She said, severely depressed, disoriented, out of control, she said. Suicidal. No, not that. It would have taken far more engagement I believed to have pulled off such a feat. Far more moral courage. Still it could happen perhaps — one liaison, one toxic narcotic cocktail away. I protested when she began the litany against me, but still I understood it as such: I was suffering, had been suffering a long time — in this time before real writing — when I was lost. A debilitating depression, a world hermetically sealed off — punctuated by episodes of high mania: sleeplessness, delusions, rage.
A string of sexual encounters. Did it not suggest I was still alive?
Get help.
Through the estrangement, through the isolation I could hear her — but muffled.
She said or I will leave
And that I had to go further and further, look for more and more elaborate, lavish, excessive, intense experience, more dangerous, more thrilling to prove—to prove what?
How had I gotten that way — that dangerously happy little girl, hour after hour, year after year, engrossed in her make-believe world? In love with the solitary place of her imagination.
She said. When the world was white and sorrow fell like snow, and nothing, nothing seemed familiar anymore.
And I said yes. Because my life had become utterly unrecognizable, not only to those who felt they knew or loved me, but also to me.
And on a day where the whiteness lifted, if only slightly, stumbling through drifts and drifts of oblivion in my pale shift, I went.
With real misgiving, trepidation dread even, a deep wariness. On an animated day I might have said how I detested psycho-babble, how skeptical I was of the whole endeavor. How suspect I found much of Freud — all the nonsense on women, on dreams. How hopeless, how useless. How much more clever I believed myself to be than anyone I could possibly find to work with. I went because I was forced to.
To the woman’s office in her apartment on the Upper West Side. I sat glumly across from her. I don’t know what to say.
Where to even imagine beginning? All that would be reduced or left out. Or overemphasized because language could best speak to certain things, but not others. The belief that words have stable meaning and can in ordinary speech convey what one is feeling struck me as naive and really quite quaint. And wasn’t that how therapy was supposed to work? I was and am deeply suspicious of language, as I think any serious writer must be. My reverence for silence, and for what cannot ever be known or understood, made this therapy business a very dicey proposition indeed. The tendency to impose false shapes, the simplistic desire for the assignment of cause, one’s hunger for why, one’s need for motivation, then solution. The preconceptions, the generalizations, the summing up — all worrisome, worrisome. And the language — oh God—dyfunctional this and that, empowerment issues, abandonment issues—how awful. The one absolutely intolerable thing. The debasement of the language. I braced myself for the absolute worst.
Born in Paterson, New Jersey.
The oldest of five children.
Educated…
Have I mentioned my penchant for privacy, for solitude? To be left alone.
Who is that woman standing off to the side, so detached, so removed from herself, narrating the events of her life as if recounting another life altogether? Why is she so filled with caution, with reservation?
I was struggling against every stricture — it exhausts me now to think of. But it was more than that — it had always been more than that. Impossible to describe. Did I actually think that this very pleasant woman was ever going to be able to help me with any of this? Of course not.
That white world where I yearned to go forever. Never come back.
Why is she there at all?
The problem was I was hurting those around me including those I loved — there was the real problem. Was I hurting myself — not really — no, not intentionally. To break out of the habitual, the deadening — in expectation, in habit, in pattern, it seemed necessary to cause some violence, some harm to oneself. But not to others. I had been asked to go because of the damage I had done to others, and I went because I recognized that damage — and desired not to do that anymore. I wanted to be free, but not at any cost — to lose those I loved would be impossible — my last connections to this world. And of course, as it is now all too clear, I was not free in the least.
I go I suppose because I am unwell mentally, I do not say it, but dying in fact, I feel myself at twenty-six to be dying. In a stupor much of the time, with an impossible sadness — the grotesque, thudding afternoons, slow and dull, how to make them pass? Unable to speak, to rise, to move. For weeks and weeks sometimes.
And on other days, without middle ground, turned on a dime, without a break, I am so manic, so hyperactive and sick with it, so unable to focus, to sleep, to eat, filled with every delusion and plan; I am genius, utterly estranged, outside, writing such astounding work and so quickly, works of art, only when I look back at them to find page after page of virtually straight lines. Impossible, obviously, to even decipher. Let alone genius.
I seduce everyone in sight. Without much feeling. Going to the next adventure in search of someone or something to hold back the dead feeling. And it works. At least for awhile.
And the raining — what’s that raining sound? Then snow. Don’t go. Last bit of world. Last blue shadow.
Week after week I wrestled with it — if I could only describe to you, dear woman show you the contours of that world — drained of all color where I lay entombed, Dr.E. I can’t breath or move.
Most people live lives of desperate accommodation I find. Overloved as a child I did not have the need to be loved or to please. I just wanted to live on my own terms.
Just.
Even the book is a box in this world.
First inklings of the box — of the dimensions of the thing — its shallow sides, its heavy lid makes a horrifying sound — and the early attempts to resist — there were signs early on — trouble early on in the refusal to assume the ordinary way of things: the prom, the driver’s license, the National Honor Society — teenage rebellion? Yes, at the time it certainly looked that way. All the small refusals, the casual, seemingly casual, sloughing off of the prescribed identities, of the ways to behave.
Oldest sibling — but no role model, my sisters and brothers watched me in dismay. And entering the working world — appalled by the tedium and the language — that bantering all day long — that horrendous small talk — the clichés, the hundred abuses. I sat in mortal misery, suffering it — incapable of entering their various pacts.
Is she making sense? Is she making any sense?
The original self slowly usurped. Without exactly noticing at first. It was just a hollow feeling, a feeling of something being taken slowly away, pulled gently from you as you watched, half-cognizant but helpless. The wild self being normalized. How difficult to retrieve a life, once it is relinquished. One felt someone somewhere getting a sinister pleasure from this. She is paranoid. The more you balked, the more exhausted you became. All part of the plan.
My parents next to me — people I desperately loved — and yet could not follow. Their dreams and ambitions seemed to me not their own but something they had borrowed, a weird loan that they had accepted without much question. I loved them but could not love their assumptions. I would have to break their cherished, their given — not because I wanted to — but in order to survive. It sounds perhaps melodramatic, but it was the terms of the struggle then.