It's Friday and I'm done for the week and I'm sipping on a glass of cold wine, waiting for Alan to arrive here from his bungalow on the Shelton beach. It's Friday and my mind is still swirling from just hearing heard three different teenagers inside five hours tell me about the drug life at Bainbridge High School, the Oxy, the weed, the ecstasy, the alcohol, the stuff I've neve ever heard about. Before class, yeah, before lunch, yeah, during lunch, yeah, then down to Safeway to use and get back to class to use more before the next class and then the next and these are - - sorry, folks, but THESE are the NICE kids! The kids who are taking over their parents jobs at raising the younger children in the family. These are the kids who are THINKING (at least while they still have brains intact in their heads enough to think). I read their poems. I see their paintings. I hear their values.
"The WORST thing I've seen this past year was on a Nova program, when some asshole got right up closs to a mother turtle who was giving birth, and, during the MOST INTIMIATE MOMENT OF THAT TURTLE MAMA'S LIFE, he took his camera crew threw lights all over her, and photographed the entire thing. So do you think that was right? Do you think that was nice? Do you think that was worth whatever kind of education we got?"
His words made me think, and I told him so. Frankly, no adult in my past week has been so passionate or emphatic about any so-called "wrong" he or she's observed other than a political wrong, and politics is ALWAYS wrong, it's constructed that way. It's a given. At least THIS kid's wrong, this weed-addicted kid's wrong is......particular. Ideosyncratic. Specific. And goddamned right.
But it' isn't just the drug kids I've seen all week, it's the obsessive compulsives, for whom my heart just breaks. Let's say you are healthy in every way and you function well in every way: good job, good relationship, good enough marriage, good at sports.....but every time you lock your house, you don't believe you've done it. You just don't believe it. So you have to turn off your car's motor and go back up to your door and try the lock. Okay, it's locked. Whew. Good. Get into your car again and get set to go, but......wait a minute. Did you give that key a really good try? Did you shove it in to the hilt, back and forth, right and left? Because, look, all your life is in that place, all your photographs are in there and your Dad has just died and....oh Christ. Here you go.. You KNOW it's crazy, you KNOW other people don't do this, but you have to. You HAVE to. You have to back your car up and get back to that door again. Try that lock one more time. And then more time. And then one more time again.
But it's not just that. If you turn off your light at just the wrong moment, something bad may happen to somebody you love. Now, THAT'S crazy, you know damn WELL it's crazy, but you also know your'e NOT crazy. Say you go to turn your basement light off but somebody is calling you, say it's your wife, say she's calling your name and you turn off your light and.......and so what if....I mean, what IF....that moment, during which you turned off your basement light, caused....I mean, CAUSED....somebody else to have a really bad time of it? Maybe even somebody you know? Cause and effect.
And it's your fault. And you've gotta live with it. How do you change it? YOu've got two Masters Degrees, did THAT change it, hell no. You go to church, does that change it, hell no. You believe in God, does that change it, hell (sorry, God) no. So something's gotta be wrong with me. Something bad. And, if something's wrong with me, that means, quite simply, that I'M BAD.
I'm bad. I'm bad and I need to be punished but I don't like to be hurt but I need to be hurt, except that I HAVE been hurt and it didn't help. It didn't help. Ah, God. I must be the dumbest, loneliest mother-fucker in the whole wide world.
And why should this woman, this Ph.D. female with her weird library-looking office in the bottom level of her townhouse, be able to help me? Why her? I've been to five, six other therapists. I've even been to hospitals, begining when I was eleven! When I was eleven I lost total motor control of my left side! And now here's this lady saying she thinks she can help me!
This lady.
With her long dangly earrings.
And her "GONE TO THERAPY" wooden sign sitting on one of her shelves.
And her books. Oh my God, her books. She's probably crazier than I am.
Maybe she'll just tell me I have way too much time on my hands. Maybe she'll tell me my reflexes are exaggerated. Maybe she'll tell me to get more friends. Go on the newest antidepressant. Maybe she'll tell me to get lost, get a life, get a dog, get a girlfriend, a boyfriend, take up volunterring, stop being so self-absorbed.
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Oops, and now here's Alan and I need to end this thing. What quote can I find to end it? Each week, for the past twenty-six weeks, various groups of symptomatic people have entered my various offices and - - I must say, I have loved these people, loved - - for the most part -- all. I have not loved the symptoms, although I have been engrossed and, for the most part, thoroughly fascinated, even captivated.. But I have surely loved the bearers of these most difficult and often tragic symptoms.
And then, each Friday, it has been like all their symptoms - - and all my pent-up compassion and empathy evolving from these symptoms - - have had a chance to slip away. So here, let me give you two quotes. One from the great Charles Dickens:
"No words can express the secret agony of my soul. Even now, famous and carressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children, even that I am a man, and wander desolately back to that hurt time in my life."
- C. Dickens
And the other, spoken by the great film actor Jack Nicholson, who played a person suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder in the movie "As Good As It Gets""
"I'm drowing here, and you're describing the water!"
May I never merely decribe the water..
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