Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (29 page)

I wasn’t going to get into it, so I said what I’d said to therapists many times before.

“I was molested as a kid. I had a venereal disease before I was ten.”

She was ready for this, of course. Had put it together from the moment I’d said the words “Do I want to fuck you?” and “rape.”

“Molested kids are often hypersexualized as adults, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She knelt down next to my chair. I wasn’t ready for this kind of sympathy. Didn’t want it. The molestation bit hadn’t been a confession. It was old material. Really old. I’d talked it to death in the past, or at least what little I could remember of it. The doctor’s office. The medical facts pointing to events I couldn’t, still can’t, recall except in comparatively innocent snippets. The virus suggests more. But what more? Who knows? Who cared? Yeah, yeah, I always thought, so somebody got to me in some way. So what? It happens all the time. Move on. I don’t need you to hold my hand.

But she did. She took my hands, both of them, in hers, looked me long and hard in the eyes, waiting for me to meet her gaze and hold it. I couldn’t. I looked at the potted fern behind her on the floor, occasionally glancing back at her eyes, which were searching my face for recognition. When our eyes did meet for longer than an instant, she gripped my hands a little tighter.

“Stay here. Look at me,” she said.

Then she added, slowly and emphatically, “There is nothing wrong with you.”

I guffawed.

“Uh, clearly there is. A lot.”

“No. All of this,” she swiped her hand across the board where we had written all my thoughts, feelings, and contemplated behaviors: hate, rape, fuck. “All of this is typical. A normal response to a very traumatic experience. Something very bad happened to you, and you reacted the way anyone would, the way most people have. That’s all.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Maybe.”

“No. Really.”

She clutched me by the upper arms this time and said the phrase again. I needed to hear it, and this time it got through.

“There’s nothing wrong with you.”

I heard the words and began to internalize their meaning. These were the words of the wellness model, not the accustomed disease model of so many psychiatrists I had known, the ones who were so eager to slap diagnoses and pathologies onto me in piles. Depressive, manic depressive, posttraumatic stress. These were all the things that were wrong with me. The troubles. But what if Carol was right? What if I was as healthy as the next person responding to an insult?

Kick me and I will bruise. Starve me and I will weaken and grow frail. Stab me and I will bleed. Are these not normal reactions to injury? A bruise, even a scar, is not a pathology. It is a sign of proper function, a sign of the healthy,
normal
body doing its job, coming to the rescue after the war.

All of this began to penetrate as I sat there, Carol holding my hands again in hers.

There’s nothing wrong with me? I thought. Really? I’m not broken? Unfit? Weird?

And that, dismissive as I had been, was when I broke. I started to cry. Suddenly, urgently, big, hot, fat drops rolling down my cheeks. Silently, against my will.

I wasn’t crying about the “trauma.” I didn’t care about that. I could barely remember it. It had never mattered consciously. It had never made me cry. It was this that mattered. The stigma, the malfunction, and the shame. The taint. Was there really nothing wrong with me after all? Was I not broken?

I cried harder.

I couldn’t explain this to Carol. Not then anyway. The session was up, for one thing. For another, the shame, like the hate, was just one piece. Part of a chain, or a spiral of linked emotions that had yet to uncoil, each in turn. This was just the beginning.

Carol could sense I didn’t want her to hug me, so, wisely, she didn’t. She waited for me to gather myself, watching carefully with large, sympathetic eyes.

“Time’s up, right?” I said, wiping my cheeks.

“Yes,” Carol said, turning up the corner of her mouth as if to say, “I’m sorry the timing’s so poor.”

But it wasn’t really. I wanted to go. Needed to. I didn’t want to feel her eyes searching my face anymore. I didn’t want to have to respond externally to what we’d discussed. I hadn’t even come to Mobius thinking that therapy would happen to me, and yet, boom, it had. What had started as a crass willingness to play along, and to take notes about the process of therapy, had penetrated into real memory, real emotional content, coiled and waiting to spring. It had taken only the slightest touch to explode.

I wanted to regain some composure. Some remove. I wanted to stare out a window and let this tearful dousing sink in, and then leach through, like rainwater in soil. And then I wanted to close my eyes on the day and forget. I wanted to go back to being a journalist just doing her job.

Tuesdays were rebirthing days. Rebirthing sounds hokier than it was, though, I admit, it did have its moments. It was another one of those Mobius trademark activities, like den chi bon, that required a suspension of disbelief, or at least scoffing laughter, if you were going to get anything out of it. And it was possible to get quite a lot out of it, even if you didn’t have visions, or weep copiously, or transport yourself back to the womb. Rebirthing, like a lot of other things they did at Mobius, was designed to access your subconscious, to function like a back door to your brain so that you could sneak in while the rest of you wasn’t looking and grab a few fresh clues to what was really going on in there. It was a way around your defenses. That’s all. Not, as I had worried, some form of devil worship or half-baked yankified shamanism all decked out in fake blood and feathers. As it turned out, it was really just meditation with a lot of deep breathing thrown in—again, for the oxygenated high, and the hoped-for partial dream state that might ensue if you caught that high while you were supine under a blanket and your eyes were closed.

Sam and Carol stood over us, guiding us into the trance, encouraging us to breathe deeply and energetically, and instructing us to say aloud a quick punctuated “Ahh” on the exhale, almost as if you were dropping the breath like a heavy bag.

Heeeeww. Ah. Heeeeww. Ah.

I had just come out of my therapy session with Carol, full of charted sexual rage, which then disgorged itself inside of me silently, splattering against the walls of my mind as I lay there huffing as instructed.

Hate, too. Hate was there in force, not just a word abstracted and splayed, written on the board in caps, but a bellyful, a meal of it rotting its way through me to shit.

Digestion. A metaphor. Yes. I considered this. Lying there. Breathing.

Emotion like a meal, always to the same end. I went with this train of thought. How marvelous to take every tasted morsel, from the lowly comfort food to the most refined and perfected dish, all of it made into shit. The same shit. Or different? Does the shit of a gourmet meal taste better to the dog that eats it than the leavings of a greasy spoon? And if so, is his palate more refined? It would seem so. To taste the chef’s art or the fry cook’s lowly labor in ordure, to suss out the progenitor in a potato, tell the coddled fingerling from the frozen shoestring, the Yukon from the Idaho.

Breathe. Heeeeww. Ah. Heeeeww Ah.

That is the psychologist’s skill, to find the meal that made the shit you’re sitting in. It being always shit in the end, one must work backward to differentiate the source, to know the ingredients of this particular pile.

Hate. What made the hate?

I knew what had made the hate. Sex had made the hate. And then hate had made the sex. And now there was just a whole hell of a lot of it going around in the bowels of my head.

I wondered what Carol and Sam would do if I crapped my pants right there or, better yet, stood up, dropped trou, and curled one out on the floor. Would that challenge their boundaries? Would it count as release?

“Let go,” they kept saying.

Yeah, I’ll let go. Here. Take that. A nice Cleveland steamer for show-and-tell. We could all gather around it and hold hands and talk about how it “speaks to us.”

They say that smell is the sense most tied to memory.

I was gritting my teeth, breathing in hisses and cold whistles that made my fillings ache. The others were lying around me doing the same, watching their own show inside their heads, or maybe just checking out as usual. Everyone was breathing loudly, everyone except Bobby, who had again fallen asleep.

As the exercise drew to a close, Carol and Sam talked us down, but I was still rigid. When the lights came up I lay there unmoving, rude. I wasn’t going to look at anybody and smile or exchange some glancing relief at the shared experience.

They shuttled us all into the art room next door and sat us around a large glass table. They brought out various crayons and markers and pastels and gave us each a piece of paper to draw on. The idea was to have an artistic reaction to the rebirthing experience.

I drew an unsurprisingly histrionic picture of an extreme close-up of my face, one enormous green eye in each top corner of the page, with a glaring black pupil at the center, as dark as I could make it. The whites of my eyes were bloodshot, and a trickle of blue
X
’s fell down each cheek, the symbolic tears. I drew two rows of brown boxes in the two bottom corners of the page, my gritted teeth. Where my lips should have been I wrote in large black letters the word “No.”

A little over the top, admittedly, but at least I hadn’t shat on the floor.

When everyone had finished drawing we gathered back in the main room, sat in a circle, placed our drawings on the floor in front of us, and talked about what the drawings had meant to us and how they reflected both our rebirthing experience and our therapeutic progress to date.

When it was my turn I talked about the rage, or tried to. I wasn’t going to really get into it in the circle, not then anyway, that was for later. But I did say that I thought that the rage was huge, insurmountable, standing between me and compassion for myself, a boulder that had formed itself around a liquid center, and the only way to get at the healing liquor was to melt or split the rock. I didn’t see how that was possible.

In discussing the picture I suggested another way of looking at it. I had drawn my face. But I, like everyone else, was on the outside looking in, and the sign on the door said “No.” I had not drawn my face at all, but a mask that was meant to scare the natives.

It was very like my dream of the house by the sea. I was outside looking through the windows of my own dwelling. The rage, which had grown up in me as a form of protection against invasion, specifically the invasion of unwanted adult hands and tongues and other organs, had done its job too well. I was locked out, too. My self-protection had been taken to such an extreme that it had become self-alienation. I didn’t trust anyone, not even myself, and the result was that I had made myself a vagrant. I did not, could not, live in my own house. I was, in fact, afraid to live there, and so I spent all of my time looking for shelter elsewhere. Having affairs.

This was the very question of identity, again. How does one exist as a self, as a discrete person in the world, and yet not inhabit one’s own self? This was my puzzle. I could not feel myself. I knew that I was standing there, or sitting there, or talking. I could hear my voice. Other people could hear my voice and had judged me to be a person. Why not? The hologram looked real enough. I moved from place to place and had ideas and bodily functions, and a past, and relatives, and a handful of friends who knew me, had known me over time and could identify my body if it came to that.

But the center was empty. I did not live there. I cannot emphasize this enough, nor can I adequately express the strangeness of this state. How can one not feel oneself? And then, having discovered that particular numbness, that confusing absence, how can one begin to remedy it? It is like trying to get to the North Pole when you are standing on it. Every direction is south.

 

After rebirthing I went away still full of the rage and the feeling of being locked out of myself. I sat there silently in the white van with Katie and Bobby, Cook, Gary, and Petunia, and as we drove and I stared out the window, watching the drably repetitive suburban landscape pass by, I became aware of a shift beginning. The rage was becoming something else, a close cousin but distinctly different. A loud song came on the radio, a song by a band I didn’t know, an awful banging screaming song that made me feel old for hating it. Bobby asked Diggs to turn it up and he did. Way up. Bobby and Katie sang along and the van filled with young, careless energy. The inane lyrics and childishly simple rhythms of the song, sung and beat out so enthusiastically by the listeners, seemed to mirror, while ineffectually covering, the empty aimlessness of people in their twenties who were already disillusioned enough with life to have drunk themselves into jail.

I began to feel horribly alien sitting there, not knowing the song, hating everything it stood for, feeling touched by the terrible void we were all trying to fill or escape from. I had that feeling for the whole drive. I sat in it. Sank into it. By the time we got to the apartments it was all I could do to walk into my room and shut the door. I lay on the bed staring at the ceiling fan, slowly tilling, and I sank deeper into the alienation, watching it slide into the familiar feeling of isolation that the company of others can so often elicit.

I thought of the day’s session with Carol. I thought of the taint. The feeling, for so long harbored in me, that I was abnormal, that there was something terribly wrong with me. This was the same feeling. Alienation, isolation. You are not like the others. You do not like or sing or know the same songs. You are not normal. Carol is wrong. You were sitting in the van and you did not know the song or like it, and you were surrounded by people and scenery that is all of a piece, all part of the same kit, the ground laid for the houses they build on it, the houses built all alike for the people, all alike, who live in them, the people who like the same songs and sing them loudly and feel familiar in their familiar world that is made for them.