By Vicki Larson
I am about to say something I ever thought I would say ― I feel bad for Ted Cruz.
The Texas Republican senator's 14-year-old daughter was hospitalized with self-inflicted knife wounds last week that the family, in a statement, noted weren't serious and that she's OK.
Physical wounds will heal, emotional wounds don't always. And while no one knows why the teen harmed herself, she came out as bisexual about a year ago in a now-private TikTok video that went viral and in which she declared, "I really disagree with most of his views."
She's at the age when kids are quite aware of their parents' failings and hypocrisies, so this does not surprise me.
Her father, like many Republican politicians and folks across the country, has been openly hostile to the LGBTQ+ community.
If you have a loved one who is queer or genderqueer ― as many of us do ― or that is how you identify, the world feels especially hard right now, in light of the hate-fueled mass murder at a LGBTQ+ club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last month. Same if you have a loved one who struggles with mental health, or struggle yourself. The pandemic has not made anything easier.
On TikTok the day after, the teen, reading from a script, was clear ― her cutting "had nothing to do with my sexuality or my father. I'm not suicidal but I am experiencing some mental issues. ... But the most traumatizing part of this experience is how public it's been."
It reminds me of when Claudia Conway, the 16-year-old daughter of Kellyanne Conway and George Conway, made headlines when she declared on Twitter in 2020 that she was "officially pushing for emancipation" from her parents, and accused her mom of physical and verbal abuse. A year later she announced ― this time on TikTok ― that things were getting better with her mother. "I know it's not really anyone's business, but I kind of made it everyone's business ― not intentionally. I was seeking help earlier this year, last year, because I was in a state where I didn't know what to do."
We didn't have a way to express our feelings about our mental health so publicly when I was a teen, if we spoke about it at all; we generally just flopped ourselves on a friend's bed and spoke in hushed voices if a parent ― usually their mom ― was home. And they were almost always home.
We were surrounded by dysfunctional families but we couldn't possibly know that. We had grown up watching "Father Knows Best" and "Leave it to Beaver," so it was easy to believe that the only problematic family was your own and if you were feeling sad or depressed it was your fault.
Here we are in the holidays, supposedly the happiest time of the year, when we're surrounded by family and sharing laughter and good times together. Yet for many people, being with family is not exactly where they want to be, at the holidays or anytime. It may be true that Cruz's daughter feels 100 percent accepted by her father for being bi, but many LGBTQ+ kids aren't. If your family rejects you and the powers that be want to deny you your basic human rights, where do you go to feel safe?
I've long thought that kids should be able to pick their families. They could bypass the abusive ones, the addicted ones, the depressed ones, the angry ones, the narcissistic ones, the overbearing ones, the ones that leave deep holes in our psyche and heart, the ones who can't accept us for who we are.
It doesn't work that way, unfortunately, which is why we're all a bit walking wounded.
We are experiencing a mental health crisis right now, increasingly among our youths. In the first half of 2021, more than 44 percent of teens said they were having ongoing feelings of sadness and hopelessness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It also found ― disturbingly ― that 55 percent experienced emotional abuse by a parent or other adult in the home and 11% had been physical abused by a parent.
I am reminded that domestic violence is the No. 1 violent crime in Marin.
It's long been known that being exposed to such things as violence, neglect and family dysfunction lead to poorer mental health and brain aging. Childhood trauma "can't be buried and it can't be killed. It's the revenant that won't stop, the ghost that's always coming for you. The nightmares, the intrusions, the hiding, the doubts, the confusion, the self-blame, the suicidal ideation," the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz wrote of being raped repeatedly when he was just 8 years old by an adult he trusted. He waited 41 years to talk about it.
So I feel for all our teens and I feel for Cruz's daughter. Who knows what family trauma she's experiencing.
But we all know that she'll experience trauma throughout her life from people like her own father who want to harm people just like her ― queer.
Vicki Larson's "So It Goes" opinion column runs every other week on the Marin Independent Journal, Novato, Calif. This article was distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
I am about to say something I ever thought I would say ― I feel bad for Ted Cruz.
The Texas Republican senator's 14-year-old daughter was hospitalized with self-inflicted knife wounds last week that the family, in a statement, noted weren't serious and that she's OK.
Physical wounds will heal, emotional wounds don't always. And while no one knows why the teen harmed herself, she came out as bisexual about a year ago in a now-private TikTok video that went viral and in which she declared, "I really disagree with most of his views."
She's at the age when kids are quite aware of their parents' failings and hypocrisies, so this does not surprise me.
Her father, like many Republican politicians and folks across the country, has been openly hostile to the LGBTQ+ community.
If you have a loved one who is queer or genderqueer ― as many of us do ― or that is how you identify, the world feels especially hard right now, in light of the hate-fueled mass murder at a LGBTQ+ club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last month. Same if you have a loved one who struggles with mental health, or struggle yourself. The pandemic has not made anything easier.
On TikTok the day after, the teen, reading from a script, was clear ― her cutting "had nothing to do with my sexuality or my father. I'm not suicidal but I am experiencing some mental issues. ... But the most traumatizing part of this experience is how public it's been."
It reminds me of when Claudia Conway, the 16-year-old daughter of Kellyanne Conway and George Conway, made headlines when she declared on Twitter in 2020 that she was "officially pushing for emancipation" from her parents, and accused her mom of physical and verbal abuse. A year later she announced ― this time on TikTok ― that things were getting better with her mother. "I know it's not really anyone's business, but I kind of made it everyone's business ― not intentionally. I was seeking help earlier this year, last year, because I was in a state where I didn't know what to do."
We didn't have a way to express our feelings about our mental health so publicly when I was a teen, if we spoke about it at all; we generally just flopped ourselves on a friend's bed and spoke in hushed voices if a parent ― usually their mom ― was home. And they were almost always home.
We were surrounded by dysfunctional families but we couldn't possibly know that. We had grown up watching "Father Knows Best" and "Leave it to Beaver," so it was easy to believe that the only problematic family was your own and if you were feeling sad or depressed it was your fault.
Here we are in the holidays, supposedly the happiest time of the year, when we're surrounded by family and sharing laughter and good times together. Yet for many people, being with family is not exactly where they want to be, at the holidays or anytime. It may be true that Cruz's daughter feels 100 percent accepted by her father for being bi, but many LGBTQ+ kids aren't. If your family rejects you and the powers that be want to deny you your basic human rights, where do you go to feel safe?
I've long thought that kids should be able to pick their families. They could bypass the abusive ones, the addicted ones, the depressed ones, the angry ones, the narcissistic ones, the overbearing ones, the ones that leave deep holes in our psyche and heart, the ones who can't accept us for who we are.
It doesn't work that way, unfortunately, which is why we're all a bit walking wounded.
We are experiencing a mental health crisis right now, increasingly among our youths. In the first half of 2021, more than 44 percent of teens said they were having ongoing feelings of sadness and hopelessness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It also found ― disturbingly ― that 55 percent experienced emotional abuse by a parent or other adult in the home and 11% had been physical abused by a parent.
I am reminded that domestic violence is the No. 1 violent crime in Marin.
It's long been known that being exposed to such things as violence, neglect and family dysfunction lead to poorer mental health and brain aging. Childhood trauma "can't be buried and it can't be killed. It's the revenant that won't stop, the ghost that's always coming for you. The nightmares, the intrusions, the hiding, the doubts, the confusion, the self-blame, the suicidal ideation," the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz wrote of being raped repeatedly when he was just 8 years old by an adult he trusted. He waited 41 years to talk about it.
So I feel for all our teens and I feel for Cruz's daughter. Who knows what family trauma she's experiencing.
But we all know that she'll experience trauma throughout her life from people like her own father who want to harm people just like her ― queer.
Vicki Larson's "So It Goes" opinion column runs every other week on the Marin Independent Journal, Novato, Calif. This article was distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
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