us Popsicles and just not come back. At every special occasion, especially holidays, we waited on pins and needles to see if he would get wasted. (He would.) After a bad binge, he would swear that he would stop drinking. Really, he would just make more of an effort to hide it for a little while. One time, my mom pulled down a ceiling tile and a ton of empty bottles fell on top of her.

The family tried interventions, and my dad went in and out of rehab over the next several years to try to get healthy and also salvage his marriage. Sometimes, I visited him there. It was always awkward and strained. I hated it. We would meet in these gathering rooms with fluorescent lights and long brown tables with cheap plastic chairs. It was dreary and empty. My dad would come out and sit across from me, and I never knew what to say. He always seemed somber and sad, like a lost dog waiting for someone to take him home.

When I was about eight years old, my dad picked me up from school, drove a few blocks away, pulled over on a neighborhood street, and put the car in park. He turned to me and said, Your mom and I are getting divorced. I had little reaction. I was relieved, but more than that, I was numb. I knew the divorce was probably not going to make things better, that in all likelihood, it would make things worse.

My dad left that night, and then he was gone. Really gone. I did not care. In fact, I was glad that I didn’t have to see him as much anymore. I rarely saw him, and when I did, I resisted. There were times I would not see him for months as he was still in and out of rehab centers. Over time, I started to build a wall of strength and control. I decided I was not going to take his behavior anymore. I would do things my way. I started focusing on school. At least I could control that.

After that, my sisters and I were left alone all the time, even more than we had been before. My mom was working and going to school for interior design and staying out of the house to escape her life. I was eight, Holly was ten, Miranda was four, and we were left to fend for ourselves. I once came home from school to find my little sister standing on top of the dining room table