My therapist reviewed the personal essay about my stepmother that has been on my site for months now, as a work-in-progress. At my request he offered suggestions, since I may send it off for publication before long. He already knows the story of my upbringing, but had this to say after reading (for the second time) what I wrote:
In terms of content – I am so sorry that this was your experience growing up. I hope that you can continue to make a rich and meaningful life out of the material that you were given.
His note came at a propitious time, as I seem to have undergone some kind of inward metamorphosis in just the past few days. I spent a bit of time trying to tell him about what’s happened. The following is an excerpted and edited version of what I emailed in response:
I do, in fact, continue to work on making my life ‘rich and meaningful.’ About five nights ago, while awake sleepless at 3 am, my mind started worrying. It’s an old habit that started early, when I feared my stepmother would come for me in my bed. Nowadays I fret about money, illness, and loss. The worry alternates with regret about the choices I’ve made, so many of which have led to ruin. A few years ago these nighttime sessions kept me trapped in a kind of hell, a crucible of fear and guilt. Thankfully, I no longer permit myself the masochistic luxury of driving myself insane with thought. Even so, on the night in question I could not imagine anything but physical pain and social isolation as my ultimate fate. My flight of grandiosity, with its vision of a future selling books on lecture tours, had faded into the realization that I am unlikely to ‘make it’ as a writer in any financial sense. The money worries that followed piled on top of my chronic shame and grief about what has happened to my body. In turn, those anxieties climbed aboard a sinking feeling that with few friends and no children, I will someday be frail and alone. In the end, I comforted myself with the thought of suicide. It reassured me to know I could always escape if the pain became too much, but that is a thin reed to cling to in the darkness.
But then, at almost the same time that I grabbed hold of my suicidal safety net, an important ‘truth’ hit me. I flashed on a childhood memory, and in a spark of clarity understood that it was OK to ‘lose’ in this ‘game’ of life. When I was little (4 or 5) we actually played a game called ‘Life.’ Maybe you remember it: players spun a wheel in the middle of the board, and moved pieces around the surface, which was textured with little hills (for no obvious reason.) They earned money based on the occupation they captured. The most valuable prize was the job of ‘doctor,’ which earned $20,000 per year (this was about 1963.) As a kid, I absolutely loved that game, and played it wholeheartedly. It killed me to lose, and flooded me with excitement when I won. I remember my family laughing at my competitiveness. (Note: while looking for an image to include with this post, I found out that ‘Life’ remains popular as a board game. Probably everyone knew this but me. For me, it’s just a distant memory.)
Anyway, five nights ago the memory of that game popped into my head, and it occurred to me I never stopped playing it. In my twenties and early thirties, I competed in ‘Life’ by trying to be the ‘best,’ working to prove my intelligence, aiming for excellent grades, getting accepted to elite programs. I even became a doctor. In those days, I also counted on having kids. I don’t think my desire for a family came from any love of children, but more from the belief that a successful person produces offspring. Biologist to the core, I understood that reproduction was the ultimate goal of living, and I could see that society looks askance at those without children. So I worked to build a future that would include the high-powered career, the big and impressive house, the wife and kids.
That rosy future came partway into my grasp, but then it slipped away. I kept playing the game, but began losing instead of winning. The first blow came when I realized that offspring would probably never come, for reasons having to do with my choices and personality. I weathered that small setback by putting the whole question off; maybe I’d have children some day far in the future. But then the big problems began, and I lost my work and identity as a surgeon, gave up the beautiful San Francisco house, and woke up to the fact that my body had been damaged by the career that I’d chosen more out of desire for success than out of love of medicine. My mental health crumbled in short order, and I soon found myself in the decade I’ve written of ad nauseum in this blog. Everything went to hell.
I kept playing the game, only now I felt worthless and ashamed because of how badly I was being beaten.
The other night I awoke to the fact that it doesn’t matter whether I ‘win’ or ‘lose’ unless I let it. As I’ve written before, I recognized that my life is actually pretty nice. I share a home with a woman who I know loves me and wants to help me be happy. We take care of two really delightful dogs. Money is coming in sufficiently at the moment for us to meet our expenses. If I don’t look at things with a broader lens than that, everything seems fine. So much of my misery comes from my expectations that I should possess all the trappings of success.
Maybe no one in my readership can relate. I know that many people, like my wife, find the hyper-competitive thing mystifying. They just live. But for me that stupid wheel in the middle of the board kept going round and round from age five to fifty. I got hoodwinked by an adolescence spent in an upscale suburb, in a culture bombarded by ads for expensive things held by gorgeous women, in front of screens flickering with countless Hollywood movies. Everything around me hammered home the conviction that unless you have money and beauty you just don’t count.
For some reason, five nights ago I let go of that soulless value structure. It suddenly hit me that life is not a game, and there is no winning and losing. Life is just existence, a brief time on a tiny globe in an unimaginably vast universe. You can hate it, or enjoy it, own everything or nothing, but you still have only a short time to learn, love, and live.
In ten years our dogs will be elderly and frail if they are even still with us; My wife and I will be older and perhaps one or both of us will have gotten seriously ill. Inflation will have eaten into our income to the point that we will have been forced to downsize in a big way. In twenty years things will be even worse: we’ll be elderly and childless with dwindling resources. These are the realities we face if we are fortunate enough to survive that long.
But for the first time, rather than dreading what’s coming, I see how I could enjoy the next five (hopefully ten) years. It may even be that next decade will be my last chance for satisfaction in this life. If I let go of my regret about what I’ve lost or never had, and quit judging myself on that basis, then I feel free to immerse myself in this time. I have not been blessed with many epochs where both my surroundings and my attitude were up to the challenge of contentment. But I am here now.
It’s been five days since I felt any huge dose of despair. I suppose it’s a bit tragic that that’s actually an enormous accomplishment. Just a few years ago five satisfied days running would have been unthinkable. Not since before I lost my career have I gone this long without feeling a thousand tons of regret, shame, and dread hit me like a train running over a dog.
This message does not sound very positive, and yet it is. I feel good right now, and all the better because I know it won’t last. I finally see that life could always have been led on this basis. Many years have passed where I was too immersed in psychic pain to enjoy my blessings. I may not have a great deal of time left before things start to fall apart again, but I have some. And I ‘get it’ that this is how life is lived in later years. Some people enjoy more social support: the majority of people have children, and often the kids can help ease the stress of growing old. Many people have more money and security, although even more have less. Regardless, everyone must eventually wake up to the inevitability of loss. The trick is to awaken to transience and still cherish what remains.
One reason I know that success as a writer and speaker will likely elude me is that it took me this long to figure out what so many people seem to have known all along. Any spiritual guide worth hir (his or her) salt would not have required five decades to learn such basic truths.
This has been a breakthrough, even if my predictions about my future sound dismal. I am thrilled to know I stand a pretty good chance of five to ten years of comfort. I want to make the most of this brief time. It helps that I am certain my future emotional pain will never exceed what I’ve already felt. No matter how bad things eventually get, I will never feel despair that exceeds what I’ve endured in the past. I know depression and every other type of painful mood will come again, which really sucks. But I also know that my past anguish has been so great that there is nothing worse left to feel. The character and circumstances may change, but not the intensity. I feel like a survivor of emotional burns: I have experienced absolutely dreadful pain, and remain heavily scarred, but at least I now know I can endure more of it if I need to. So there is really nothing to fear. All I need to do is let go of my expectations.
I went on to thank my therapist for his role in getting me to this point. As I’ve gone through this piece in second draft, I see that he will likely notice too many references to comfort and contentment. From the ACT perspective, the point of life is to live all the emotions fully, whether they feel ‘good’ or not. But for someone who has spent so much time in psychic distress, it is nice to hold on to the realization that I have a few years that I could really enjoy, if I just let go of my misguided fixation on ‘success.’
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