“Why won’t you include me?” I whined into my cell phone as if I were tattling on an older child for neglecting me. As if I hadn’t been invited to a birthday party.

“You have to live your life,” my mother said. “You’re twenty-five. It’s an important year. Your dad and I can handle this together.”

More news had come and none of it was good. Dr. Lee, an oncologist in Eugene, had diagnosed her with stage IV pancreatic cancer. There was a 3 percent chance of survival without surgery. With surgery, it would take months to recover, and even then, there was only a 20 percent chance of emerging cancer-free. My father was fighting for an appointment at MD Anderson in Houston for a second opinion. Over the phone my mom pronounced it “pancry-arty” cancer and “Andy Anderson,” which led me to believe our only hope lay in the hands of some kind of Toy Story character.

“I want to be there,” I insisted.

“Mom’s afraid you two will fight if you come,” my father admitted later. “She knows she has to put all her focus into getting better.”

I assumed the seven years I’d lived away from home had healed the wounds between us, that the strain built up in my teenage years had been forgotten. My mother had found ample space in the three thousand miles between Eugene and Philadelphia to relax her authority, and for my part, free to explore my creative impulses without constant critique, I came to appreciate all the labors she performed, their ends made apparent only in her absence. Now we were closer than ever, but my father’s admission revealed there were memories of which my mother could not let go.

From day one, I’m told, nothing about me was easy. By the time I was three, Nami Emo had dubbed me the “Famous Bad Girl.” Running into things headfirst was my specialty. Wooden swings, door frames, chair legs, metal bleachers on the Fourth of July. I still have a dent in the center of my skull from the first time I ran headfirst into the corner of our glass-top kitchen table. If there was a kid at the party who was crying, it was guaranteed to be me.

For many years, I suspected my parents might have been exaggerating or that they were ill prepared for the realities of a child’s temperament, but I have slowly come to accept, based on the unanimous recollection of multiple relatives, that I was a pretty rotten kid.

But the worst was yet to come, the tense years to which I knew my father was referring. By the second semester of eleventh grade, what could have passed up to that point for simple teenage angst had begun to escalate into a deeper depression. I had trouble sleeping and was tired all the time; I found it hard to muster the will to do much of anything. My grades had started falling and my mother and I were constantly at odds.

“You get it from my side, unfortunately,” my father told me one morning over breakfast. “Bet you can’t sleep either.”

He was sitting at the kitchen table, slurping a bowl of cereal and reading the newspaper. I was sixteen and recovering from another blowout with my mother.

“Too much going on here,” he said. He tapped on his temple without looking up and turned to the sports section.

My father was a recovered addict and had endured an adolescence far more troubled than my own. When he was nineteen, residing semi-permanently under the boardwalk in Asbury Park, he was caught selling methamphetamine to a police officer. He spent six weeks in jail before moving to a rehabilitation center in Camden County, where he became a guinea pig for a new psychotherapy treatment. He was made to wear a sign around his neck that read i’m a people pleaser and engaged in exercises in futility that would supposedly stimulate moral fiber. Every Saturday he dug a hole in the yard behind the institution, and every Sunday they made him fill it back up again. Any trouble I might be in seemed minor by comparison.

He attempted to console my mother, convince her it was a normal phase, something most teenagers ache in and out of, but she refused to accept it. I had always done well in school, and this shift coincided all too conveniently with the time to start applying to colleges. She saw my malaise as a luxury they’d paid for. My parents had given me too much and now I was full of self-pity.

She doubled down, morphing into a towering obelisk that shadowed my every move. She needled me over my weight, the width of my eyeliner, the state of my breakouts, and my lack of commitment to the toners and exfoliants she’d ordered for me from QVC. Everything I wore was an argument. I wasn’t allowed to shut my bedroom door. After school, when my friends would head to one another’s houses for weekday sleepovers, I was whisked away to extracurriculars, then stuck in the woods, left to grumble alone in my room with the door left open.

Once a week I was allowed to sleep over at my friend Nicole’s apartment, my sole respite from my mother’s overbearing supervision. Nicole’s relationship with her mom was the complete opposite of mine. Colette gave Nicole freedom to make her own decisions, and they actually seemed to enjoy spending time together.

Their two-bedroom apartment was painted in bright, bold colors and was full of cool vintage furniture and clothing from thrift shops. Longboards from Colette’s teen years in California were stacked by the front door, and souvenirs from a year abroad when she taught English in Chile lined the windowsills. A porch swing hung from the ceiling in the living room; plastic craft-store flowers weaved through the chain links that suspended it.

I admired the way they seemed more like friends than mother and daughter, envied their thrifting trips to Portland. How idyllic it seemed when I’d watch them bake together in their apartment, pressing pizzelles out of homemade batter with the heavy metal iron they’d inherited from Colette’s Italian grandmother, tracing dozens of intricate patterns into delicate, edible doilies, dreaming of the café Colette someday wished to open, a place where they could sell their baked goods and decorate the interior just like the home I found so creative and charming.

Observing Colette made me question my mother’s dreams. Her lack of purpose seemed more and more an oddity, suspect, even anti-feminist. That my care played such a principal role in her life was a vocation I naively condemned, rebuffing the intensive, invisible labor as the errand work of a housewife who’d neglected to develop a passion or a practical skill set. It wasn’t until years later, after I left for college, that I began to understand what it meant to make a home and just how much I had taken mine for granted.

But as a teenager newly obsessed with my own search for a calling, I found it impossible to imagine a meaningful life without a career or at least a supplemental passion, a hobby. Why did her interests and ambitions never seem to bubble up to the surface? Could she truly be content as only a homemaker? I began to interrogate and analyze her skill set. I suggested possible outlets—courses at the university in interior design or fashion; maybe she could start a restaurant.

“Too much work! You know Gary’s mom start her Thai restaurant—now she always running around! Never have time for anything.”

“When I’m at school, what do you do all day?”

“I do a lot, okay! You just don’t understand because you spoiled. When you move out of house you see everything Mommy do for you.”

I could tell my mother was jealous of Colette—not because of her whimsical ambitions, but because of how I idolized her desultory aims—and the more I rotted into a cruel teenager, the more I flaunted my relationship with Colette as a way of taking advantage of my mother’s emotions. I felt it was payback for how frequently she took advantage of mine.

Into the vacuum of my disinterest, music rushed to fill the void. It cracked a fissure, splintered a vein through the already precarious and widening rift between my mother and me; it would become a chasm that threatened to swallow us whole.

Nothing was as vital as music, the only comfort for my existential dread. I spent my days downloading songs one at a time off LimeWire and getting into heated discussions on AIM about whether the Foo Fighters’ acoustic version of “Everlong” was better than the original. I pocketed my allowance and lunch money to spend exclusively on CDs from House of Records, analyzing lyrics in the liner notes, obsessing over interviews with the champions of Pacific Northwest indie rock, memorizing the rosters of labels like K Records and Kill Rock Stars, and plotting which concerts I’d attend.

On the off chance a band toured through Eugene, there were two venues to play. The WOW Hall was where I saw most local shows growing up. Menomena, Joanna Newsom, Bill Callahan, Mount Eerie, and the Rock n Roll Soldiers, who were the closest band Eugene could claim as hometown heroes. They wore headbands and leather vests with tassels that hung over their bare chests, and we admired them because they were the only people we knew who had left and accomplished something—a coveted major-label deal and a slot in a Verizon Wireless commercial. We never stopped to question if what they’d accomplished had really been so great, why they were back in town to play so often.

Bigger bands played the McDonald Theatre, where I saw Modest Mouse and crowd surfed for the first time, spending a good thirty seconds on the edge of the stage beforehand to ensure someone in the front row would in fact catch me when I jumped. Isaac Brock was like a god to us. There was a rumor that his cousin lived in the next town over, in the trailer park that the song “Trailer Trash” is about, and this potential proximity made him all the more relatable—someone we could claim as our own. Everyone I knew had somehow memorized every word to his sprawling, hundred-track catalog, including the songs from his side projects and B-sides, coveted albums we were constantly trying to track down to burn and slip into the plastic sleeves of our CD binders. His lyrics epitomized what it felt like to grow up in a small gray town in the Pacific Northwest. What it was like to suffocate slowly from the boredom. His swelling eleven-minute opuses and cathartic, blood-curdling screams soundtracked every long drive with nothing to think about.

But nothing impacted me so profoundly as the first time I got my hands on a DVD of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs live at the Fillmore. The front woman, Karen O, was the first icon of the music world I worshipped who looked like me. She was half Korean and half white, with an unrivaled showmanship that obliterated the docile Asian stereotype. She was famous for wild onstage antics, spitting water into the air, bounding across to the far edges of the stage, and deep throating a microphone before lassoing it above her head by its cable. Agape at the image, I found myself in a strange state of ambivalence. My first thought being how do I get to do that, and my second, if there’s already one Asian girl doing this, then there’s no longer space for me.

Back then, I didn’t know what a scarcity mentality was. The dialogue surrounding representation in music was in its nascent stages, and because I didn’t personally know any other girls who played music, I didn’t know there were others like me struggling with the same feelings. I didn’t have the analogical capacity to imagine a white boy in the same situation, watching a live DVD of say, the Stooges, and thinking, if there’s already an Iggy Pop, how could there possibly be room for another white guy in music?

Nevertheless, Karen O made music feel more accessible, made me believe it was possible that someone like me could one day make something that meant something to other people. Fueled by this newfound optimism, I began to badger my mother incessantly for a guitar. Having already sunk a hefty sum on a long list of extracurriculars I’d summarily abandoned, she was reluctant to oblige, but by Christmas she finally broke down, and at last I received a hundred-dollar Yamaha acoustic in a box from Costco. The action was so high it felt like you had to wrestle the strings half an inch to pin them to the fret.

I started taking lessons once a week at the most embarrassing place one can learn how to play the guitar—the Lesson Factory. The Lesson Factory was like the Walmart of guitar lessons. It was connected to the Guitar Center and inside there were about ten soundproof cubicles, each equipped with two chairs and two amplifiers and your very own defeated musician recruited off Craigslist. I was lucky enough to be paired with a teacher I actually liked, who must have considered me a welcome break from prepubescent boys who exclusively wanted to learn how to play Green Day songs and the intro to “Stairway to Heaven.”

The lessons couldn’t have come at a better time. That same year Nick Hawley-Gamer took the seat next to me in English and it felt like I’d won the lottery. I’d heard about him because he was Maya Brown’s neighbor and ex-boyfriend. I didn’t have any classes with Maya, but she was known to all of us because every boy in our grade had a crush on her. Infuriatingly, she was objectively pretty and popular but masqueraded as a tormented alternative. She dyed her brown hair jet black, wore caramel-colored corduroys, and would write things on her arms in pen so she wouldn’t forget them, thoughts she later wrote in her LiveJournal, which I followed assiduously even though we weren’t friends in real life. Her entries were made up of Bright Eyes lyrics conflated with her own romantic encounters and meandering ruminations largely written in the second person, directed at someone anonymous who had either wronged her or for whom she desperately longed. I thought she was one of the great American poets of our time.