Psychiatry insists that disorders of the mind are biochemically based, yet it pursues lines of questioning that place much of the weight of the expression of symptoms on early social experience. This is not unique. Oncologists, cardiologists, and endocrinologists, to name just a few, reference behavioral influences in their diagnoses, but psychiatry places a special emphasis on development, and things other people may have done to, or demanded of, the patient. Every therapist, in the hospital and out, wanted to talk about my childhood, as if serotonin was a byproduct of Freudian theories about life with my mother.
Dr G prescribed meds, but he was a psychoanalyst at heart. He had a coup in the point that I certainly liked to talk about myself, but I was reluctant to bring my family into the discussion. I was taking full responsibility for the onset of the disease that afflicted me, whatever disease it was, for the diagnosis kept changing. I would not fault my parents, siblings, or anyone else. I spent months defending my childhood, arguing that if the illness was biological and was treated with psychopharmaceuticals, then things my parents or peers did when I was young had no effect at all on my being sick now. I idealized my childhood to the point where I didn’t know which stories were true and which were mere family legend. What I did remember were the books I read. To this day books remain my biggest influence, and I spent countless afternoons and evenings as a child at the town’s library looking things up and learning all I could. The rows of shelves taller than me left me gazing skyward in wonder of all there was to learn. The card catalogue was a treasure of tabbed drawers full of legends I could aspire to and devour. Years later, when I ran into the old librarian at a wedding, it was like reuniting with a long-lost family member. When I sat down with Dr G, hell, when I sat down with anyone, I wanted to discuss books and ideas. But he was having none of it. He wanted to hear about my family. So I told him what I knew.
I have two brothers. Rich is four years older than me, and Troy is three years younger. They were both star athletes and I was not, and they both worked at their studies when I never had to crack a book to do just as well. Rich was full of charm and humor, trained as a civil engineer, and went on to become an executive with a pharmaceutical company, with a terrific wife and three good, smart kids. Troy was more challenged and shy. He barely spoke before he entered kindergarten, but he hit his stride, worked very hard, and became a physical therapist with his own practice. He, too, married well, and had two promising kids who both excelled at most everything they did. The years between the three of us meant that we never really hung out together in school. They had tight friendships that have lasted years. I drifted between groups and haven’t carried any early friendships with me into the present. Rich and Troy both went the traditional route to college from high school, so I got a head start on both and succeeded in business while they were still studying, but they quickly caught up to my early success. We all still get together, and I look up to them both.
My sister, Stacey, and I have a very special relationship. She is the youngest, and of course, we brothers looked out for her. She may be the smartest of all of us. When I was 17 and she was 12 and Mom was at work, I used to make a big deal of leaving through the front door with my girlfriend, only to sneak in the back door to slip into my room and tie her up with guitar cables. Stacey wrote me a letter saying she knew I wasn’t really leaving, and she knew what we were doing in there. Years later she went to study in Australia and I truly missed her. I never took pictures when I traveled, never saved trophies from when I was young, and have never cared for sentimentality or looking back. But I saved every one of the letters she wrote me. Later in life, when both of us were single, we would vacation together, and we’ve always leaned on each other for support.
Mom and Dad must have parented well to turn out such good kids. They embodied the American dream, starting out in a trailer living with the jockeys at Garden State Park, only to grow their family into the large duplex where we all grew up in Haddon Heights, NJ, and, by the time I was in high school, a vacation home in the woods on a lake in the Poconos. When I was younger we took trips to campgrounds at the shore and in Shenandoah Park, and while, from gnats through the screen that left us up to our necks in the bay to escape their biting, to a floating air mattress from leaks in the tent, there was always some disaster, we still laugh about those trips now.
My parents never fully understood me, as I was always into science, literature, history, and politics they couldn’t grasp, but they made every effort to develop the talents I had. Dad was an athlete and a coach, so a bookish child was a challenge for him. But he was always there. When I got into sailing and used to peddle my bike each weekend to Cooper River to crew for the men on their GP-14s, a sail appeared under the Christmas tree, and Dad would haul my little dingy onto the roof of the car so that we could go and sail, the racing boats bearing down on us, skippers shouting, as we struggled through the regatta on a starboard tack. When my band needed a space to rehearse in, he built and wired a room in the basement where we could emulate rock stars and practice to play school dances and, once, for the entire town before the fireworks on the 4th of July.
Mom dove into her kids, sewed costumes for Halloween and the school play, and became president of the PTA. She made me a Pieta at her ceramics class and took me aside when she sensed something was bothering me. I remember sitting at the top of the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art after she took me to a Van Gogh exhibit. She told me to point out my favorite building in Philadelphia’s still squat skyline, and when I did, she assured me that if I worked hard enough it could be mine. And she believed it. She cooked our pork chops so well-done that we could break them on the table, but she was caring and available. Once, when I was eighteen and working as a tour guide, meeting a group headed to Disney World at the Boston airport, I met an old guy at the hotel bar. I was naïve and followed him to his room where he said we could drink for free. He showed me dirty magazines and sat on the bed and touched my leg. Suddenly aware, I pushed him aside and ran back to my room. I called Mom.
No problems came until high school when my motivation evaporated. I blame it on math, not my parents. More advanced math was hard, and I had poor study habits, so I just quit. I never did take calculus. When other things got hard I quit them, too. My parents didn’t raise a quitter, no way, so they had no idea what to do with me. I fled when I was 19 and moved into the home of a 40-year-old woman who lived in Media, Pennsylvania. But when that ended I was written a speeding ticket racing home across the Walt Whitman Bridge, long and bright in the middle of the night, trembling as I pulled up the incline of the driveway of my childhood home. My parents assured me they’d always take me in; always be there; always reluctant to, but inevitably only able to, judge.
Dr G also wanted to know about Debra, and what happened there. I honestly couldn’t tell him. We were still close, and talked all the time, but we were finished as a couple and slowly and painfully pulled further and further apart. We still speak, and end every phone call with a friendly, “I love you that” that neither of us knows quite what it means. I don’t think we ever did. We were so set on equality that we forgot Aristotle’s caution that there is nothing less equal than trying to make things that are unequal, equal. We were each so selfish that there was little room for anyone beside ourselves in our separate hearts. We never fully knew what happened, not from the day we met, not now.
Debra tells me I was hospitalized in Richmond a second time, and Mom insists that when she came to visit later I still saw the dead walking in the fields as we drove by, but I remember nothing of that, so that’s not part of my story. I told stories to Dr G, some that were true, and some I read in books. Only I didn’t know the difference between the two and I still don’t. I’d veer off into whatever interested me at the time, to the exclusion of all else, just as likely to change entirely a week or two later and adopt a different persona with a different set of facts. I should have been more careful and consistent with what I insisted was true, because often it wasn’t.
My room in the hairdresser’s house was small, and I spent little time there. I’d sit outside and read Japanese authors like Yoshimoto, Murakami, and both Suzukis, and I read everything by Mishima that was translated into English, the myth of the rising sun still burning in my mind even as the lost decade in Japan was well established. My political wanderings landed me right into neoliberalism: the very big, planned out corporate sponsored government that masqueraded as libertarianism and was ascendant in the Regan era then covertly realized under Clinton. My own brand of libertarianism gave way to pragmatism as my economic sun set and I suddenly wasn’t as free as I thought I was, and I obsessed over the cost of everything. A couple named Paul and Margi, who were artists and co-workers at the coffee shop, commanded much of my time, and I sat a witness and participant as they created. We posed in an ad for a fictitious law firm with the caption, “If you’re thinking of having an accident, call us first.” A piece called Credit Racket in which Paul applied for cards from every credit card solicitation he received for two years and cut them all up and glued them to a board, posed a special problem years later when he applied for a mortgage and had dozens of open lines of credit that needed to be closed. I’d lie in the grass at the vast estate of Maymont with a Walkman, and listen to Glass, O’Reilly, and Reich, never quite sure when one piece ended and another began. I made my life as minimal as possible, but so much was going on in my head that the thoughts just tumbled like the music I listened to - stuck in the groove. The lithium Dr G prescribed was unpleasant, so I stopped taking it and the tremors ceased and my skin cleared up.
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Budding mania fueled an extreme energy and a bent toward innovation that fueled my early success. I embodied a positive, everything established be damned, attitude that led me to very new places, and I thrived. But, in my personal time, I still showed a tendency toward inertia that now combined with a new found caution about change that slowed me down and prevented my re-entry into a successful business venture. I evolved from saying yes to almost anything to standing in the traffic of new ideas yelling, “Stop!” Given what I’d been through, this may be understandable, but it was death to my success in business. I was simply scared of new stuff.
I retained an anti-establishment bias, but killed the evolutionary impulse and found myself stuck in a rut. I told myself that the hole in my resume and the fallibility of my reason would forever hold me back, and I inured all risk from my life. I became less and less able to stand up to the changes the disease forced on me and, of all my irrational thoughts, this became the most damaging. Full of madness and caution, I reflected that if I presented my present self to my former self, the old me would not hire the new me to do anything at all. I let reality slip, saw only threats in the visions that came to me, and lost all sense of risk. It was no wonder that politically I was becoming more conservative. I was afraid of change while at the same time throwing away all that was stable in my life. I rationalized this by adhering to the insistence that decisions followed a carefully thought-out philosophy, but I was neither careful nor thinking. In the end, I became very risk averse toward anything that required big plans and long-term effort, like career or enterprise or venture, and crazily impulsive with things I just fell into, like jobs, or spending money, or even relationships. The long-term and effortful left me bound by a fear of failure, or possibly a fear of success, that left me grounded when I once flew. The mindless entry into things that just happened held me back just as much as the caution about things that took effort, and I made bad, quick decisions about things that would affect me for a very long time, and things that would cost me a lot: A lot of time, a lot of emotional energy, and a lot of money. I threw out all that held me stable, committing some metaphorical suicide since I was afraid of ending up alone and old. It was 1995, I was only 32, yet I felt finished. Caged by the thought that I couldn’t go back, not to the job, not to Debra, not to my past self, I needed something new. But I said no to everything until Theresa came along.
There’s nothing more inspiring than budding love, and I was in love with the idea of falling in love. Anyone could have met my criteria for a match. Desire was all I had left, and all I thought I could do. Whether this need for someone else was borne of promise or self-loathing, I’ll never know, but I met a new woman and she was a handful, and I decided not to look back. Rushing into things had so often gotten me into trouble, but also into stability, so I threw off the chains of caution and set out with no planning at all, off to new places, if not newfound security or rational thought.
I was holding court at the Starbucks I worked at as if the espresso machine were a stage, and discovered that only while working did I feel fully alive. Things came to me when I was engaged in something productive. Things like ideas, confidence, and people. I began dating an attorney who liked to take me places. She was extremely busy and canceled a lot, but she managed to fit me in from time to time and expose me to things in Richmond that were well above my station in life. I was a climber still.
But there was this other woman, young, dark-haired and dark-eyed, beautiful, yet with a boisterous, snorting laugh, who hung out at the coffee bar. She had a brash Jersey accent and an irreverence toward everything. She seemed to show up for every one of my shifts, and we flirted, trading Yankee-fueled insights about the tightly wound south. But nothing was inevitable in my life. I liked her, yet uncharacteristically, I kept a careful distance for a bit.
I learned her name was Theresa and she was a med student in her last year at MCV. She lived with a rich roommate and unhappily dated a rich, young, doctor, and seemed to have an awful lot of time to kill for someone in med school. She was brilliant, disarming, full of energy, and wounded deep within. I’d met my match.
One night the attorney planned to take me to Lemaire at the Jefferson Hotel, but she called in the afternoon to cancel. I asked Theresa if she wanted to go out instead. Thrilled at the prospect of going to Lemaire, she said yes, but I burst that bubble and told her I could never afford that. I knew a place, Mexican Restaurant Number 3, that had great food, bad lighting, and fishbowl-sized watery margaritas, so you could drink a lot and feel a little, and I sold it to her like it was a restaurant on the Michelin list. She laughed at the thought of it, but I picked her up later at her apartment in my now silly Acura and we went out for chips and salsa.
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My life had boiled down to just a few places, and even that list was slimming. When not working, I trampled the same paths everyday. Uncomfortable when I was closed in, I spent most of my time outdoors. After spending afternoons for months carving turns in the vast, sloped, asphalt, I stopped rollerblading on the parking lot of The Shrine. I went to the cemetery less and less often, standing by the gates as the sky fired with the sunrise over the marker covered hills and ancient trees, I sought less darkness and more light. The cemetery just felt too full of shady spots.
I kept coming back, in any weather, to the Japanese garden at Maymont. There was a bench by the pond, just beyond a disjointed bridge and walking stones placed in the water set for entering the stream, and I sat there for hours assessing the landscape – so carefully cut back and cultivated, forever pruned but always assaulted by assertive nature creeping in to grow over the paths and choke the koi with algae. The perfect meadow was a fraud, and the land left without constant care would soon be a mess. After reading so much Japanese literature and walking among the maples, I was drawn to the challenge of Zen, the dare to just experience what arises without judgment, but I knew that meditation was required and the thought of confronting the barbs hidden around the corners of my mind terrified me, so I never took to the cushion. My time in the Japanese garden was as close as I would come to contemplation, as there was always a blue jay skittering into the bamboo to pull me back when my thoughts ranged too far from the trees and sky reflected on the water. Again, I was outside, free of the bind of limitations I faced in my room, open to the expansive, clouded, sky over the James just beyond the fence and the train tracks from where I sat. The garden, too, was bound, and even though the boundaries of Maymont were carefully hidden, I couldn’t help but know they were there.
Theresa and I laughed through dinner and through the next few days we spent together. I was on medications with disruptive side effects, and she took an SSRI anti-depressant, so sex was difficult at first, but we each let just enough of our guard down to establish an intimacy rare in two people looking to hitch each other to each other’s wagon and pull out of Richmond toward a life each quietly envisioned; a life of shallowness and happiness rare in people so lost in thought and backed into a corner by events outside of their control. There was a shadow that occasionally crept across Theresa’s smiling visage, a shadow of a story tinged with experience about which I dare not ask, and she dare not tell. We were constructing a fantasy, and she asked little about my own struggle. We saw each other for what we could be, not who we were, and we leapt for it.
I could be a master of finance, but I had moved so far from business that the cost of re-entry was capital I was unsure that I could invest. She wanted to go to law school, but she had bled so much into med school and graduated as a doctor, unlikely to ever practice medicine. We both adhered to the worst possible advice, “Fake it ‘till you make it,” and I discarded all I learned from my readings in Zen. I was not to overcome my suffering. I was not to recognize hers. We both privately determined to just will it away, and I never did take Theresa to Maymont.
We met in the fall of 1995 and by June of 1996 we were married and on our way to Phoenix, Arizona. Theresa didn’t match at any of the internships she applied for, so a late spring scramble for a spot placed her in a VA hospital in the desert. I left a lot behind in Richmond. Without looking back I packed indiscriminately and moved for a short time to New Jersey, where we were to celebrate our marriage before we moved out west.
We hired and officiant who was a client of my mother’s travel agency; a pastor who owned a few drug addiction clinics. The ceremony and reception took place at the Bridgewater Manor, a New Jersey wedding factory, all very ornate and over the top, and we served canapés, a sit-down dinner, and danced. The readings we chose were from a collection of English Christian verse, and much to Theresa’s family’s lament, the service was as far from a Catholic mass as we could get it. Throughout the vows a niece of mine, just an infant, screamed at the top of her lungs, and few heard anything we said as we exchanged vows. But my family were listening to the baby, as if the child was screaming, “Stop!” The very sentiment each one of them had expressed the night before.
I told them what Theresa had confessed a few days earlier. It turned out that during her last year at med school, not that long before I met her, she interrupted her studies because she broke down, and she was admitted to Charter Westbrook like me. Her doctor was Dr G. In her therapy he suggested that she visit a Starbucks in the West End and ask for a barista named George. I don’t think it’s ethical for a psychiatrist to play matchmaker, but we did hit it off, after all. My family was outraged and foresaw only doom. I thought it would be hypocritical of me to refuse to marry someone who was hospitalized, despite the set-up of our meeting and the fact that, in therapy, Dr G encouraged me to take the plunge. In hindsight, I wish he’d stuck to prescribing medicine, trying out new potions until one worked.
At the reception, Theresa and I promised each other not to succumb to the trite act of pushing wedding cake into each other’s faces, and the cake was cut and we fed each other gently. While visiting the tables of our guests a bit later we came to a friend of Theresa’s from undergrad. He aspired to be a dilettante and smashed his slice of cake in Theresa’s face. She laughed and I wanted to deck him. In hindsight, he should have smashed the cake in my face because he and Theresa would later have an affair when things got rough between her and me.
We honeymooned in Banff and Lake Louise, and then it was time to move on. All the clichés we had been told as children, “If you work hard enough you can be whatever you want to be, have whatever you want to have, accomplish whatever you set out to accomplish,” stretched out before us over the miles of highway as we drove ahead across the country, in a U-Haul truck towing a car - everything we had, for I had more stuff to take this time, packed away in boxes, fermenting in the heat in the truck in mid-summer on our way toward a life we never considered, and always wanted.