Voluntary Madness Part 18

Molestation to self-harm, and the depression in between. All linked. All ingrained. A very old way of responding to an insult. A pattern always leading to the same place. A normal reaction, as normal, common, and predictable as a physical law.

This was a map of my depression and its source, as well as its propensity to repeat itself over and over again in response to a variety of stimuli, from work stress, to relations.h.i.+p stress, to any perceived violation or threat, all of which could set the process in motion in its accustomed way and dump me out at the far end in a heap.

This was my diagram of distress, or one of them anyway. There would be others. Other patterns. Other habits and modes. My depression is not one-dimensional. The molestation does not explain it wholly any more than drawing the map of its effects can heal all my ills going forward. It goes without saying that there are plenty of depressed and suicidal people in the world who were not molested as kids. They have their own triggering traumas, their own consequent patterns of emotion and thought, and the power of those patterns and traumas will not be magically expunged by this kind of charted uncovering.

As Carol would say, the diagrams and maps are coping skills, and they would not be drawn just once. They would be drawn again and again in different ways on different days when the feelings ran too high and were crippling. I would take apart my house brick by brick, and it would build itself up again when I was not looking. I would draw my maps and diagrams, and then I would promptly forget them in the storm of experience. And I would draw them again, and remind myself again to see that the feelings were not real, that they were just ghosts rattling their chains. And then, for a time, the feelings would seem less frightening, and I would move past them and go on. I would repocket the map or throw it out, thinking that I knew what it said and that I didn't need it anymore. And as I picked up my pace, and began even to walk with a little swagger in my step, I would succ.u.mb to the illusion that I was healed. And that comfortable, believable illusion would last for quite a while. Until the next time.

The days at Mobius ran according to a schedule. Each day was very much like the next, one floating into the other, blurring and pa.s.sing by. But I never minded this. Time didn't drag me down and subdue me the way the empty days at Meriwether had, and it didn't feel stale and tedious like the well-meant, but mostly futile structured days at St. Luke's. My two weeks at Mobius were slow and pleasant.

We were spoiled. Everything worrisome was taken away, everything necessary provided or planned, such that you didn't really have to think about anything except the state of your soul or your liver, whatever the case might have been. And if you chose not to examine your life, which many of my fellow clients stubbornly did, then you just walked the short distance between sitting places, or rode the ten minutes in the van and then plopped yourself down again to zone out in another venue.

I liked the life there. It was easy and comfortable, and in certain ways it even helped me to practice for real life with training wheels on, which may sound infantile, but is not something to be overlooked when you've been depressed and found yourself in the humbling position of being unable to get out of bed.

So, for example, it was good for me to go to the supermarket and plan meals for the week and then cook each of those meals in the evening, or a.s.semble and take the allotted lunch and snack provisions to the Mobius offices in the morning. It was good for me to do my dishes and my laundry, all in the safe confines of the playhouse.

I got used to the routines and found them comforting and stabilizing. In the mornings I grew accustomed to waking immediately to the familiar sucking sound of the apartment's front door opening. I knew this meant that the night tech was there to give us our meds before he went off his s.h.i.+ft.

Usually it was Roger. Roger was a father of two who worked part-time in construction when he wasn't working at Mobius, and he was one of the most polite people I have ever met. I hated the idea of putting the poor man in the awkward position of having to wake me in my room, where I was likely to be half out of the covers in my underwear or in some other unsightly state of disarray. So I had programmed myself to leap out of bed at the sound of the door, make myself vaguely presentable, then meet him in the kitchen, where he had taken to setting up his meds box on the table and waiting patiently for me to show. I didn't like to keep him waiting. Besides, he was a big fan of my coffee, which I always make very strong, and I liked to be able to offer him some before he had to go.

We usually sat there for twenty minutes or so over our cups, talking about some wounding lesson in manhood that he'd had to guide his son through that week or the progress of his latest construction project. He would often ask me how I was doing at Mobius, if I was getting something out of it, and what my plans were for getting back into my life. I always enjoyed those conversations. They were a homey segue into the day, and they kept me from doing the kind of unhealthy brooding that I tend to do when I first wake in the morning and lie there wis.h.i.+ng I didn't have to get up.

When our twenty minutes were up, Roger would get up to go, thank me, wish me a good day, and I the same to him, and then I'd stand for a minute longer in the kitchen finis.h.i.+ng my coffee and thinking over what we'd said. Then I'd wander over to Katie's door and give it a soft knock to let her know that we had about fifteen minutes before the van came. Usually she'd been up until four or so, still struggling with the Xanax withdrawal.

Cook, being a bit of a lady's man, always called in the mornings from his cell phone to say when the van was on its way. We'd chat for a minute, and give each other needless s.h.i.+t. He would flirt with me, even though he knew it would lead nowhere, and I would deflect his attempts sarcastically. Then we'd go on to other things. He'd been there in group process therapy, so he knew my private information. It was customary between us to rib each other on this score. He'd ask me if he was going to be my next affair, and I'd ask him if he liked it in the a.s.s, because that was my thing. That usually ate up the couple of minutes until the van pulled into the parking area downstairs, and I'd throw my lunch and notebook into a bag in time to go.

Diggs would show up at the door and we'd take our seats in the van. On the drive to the office Cook and Gary, who both had houses on or very near the beach, would talk about power boats or deep-sea diving, or Cook and Katie, both of whom had been in jail, would advise Bobby on her upcoming incarceration and debate whether or not it was easier doing your time in the prison infirmary.

Petunia and I usually sat in the back row listening and looking sleepily out the windows. We always exchanged hearty greetings, but after that there wasn't much to say, which was fine with both of us. He was the kind of person who could hold a long silence well, and who had clearly come to the conclusion long ago that there was really very little that anyone needed to say to anyone else. I admired this economy of words, and thought it would behoove me to practice it.

When we got to the Mobius offices, we'd all put our packed lunches in the fridge and maybe grab a cup of the coffee that Sam or Carol had put on. Den chi bon didn't usually start until nine thirty, so we had forty-five minutes of loaf time when people who hadn't brought laptops and weren't availing themselves of the wireless service at the apartments could use one of the office computers and surf the net or check their e-mail.

The communal computer was on a desk in a sitting area across from the kitchen. There were also some armchairs, a large well-stocked bookshelf, and a table with a chessboard on top of it. The carved wooden chess pieces were usually positioned in various midgame arrays, but I never saw anyone playing. Katie usually commandeered the oversize leather armchair with ottoman and went back to sleep, impervious to all noise. I usually made notes in my notebook or read a bit over my third cup of coffee, unless it was a bad morning, in which case I'd sneak in to see Carol while she was trying to eat her bagel.

She was always welcoming. She wasn't the kind of therapist who didn't want you to know that she was human, so she didn't mind eating in front of you. In fact, she purposely asked me to stay in her office one morning while she made a phone call to Starbucks customer service in order to complain about rude treatment she'd received at a store that morning.

"I want you to hear this," she said.

She meant that she wanted me to know that she could be as petty as anybody else, and that the traditional transference process of falling in love with her, or making her into my spit-and-polish guru didn't have therapeutic value in her eyes.

And she was right. It didn't. She was a person as warty as anyone else and, as she reminded me, as defined by her past as I was, even at the age of fifty-one.

"This stuff doesn't go away, you know," she said. "I'm still doing all kinds of irrational things because of other things that happened to me when I was a kid. The number one characteristic of trauma is that it repeats itself."

She told me a story from her childhood about some freaked-out kid in grade school who had leapt on her from behind and tried to strangle her. It had taken four people to pull him off, and she still has a scar on her neck from the experience.

"Now whenever I go to the movies," she said, "I have to sit in the last row. I have to have my back to the wall. That's trauma. Old trauma repeating itself in my thoughts and actions even now, forty-some years later."

I'd never had a therapist who'd told me stories about herself, and our relations.h.i.+ps had always, in my opinion, suffered as a result. I connected with Carol because she let me see that she was a person and that she was fighting the same fight, continually. She was an object lesson in perseverance and the sometimes bitter truth that no amount of mindfulness was going to renew you, or erase you, or make you into someone else. You were you. Stuck with you and, in a sense, stuck with your past, even if you could learn to navigate around it, or avoid falling entirely back into it. Patterns would repeat themselves, and the most you could do was be aware of and manage them. But you weren't ever going to be free, and there was no use in fooling yourself about it or, as Carol believed, fooling your clients about it either, catering to their dysfunction disinterestedly and impersonally like some kind of pie-eyed genie farted out of a jar.

Most mornings I left Carol's office and went right into den chi bon with Sam, which lasted for the next hour and fifteen minutes. Invariably I was calmer when we finished. Every day I got better at letting go and letting Sam lend me some of the immense positive creative energy he brought to work each morning. Every day I let the Indian man's liquid caramel voice penetrate a little deeper into my sour skepticism, and I let the strange thrusting motions of the exercises carry me away, until I was doing most of the session with my eyes closed, holding hands with Gary and Sam, and swaying to the sickly sweet swells of a Celine Dion song, with that same stupid contented smile plastered on my face.

What can I say? It worked for me. h.e.l.l, it was better than peeling oranges in the bathroom or playing board games with people depressed enough to make me look like Suzie Sparkle by comparison.

Anyway, it did more for me than coffee, and that's saying something.

After den chi bon, at eleven, it was back into perception therapy, where the rest of the clients weren't nearly as overeager and forthcoming about their twisted inner lives as I was, and usually mumbled whatever they thought they had to or could get away with in order to at least minimally satisfy Carol and get through the exercise.

And Carol wasn't forcing anything. She knew better, even if she was, at times, maybe a little too overly optimistic about the fact that she was often preaching to the deaf. But at bottom, she knew that the people who were there merely because they were court-mandated to be in some form of rehab, and had chosen Mobius as the lesser evil, weren't going to make much effort to get something out of the experience. And making an effort was the one and only way to actually get something out of it.

That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. n.o.body could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that.

Gary made an effort. He was on his way, trying to kick the c.o.ke and stay focused. His heart and mind were open to change. Cook made the occasional pull, but for the most part he was too busy making a play for the girls to really get down to his own business. Katie, more often than not, was texting her boyfriend that she was going to kick his a.s.s when she got home. And Bobby? Well, Bobby was just not there at all. She didn't even try to disguise the lazy annoyance in her voice when she answered Carol's questions. She didn't seem in the least bothered by the fact that she'd taken other people's lives in her hands repeatedly while driving in the kind of condition that landed her upside down in ditches and trees. She only had a few days left to do at Mobius, and all she could talk about was how she was going to get drunk at the airport before she even got on the plane.

And that, in fact, is exactly what she did. The day she left, she had Diggs drive her to the airport in the morning a few extra hours before her flight was due to leave, so that she could spend that time in the bar. She sent Cook a message later that morning on his phone. There was no text attached. It was just a picture of a gargantuan Long Island iced tea.

So much for her process.

At noon, after process therapy, we ate our bagged lunches seated around the long table in the kitchen. Afterward, between one and two, we either met privately with our a.s.signed therapist, or we met with Josie, who had her own paperwork to fill out for each of us, or, if it was Wednesday and we so desired, we could meet with the psychiatrist and get meds.

At two we had another group meditation session with Josie, Sam, or Carol, and sometimes all three, or we had rebirthing group, or we listened to a lecture on mindful living delivered by a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk who came in every other week to lend us his serenity. One day a week at this time we met with a nutritionist, who gave us information on caloric intake, body ma.s.s index, vitamin regimens, dietary supplements, carbs, fats, proteins, sweeteners, and so on.

This was all part of the mind, body, spirit aspect of the program, and whether, in the end, it changed your life or not (I found the monk pretty mindless rather than mindful, for example), I appreciated the effort that Dr. Franklin had made to offer us a variety of ways to approach our health. It was there for us to take advantage of or not, to incorporate or dismiss as we wished, and it wasn't usually very hard to skip out on these sessions if you really found them excruciating. You could, as I sometimes did, sneak into the meditation room, just off the main hall next to the art room, and ohm yourself into a state, or you could make yourself look busy over one of the self-help books on the shelves in the main seating area.

Three thirty usually rolled around pretty quickly, and then it was back into the van to the apartment where we usually had about an hour to ourselves before the evening activities. If it wasn't spa night, I often used this time for my workouts down at the apartment complex's minimalist gym, which was located next to the oval pool and Jacuzzi, where Cook and Bobby did their woozy cuddling.

If it was spa night, then I saved my workout for later and took a nap. The spa had a much larger, better-equipped gym than the apartment complex and a twenty-five-meter pool where I sometimes did laps. Petunia and I often spent most of our two hours at the spa working out, spotting each other in the weight room or riding the cardio machines.

After the evening's activity, we went back to the apartments, where I cooked myself dinner and ate it watching TV. I usually finished out the day in my room making notes about the day's events or combing the work of existential psychologists like Rollo May for juicy chewables to sleep on. I'd lie there drifting off, thinking hazily and more than a little self-satisfiedly of Kierkegaard's a.s.sertion that anxiety is our best teacher.

And then after a deep, restful sleep, I'd wake again to the sucking sound of the rubber seal breaking on the front door, and I'd wander sleepily out of my room to find Roger opening his yellow toolbox full of meds on the table in the kitchen.

As I said, it was predictable. It was simple. There was nothing to do but just be and breeze through the days unenc.u.mbered by responsibility yet untrapped by a locked ward. You had as much freedom as any program could grant you, and as much therapy and fresh air and entertainment as you were willing to grab.

On Sat.u.r.days and Sundays we slept in, and then they took us to the beach and to the movies, and we ate potluck lunches around the pool. If it rained we went to a museum, or we sat around in each other's apartments watching sportscasts and garbage TV.

People complained about the few small restrictions-that we had to go everywhere as a group, or we had to be driven around from place to place like bad-seed preschoolers. But after my experiences at St. Luke's and especially at Meriwether, I knew that these guys had no idea how good they had it. To me it was like a low-budget vacation or an ashram at the Motor Inn. It was all right. And given the alternatives, it was paradise.

I even got something out of it. Something real to take with me and use in times of distress. Call them tools, for lack of a better term. Or progress on the ongoing problem of me.

Best of all, I got a real therapist, someone who would be a person with me and challenge my views, nudge me off my brutal, grinding track and offer me a gentler alternative.

"Give yourself compa.s.sion," Carol said. "When you're feeling something intense, stop, observe the feeling, acknowledge your discomfort, and then give yourself compa.s.sion."

She saw me shaking my head.

"What? You don't like the word 'compa.s.sion'?"

"No. It's too delicate. It'll never work. My mean brain will just roll over that like a doll in the road."

"All right. Think of another word that you can relate to."

"I don't know."

I'd thought. The obvious, common words had come into my head. Kindness. Gentleness. Sympathy. But I had shaken them off with disgust. Then I'd thought, for some reason, of myself in the lobby at St. Luke's, terrified and crumpled, and I'd remembered that word. The word I had said as an exclamation, an invocation, a prayer. "Remember O most gracious Virgin Mary."

"Help," I'd said.

"Help," Carol had repeated. "Great. So," she had written it down on a sheet of paper for me, "stop. Observe yourself. Acknowledge your discomfort. Give yourself help."

"Right. Help," I'd repeated. "I can try that."

I had come back to the meanings of words. "Help." And now "try."

"Try that." "Just try."

I'd elongated the sound in my head. Trrrrryyyy. I had written it down in my notebook, and as I'd looked at it I'd seen that it was one of those words that looked off-kilter on the page the longer you stared at it. Three letters and the nonvowel vowel Y Y. It was like one of those words you see a lot in crossword puzzles because they fill in the three-letter gaps. Like emu or awl.

Try. It had a nice twist to it when I p.r.o.nounced it again slowly to myself, like someone wringing out a rag between his fists. Tryyyyyyy. Squish. Dribble. Drip. Drip. Drip.

And then there was try, as in "Try the criminal." The trial. The judges in my head. They, too, had been in the lobby at St. Luke's. p.r.o.nouncing their sentence. Pointing their fingers. Relentless.

Ah. And there it was. Again. The pattern starting. This was how my brain went to the bad place. This was how I would end up in the tub. I would take a perfectly good sunny-day word like "try"-"Try it. You'll like it"-a word full of possibility and personal empowerment, and bring it around to Kafka in three minutes flat.

Thinking about it afterward, I could just hear what Carol would say, "Norah, listen to yourself."

Yes. Listen. Observe. See the downhill metal ball rolling, gathering speed until it is a bullet right in your path. Right in your brain. As fast as gravity. Then momentum. Then force.

Choose not to. I say this to myself a lot now after Carol. Choose not to go down that path. Take the dark thought pattern and bring it into the light. That was what perception therapy was all about.

The old thought is: Try.

The old perception is: I am on trial.

The old behavior is: Penalty.

The new thought is: Try The new perception is: Try and try again.

The new behavior is: Go on.

When she got out of Mobius, Bobby only had about a week of freedom to enjoy before she had to do her time in jail. Since she and Cook were apparently an unofficial item by the time Bobby left, Cook had offered to let her stay at his beach house for that intervening week. He'd asked his sister to pick her up at the terminal.

Word was that Bobby had been so obliterated and belligerent by the time she landed, she'd nearly been arrested by the airport cops. She'd been outside on the curb ranting about lost baggage for about ten minutes when Cook's sister pulled up just in time to yank her into the car and drive off.

That was the last I heard of Bobby.

Now that she was gone, Cook had turned his attention back to Katie, who was basking in the prospect of another male to abuse. But Cook didn't mind. He didn't mind anything. He had a week to go and he'd be back on his sailboat making a trip to the Sarga.s.so Sea, or some other place that seemed aimlessly appropriate. He was as supple and soft as the blond hairs that covered every visible inch of his body, like a golden down that signified his favored status with the G.o.ds. To look at him, you'd never know he'd been to prison. He looked like he'd been a lifeguard all his life, even in in prison. He had a gift for finding the smooth pa.s.sage, even through an ordeal. He had a talent for happiness, which might have been why he didn't really pay much attention in cla.s.s. He knew how to turn negativity around. He was in the hammock already. What did he need with the Buddha. prison. He had a gift for finding the smooth pa.s.sage, even through an ordeal. He had a talent for happiness, which might have been why he didn't really pay much attention in cla.s.s. He knew how to turn negativity around. He was in the hammock already. What did he need with the Buddha.

I wondered if his equanimity was siphonable, like maybe his b.a.l.l.s were full of quinine and that's why he wasn't susceptible to my disease, and if I could just tap some of that elixir, I'd be as sanguine and sun kissed as he was.

I wondered what his therapy sessions were like.

The thought is: Life is good.

The perception is: I'm made of nutmeg and cherries and malted milk.

The behavior is: Taste me.

Of course I knew this had to be an illusion. He wouldn't have been at Mobius if he'd had it all sorted out. Either that or he'd just gotten caught and been forced to do his time here like the others. He said he'd come of his own accord, but maybe that was c.r.a.p.

Still he was there with the rest of us, and I was grateful for the enthusiasm he showed for the activities portions of the program. He was there in den chi bon, smiling and gesticulating inanely with Sam and Gary and me. He came to life in the art room after rebirthing when we drew our silly pictures, even though he couldn't draw any better than I could.

He took part enthusiastically when we made a Tibetan sand mandala one afternoon on the floor of the activities room. Earlier that week, Sam and Carol had asked each of us to draw a picture or symbol that we felt would be representative of our time at Mobius, something personally meaningful that would encapsulate what we had learned or remind us of the healing principles we should try to reconnect with in times of stress. They gave each of us a square of white cardboard, nine inches by nine inches, and asked us to fit our picture or symbol into that s.p.a.ce. In order to make the mandala, we placed all of our small squares of cardboard side by side on a larger piece of cardboard on the floor and recreated the images on them, this time using colored sand, which we poured from the narrowed snouts of plastic bottles. As Sam and Carol instructed us, the sand mandala was a lesson in cooperation and impermanence, cooperation because it is a collective form of art, and impermanence because the sand is never fixed to the base. The wind can blow it away.

My symbol was a chair. It was my reminder to stay put, to stay with the feelings, not to run or try to escape through s.e.x or drugs, to inhabit myself and my dreamy sea house for the first time.

Gary's symbol was an eye. A huge eye. He said it was for vision and seeing clearly. Other people made abstract symbols whose meanings I didn't investigate. Some had drawn mountain scenes with the sun rising above them or calming bucolic vistas as seen from a cottage window. That kind of thing.

It took us a few hours to finish tracing our own designs, and to fill in the open s.p.a.ces at the center and edges of the large piece of cardboard underneath. It was like being in fourth-grade art cla.s.s again, except without the mess. It was a relaxing way to spend an afternoon, and, more to the point, it was a way to calm the critical mind by occupying it in the relatively menial task of pouring sand.

Once engaged in this way, the mind stops watching the rest of you so closely, and your thoughts can amble unsupervised and unjudged. This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself. Klonopin had done that. By chemically shutting out thought, it had stopped the whirling, overwhelming, expectant world and brought me to a tiny still point of focus right in front of me.

Working on the sand mandala had the same effect. The part of my brain that would normally have been obsessing about my failures and inadequacies, or the pa.s.sage of unoccupied, unimproving time, or the pointlessness of going on, was busy thinking about how to trace the drawing with grains of sand.

Again, the material is meaningful. First, sand is not easy to manipulate precisely. It takes patience and concentration. What's more, it forces you, as I had learned by the end of my time at St. Luke's, to shrink your world, in this case from the overwhelming bucket or beachful to the single, manageable, even fascinating grain.

Sam and Carol were always trying to teach us, according to the Buddhist tradition, to be present, in the moment. This, they urged, was the way through our pain. But the novice rarely grasps this as anything but rhetoric. The conscious, micromanaging mind is just too omnipresent, too used to splas.h.i.+ng around disruptively like a brat in a pool.

But making the mandala, which is an art practiced by Tibetan monks all over the world, showed me, not abstractly but concretely, what being present really meant. It put me there. Focus your mind on a task, the more menial and the smaller the component parts the better, and the s.h.i.+ft is inevitable. As idiotic office managers are so fond of repeating, you will almost certainly find G.o.d in the details.

To preserve the tidiness of the activity room, instead of turning on a fan when we had finished the mandala and watching the beautifully patterned colored sand drift artificially along the baseboards, we poured it instead into several large pans that we planned to take to the beach the next day so we could toss it up and out over the water.