Washington opens up about her childhood in her new memoir, 'Thicker Than Water.'
Kerry Washington is looking back on some of the formative experiences and long-hidden traumas of her childhood in her emotionally charged new memoir, Thicker Than Water.
In an excerpt from Washington's forthcoming book -- published by Oprah Daily -- Washington recalls the vitriolic fights her parents used to get into when she was a child, and how the fear and stress from their bitter battles impacted her own young mind.
"From what I remember, most of my parents’ fights were about money, and about the fact that neither of them felt like they were in the marriage they wanted to be in, or more precisely, that they were married to the person they wanted to be married to," Washington recalls in her book.
The celebrated actress explains that her parents "both harbored deep disappointment over what their lives had become" and would scream at one another with deeply held anger. However, it was also important to them to keep face around their kids and other families.
"We pretended to ourselves, to each other, and to the outside world that our family was not suffering the pain of life’s disappointments," Washington writes, explaining that her parents would often save their brutal bickering for when she was asleep, wrongly believing that insulated her from the tension between them.
"As a young child, I would lie in bed and listen for signs of how serious each battle was and when it might come to an end... I developed panic attacks at night," Washington writes, saying that the panic attacks began when she was only seven.
"They manifested first as a rhythm of anxiety that encircled my brain, then evolved into a rapid pulsing, a whirling frenzy of metallic thumps, like those nauseating old spinning rides at a county fair," she recalls. "It was the sound of terror, wholly unnatural and unconnected to the rhythms of my heart. I was dizzied with terror, no ground beneath me."
Washington remembers how she "couldn't make it stop" and she couldn't sleep when the panic would set in.
"Even on peaceful nights, I trembled at the possibility of it," she writes. "Sometimes, I would rock my body back and forth, vibrating, rattling, trying to drown out the pulsing noise and regain control of my body."
Washington explains how she would try to get to sleep as quickly as she could, before she felt those first pangs of panic, because otherwise sleep would be next to impossible. If the panic did set in, "Only exhaustion would override the rhythm, lulling me to the dream state beyond my fears."
Eventually, Washington had enough of pretending and panicking in silence and, during a particularly loud fight one evening, she burst into the room where they were arguing and screamed for them to stop.
"Watching me enter the stage in the middle of their war was a final stab at my mother’s already wounded dreams. What she had dreamed of was a happy family. In her mind, she was supposed to be a successful working mother with a loving husband. She was supposed to have 2.5 kids, a couple of nice cars, and a schedule filled with service to her community and her family. She had wanted to create a world that was different from the one she grew up in... and she was failing," Washington writes. "Looking back, I think my mother was trapped in the fun-house version of her dream, an upside-down reality filled with anger, fear, and resentment."
After Washington confronted her parents, things the next day were back to normal with her mom pretending once more that nothing was wrong. But for Washington, things weren't normal at all. She says she decided to just stay quiet, stay in her room, and accept the situation.
"I became more private and withdrawn. I resolved to stay in my room at night while the dreaded internal pulse of the rhythm terrorized me to sleep. My parents’ battles were minor in comparison to the one that was raging within me," she writes. "My mind and body became the enemy; I was trapped within them."
She made it her mission to be perfect, on the chance that their love for her could heal her parents' faltering relationship.
"I tucked away the fear and started to develop a role, a character that would stay with me: The good girl. The perfect child. The solution," she writes. "It was clear that my parents had lost their ability to express their love for each other, but perhaps a shared love for me could help them find it again."
Washington's Thicker Than Water: A Memoir comes out Sept. 26.
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