Shortly after my parents’ divorce, my mother took us to see a family counselor. I don’t remember if my younger sister was with us at the time. She was only one. My older sisters were ten and twelve, and I was eight. This one session we attended has stuck with me my entire life. It’s where I was first introduced to the concept of family roles: the scapegoat, the hero, the lost child, and the mascot. That’s the order in which I remember them and the order in which my sisters and I fell headlong into them. These dysfunctional family dynamics are so predictable and so prevalent, they’re spelled out in psychology textbooks with little cartoon figurines and everything. Damn it! I hate getting lost. I hate feeling lost. I hate feeling as though I’m treading water, kicking and paddling and never getting anywhere. I’d never felt lost before this as a child. I was the one who wandered off chasing whatever caught my eye. I was confident and adventurous. My mother had to hunt me down. It was never the other way around. But when my father left, he took my inner compass with him. My home was gone, and it was never going to come back again, ever. My entire reason for being vanished, and I disappeared into the shadows of an unfriendly, uncaring world.