The House of Self

Here’s a truth: I work in movies and television, and I hardly watch TV. To be honest, for the past decade, I have probably turned it on twenty times. And always around Christmas because I like to make sure it still works and because I love watching the twelve-hour YouTube video of a fireplace. I swear to God, it makes the house feel warmer in the winter.

So why don’t I watch TV if I work in the business? First of all, because everything I watch, I have to watch twice. The first time, I am just critiquing it. The second time, if it has a good storyline, I can actually enjoy it. I am constantly picking things apart. The sets. The paint. The choices. The details. The things no normal person should care about, but that my brain absolutely will not let go of.

The other reason is that I have so many creative ideas and things I want to do that I usually make those the priority. But lately, I have been wanting actually to sit down and relax, so I have been trying to watch more TV. A few nights ago, I watched The Glass Castle. I thought it was fine. I read the book a long time ago, and I do not remember it being the same. But I think that is often true when you read the book first and then see the movie. You are usually disappointed. So I have a tendency to watch the movie first and then read the book if the movie is interesting enough.

But most of the time when I watch TV, I watch kids’ movies. I think I have seen Moana fifty times. I do not like the newer one as much as the original, but what I love about kids’ movies is that they reduce life to its simplest, most basic understanding. They do not complicate things the way we do as adults. Kids’ movies simplify. They name things plainly. They show you the truth in a way your adult brain might otherwise try to outsmart.

Recently, somebody suggested I watch Encanto, and I seriously felt personally attacked by this movie. Not in a bad way. More in the way that it made me look at things differently. And I think that is what good stories do. They show you something about yourself before you even realize you are looking.

I did not just relate to one character, which is what we usually do. I related to basically all of them. All of them felt like a part of who I am, and I think that might be true for a lot of us. Maybe we do not carry every character in the exact same way, but we carry pieces of these roles. The strong one. The perfect one. The truth-teller. The quiet one. The caretaker. The emotional one. The one who does not know where they fit.

I was Mirabel, the one without the obvious gift, trying to prove that she belonged in a family system where you had to prove your worth by being useful. She could see what was breaking before anyone else wanted to admit there were any cracks, and she was trying to hold everyone together while really wondering, what about me? Where do I fit?

I was Luisa, carrying everything because I could. The strong one. The dependable one. The one who could lift donkeys and buildings, tend to family emergencies and all the emotional labor and impossible expectations. The one who looked fine because she was functional, but underneath, she was like a pressure pot building.

Then there is Isabela, trapped inside the performance of being beautiful, graceful, good, and easy to love. The golden child inside her own cage. I call it the “dance, monkey, dance” role. When you are expected to perform on command the way everybody else wants you to. But it is really when she makes something prickly and real that she becomes more alive. For her, it was a cactus. An honest cactus. The first time she made something that was hers.

And then there was Bruno, exiled for telling the truth. He saw what no one else wanted to see. He carried the burden of perception. He became the scapegoat because the system could not tolerate the information he shared. So the family made a rule: we don’t talk about Bruno. Which essentially meant Bruno could not talk for Bruno.

Sometimes I think every family has a Bruno. The person who names the dysfunction. Or maybe it is the person who remembers what everyone else rewrote. Sometimes it is the person who carries the grief, the pattern, or the uncomfortable truth. They saw him as dangerous, but he was not. He was just inconvenient.

Then there was Dolores, hearing everything and saying almost nothing. Hyperaware. Tuned in. Listening through walls. Catching shifts in tone. Noticing what was not said in order to understand what was being said. People like Dolores are often mistaken for quiet, but they are actually overloaded. She knew too much because she heard too much.

Then there was Pepa, trying to control the weather of her emotions because everyone else was affected by them. Her gift was her trap. She was not allowed to simply feel. Her feelings became the climate. Her anxiety, the clouds. Her fear, the storms. And everyone around her seemed to need her to calm down, not because she was unsafe, but because her emotions made the room uncomfortable.

I think that one hit the most. Because some of us learned very early that our feelings were too much. Too visible. Too inconvenient. So we tried to regulate not just ourselves, but everyone else’s reaction to us. And somewhere in that reaction, we lost orientation to who we were.

I was Julieta, healing everyone with what she made. The caretaker. The nourisher. The one whose labor becomes medicine. There is something beautiful in that, but also something exhausting. When your gift is healing, people can forget you are a person who also needs care. They come to you hungry, wounded, needing something. And because you can give it, you do. Again and again and again. Until you are utterly depleted and shrunken in your own existence.

And then there is Abuela. The one who built the house. The one who survived the original trauma. The one who lost so much that she became devoted to never losing anything again. Her control did not come from nowhere. Her hardness was built around grief. Her fear became family law. Her pain became a system everyone else had to live inside.

Just hear that sentence for a moment. “Her pain became a system everyone else had to live inside.” How many of us know what this is like? When we have to tiptoe around another to stay close, even when it feels uncomfortable.

That is what generational trauma does. It starts as survival, then becomes structure. It starts as protection, then becomes pressure. It starts as, “I never want us to suffer again,” and somehow turns into, “You must become perfect so I can feel safe.”

The origin of trauma bleeds into later friendships, relationships, and truly, it becomes the whole lens of how we view and interact with the world around us.

That is why Encanto works so well. The magic is not really the point. The house is the nervous system. The candle is the family story. The cracks are the truth trying to get in. The gifts are the roles everyone had to play to keep the whole thing standing. And Mirabel, the one without a gift, becomes the one who can see the system clearly.

That feels important. Sometimes the person who does not fit the family structure is not broken. Sometimes they are the doorway out of it. Or a window into it. Sometimes, the one who cannot perform the assigned role is the one who reveals the cost of everyone else’s performance. Sometimes not having a “gift” is what allows you to see the people underneath theirs.

I think that is why I cried. Because kids’ movies always make me cry, I swear. But also because I feel like we all have parts of ourselves that learned to adapt in order to move through the world. Maybe we do not hold all the characters that Encanto has. Maybe we just have slivers of them around different people. But it is the fact that it is being named, I think, and the ability to visually watch it play out in front of you. It becomes interesting and sort of like its own excavation.

Maybe you have been the strong one. The shapeshifter. The truth-teller. The sensor. The caretaker. The emotional weather system. The one trying to be perfect. The one exiled for naming things. The one wondering why you did not get the same kind of magic everyone else seemed to have.

And maybe you have also been the house. Cracking quietly while everyone kept asking it to hold.

What Encanto understands is that healing does not happen because everyone finally performs better. Healing happens when the performance stops. When Luisa gets to be tired. When Isabela gets to be messy. When Bruno gets to come home. When Mirabel gets to be seen. When Abuela finally tells the truth about what happened to her. When the family stops worshiping the miracle and starts seeing the people carrying it.

Maybe that is what coming home really is. Not returning to a perfect place. Not fixing the house so it never cracks again. Not becoming the version of yourself that everyone else can understand, praise, or use.

Maybe coming home is when all the parts of you that had to leave in order to survive are finally allowed back in. The strong one. The scared one. The beautiful one. The angry one. The quiet one. The truth-teller. The caretaker. The one who performed. The one who disappeared. The one who kept holding the whole house up while wondering if anyone could see her shaking.

The person becomes whole when all the parts of who they are get to come home and live inside the house.

The house of self.

That is what home means to me now. It is not one place. It is not one person. It is not a house that never breaks. It is the ability to stay close to yourself, even when everything around you shifts.

That is why I can go wherever I want in this world and still not be far from who I am.

Because the real miracle was never the house.

It was learning how to come home to myself.

It just so happens home looks like Skewed North — a little off center and a little on point.

Off course. On purpose.