I’ve often wondered what Dad felt as he began his college career at Stanford in the autumn of 1939. He must have made the move from Pasadena shortly after September 1, the day Hitler’s troops overwhelmed Poland to initiate World War II. If he thought about it at all, he must have realized that his delusional mission to save the world from the Fascists three years earlier was a complete disaster. The Fascists continued to escalate their preparations to take over Europe; Dad had barely survived his hospitalization. Undoubtedly, he tried to block out that period of his life altogether, moving forward to take up the study of psychology and philosophy up in Northern California, keeping his half-year siege locked up somewhere as a distant memory.
As for my own start of college, ominous clouds occluded the Boston skyline as we exited the turnpike in our station wagon. In Cambridge, heading up Massachusetts Ave. toward Harvard Square in the steady rain, vans and trucks appeared through the windshield wipers, young people lifting boxes from tailgates and trunks, covering their heads with jackets or newspapers. Was I really one of them?
The next day was sparkling, early fall in its glory. “Will you be scared, Steve, living in a dorm like this?” Sally asked as we walked up the three flights to the suite in Massachusetts Hall. The sign on the side revealed its date of origin, 1720.
“I think it will be kind of cool,” I replied, a bit too jauntily.
For our final dinner we found a restaurant in another part of town. It was festive, the air outside soft. But with the farewell looming, the scraped feeling inside my eyes and throat had thwarted my appetite. We finally headed back to campus. Glimmering in the moonlight, the silent Charles River was on our left. Just a few more minutes and my new life would begin.
The problem was that my legs seemed to be cast in cement. Who would I be once I was outside this sticky sense of duty and familiarity, this tangle of awkward silence? Which was stronger—the force pulling me toward a different life or the one holding me in the car, the gravity of a heavier planet?
Harvard Square had little traffic at 10:00 p.m. Dad made a sharp right turn into the Yard, the gate open all day for cars to drop off eager freshmen before orientation. We were the last ones there in the darkness. As he pulled to a stop, the car held a ghostly silence.
“Thanks for everything, everybody,” I managed to say in a hoarse whisper; “I can’t believe you drove me all the way out here just to see me off.”
“We’ve had a good time here in Cambridge, haven’t we?” said Mom.
“I’ll miss you all,” I replied.
“I’ll miss you, Stevie,” Sally said, as my heart tugged until it almost snapped. Images flooded my mind: the tiny girl who bit my arm, my constant companion on family trips, our made-up language when we were young, her ballet recitals, our cats. The calls to the house years ago when friends of the family would ask: “Is this Steve or Sally? I can’t tell your voices apart!”
Dad looked proud but tired. It would be a long drive back to Ohio the following day. “All best, son,” he said, reaching back to shake my hand.
Just as I prepared to say farewell to Mom I saw her shoulders shaking up in the front seat. A moment later her whole body heaved. Chin down, arms limp at her sides, she had burst into silent convulsions. The tears streamed down her cheeks, her face wracked in despair. Everyone froze. Who had ever seen such emotion from her? Finally she sat up.
“I was overcome,” she murmured, embarrassed. I awkwardly reached across the seat. “Stevie, we’re so proud,” she said, trying to smile.
“Good-bye, Mom; I love you.” I gave her the best hug I could at my cramped angle. Too late, it dawned on me what kind of support I’d been for her the past 17 years.
“Good-bye, Steve, we all love you.”
I somehow left the car, turning to wave as three hands appeared through the car’s windows. The taillights slipped away as Dad entered the flow of traffic. There’s no way I could have stayed back, I told myself. With rubbery legs I lurched forward and pulled on the heavy door of my building. Had it been recast in lead? But once on the stairs, with each successive step I felt lighter, almost buoyant. Reaching the fourth-floor landing, I placed the key in the lock.
I was thinking of pre-med, maybe psychiatry or neurology. Those books of Freud I’d started to read in high school, discussing all that goes on in the mind of which we’re not even aware, had pulled me in. I played freshman football, trekking across the bridge each afternoon to the mentholated smell of balms and athletic tape. I went to weekend parties in Harvard Yard, hardly believing how much some of the guys could drink, the sweet scent of marijuana pouring out from dorm windows. I’d overcome enough inhibitions to try both.
A notice about freshman seminars had caught my eye, especially the one on social deviance, a year-long course on behavior outside social norms, blending psychology, sociology, and anthropology. To get accepted, applicants had to be interviewed. At the small office in Harvard Yard, Dr. Perschonok was intense but kind, with a sharp nose and wrinkled brow. Once an idea took hold, his pensiveness gave way to delighted enthusiasm. Through his thick Eastern European accent he began with a few general questions and then politely inquired as to what form of deviance most interested me.
I opened my mouth but no sound emerged. Flash-frozen, I was back in right field, immobile. In what seemed forever but lasted perhaps 15 seconds, the shame spread over me like a rash. If I’d had any experience at all in discussing the realities of mental illness, I would have spoken of my father’s experiences and perhaps the puzzle of serious mental disorder more generally. But I drew a blank. Clearly, I wouldn’t get into this seminar or any other. Breaking the agonizing silence, Perschonok gently suggested a topic or two to help me recover. Defeated, I skulked from the room. I felt like walking further west, perhaps to Ohio.
No surprise as I rushed to the notice board the next day: My name was not among the admitted group of ten students. Yet a small waiting list appeared at the bottom, with my name somehow included. Each time I went back to check, I’d moved up the list. Some of the original acceptees must have found other courses. By the end of the week I’d miraculously moved to the top group.
Excitement filled the air, with radical ideas in psychology and politics dominating discussions, the stimulation constant. But who was I? A Midwestern carryover into football and pre-medicine, or an increasingly long-haired student with a few ideas? There was a faint vibration ringing through my mind, the faint pedal point of a distant melody. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Before returning to Ohio for Christmas, I wondered what gift to get for Dad. Intrigued by the seminar on social deviance, I thought of one of its readings, R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, his philosophical and psychological treatise on the nature of schizophrenia. I was enthralled by its premise, that mental illness was the result of social forces and communication styles. Sure that Dad would be intrigued by its ideas, I purchased the paperback.
On Christmas morning I wondered whether I still belonged in the rituals I’d experienced since boyhood. When Dad opened the wrapping paper of my gift in the family room, over by the tree, he looked as though he’d been slapped, averting his eyes and mumbling a hollow thanks. Something had struck a nerve, but what?
A few hours later, the household was getting ready for our holiday dinner. As I walked through the living room I heard Mom and Dad nearby in the study, their voices furtive. “Why do you think he got me this book?” Dad asked, shock in his voice.
“Well, he knows something,” Mom replied.
“Yes, he must,” Dad murmured. But if I did know something, I wasn’t sure what. How much did I know before I knew?
Back in Cambridge in early January, the winter yielded a few magical days after snowstorms, the river frozen over, trees covered in white. Inevitably, though, everything turned to gray slush within a day. Two months later I walked through campus, spring threatening to emerge from the bleak skies. Pools of shallow, dirty water covered the ground, replacing the ice from a few weeks earlier. Bustling, I felt almost clammy in my sweater but the wind was frigid whenever I stopped at a corner. I looked toward the river just in time to see a sharp ray of sunlight pierce the cloud cover. Reflexively, I raised my hand to shield my eyes.
Arriving on my landing, I couldn’t see the key I’d retrieved from my pocket. Shutting my eyes, I tried to will away the inevitable, but the lightning bolt of light was now in place. After additional full-on migraines in high school—always in the spring, always following the experience of glare—I knew all too well what was coming. Twenty minutes later, like clockwork, the pain began to pierce the side of my skull. The worst part was always the inevitability, the certainty that nothing could prevent what was to come. After a few immobile hours, I felt again that I’d swallowed the contents of a swamp. Rushing to the bathroom, I heaved and retched over the toilet. Finally, I descended into a numbed sleep.
In the morning I lifted myself up out of my bed. I was back to normal but not just normal. Colors were vivid, tastes sensuous, the air fresh with possibility. My whole being had a brisk vitality. Why couldn’t my body and spirit be this vibrant every day? I was astounded at the utter difference between debilitating pain and the transcendence afterward. The extremes were baffling.
* * *
Back from spring break, and after my dad opened up about his mental illness, things seemed strangely familiar but at the same time everything was different. For a few days I wasn’t sure of my whereabouts. Was I actually in Cambridge? Or still lingering in Columbus? Or perhaps inside Norwalk Hospital, listening to screams on the ward all night long?
Rushing to class the following week, I stopped in my tracks. At the upper edge of my vision I made out faint yellow-green buds emerging from the branches of the ancient trees filling the lawn, the late-arriving New England spring finally here. Peering into a pale canopy of hope, I clutched my secret covenant. Years in the making, the fortress of silence surrounding my entire life had been shattered by Dad’s words. In its wake lay an underground river, strong and swift, the current propelling me on a wave of family, history, and perhaps even hope. I now had a mission: to understand Dad’s experiences and the mysteries of serious mental illness. His secrets had been locked inside him for years, as though preserved in amber. Who else had ever heard him talk like that?
But as the weeks went by dread competed with hope, as I sensed the family legacy of mental illness closing in around me. All my planning and control, each of my small accomplishments: Maybe they were just a house of cards, ready to collapse in the next breeze. By the early 1970s my twin and adoption studies had debunked the myth that parenting practices cause schizophrenia. Instead, genes were the main culprit. Deadly strands of DNA must lurk inside each of my cells, counting down to the end of my sanity. But when would it happen?
In high school I’d read Lost Horizon, a novel Mom taught and loved. After his plane had crashed in the Himalayas in the 1930s, the main character, Conway, discovered the hidden enclave of Shangri-La, protected from the world and its growing conflicts. Orienting to the mystery of the lamasery, he began to feel at peace. The High Lama soon told him of the miraculous nature of the setting: People who stayed there attained the ability to live for hundreds of years, approaching immortality. Unlike anyone else who’d ever heard the news, Conway was intrigued, embracing this miraculous opportunity. Finally nearing death, the High Lama appointed Conway as his successor. Filled with a blend of honor and apprehension, Conway hesitated, unsure whether he could manage the responsibility.
I identified, realizing that I’d been appointed to solve Dad’s lifelong problems. Our talk had released a small dose of poison from the plastic skins of those long-ago balloons. Once out in the open, might it convert into an inoculation small enough to build protection and immunity? Or was it lethal?
The hardest times came at night. From my narrow dorm bed I wondered how Dad survived those months in mental hospitals. Mental hospitals! The worst places in the world, I was certain, stark settings for those who’d reached the point of no return. Some of his fellow inmates, with their misshapen heads, were society’s hidden freak show, banished to live forever out of everyone’s sight. When might I join the damned, next in line to lose control over my mind?
Each second I lay awake compounded the last. Vultures circling their prey, thoughts of Dad’s madness crowded my mind. Through the fractured logic of the wee hours I became convinced that if I remained sleepless until dawn, I’d reach a divide. The morning light would be a signal that I’d crossed into irrationality, the chaotic flow of my thoughts unchecked. The only weapon was to hold on, white-knuckled, and try to sleep. Fighting panic, I somehow drifted off. In the morning I was shocked when my mind was still intact. But how many more nights could this go on?
Daytime brought possibilities. My energetic roommate Bill worked as a Big Brother at Columbia Point, one of Boston’s worst housing projects. While there, he’d learned that a mom with two young boys but no dad in sight needed help. I took the T to meet them. There was something about boys needing guidance that drew me in. Jerry was eight but his eyes already had a probing, adult look. He pushed limits but showed real wisdom, craftiness interleaved with insight. Bobby, six, floated above the ground when he walked, his thin limbs lighter than air, his long blond hair a tangle. Over the next three years, on Sunday afternoons I showed them where to put their fingers on the laces of a football. We might take the train downtown to the Museum of Science or aquarium, ending up at their mom’s crowded housing-project apartment, once they’d moved to South Boston. I saved up and got Bruins or Celtics tickets high in the nosebleed seats, the cigarette haze half-masking the players below. In the spring I found bleacher seats at Fenway for the Sox. I owed something to the world for my gift of sanity, as long as I had it.
That spring Barb told me that she’d met someone else back at college. For a day or two I was crushed but soon felt relief. Not that I could ever end a relationship myself. The thought of initiating a break-up felt like ejecting myself into the blackness of space, drifting without oxygen through eternity. Yet Barb had done the work for me.
I half-dreaded the parties and mixers I attended, never quite knowing what to say for small talk. But at one, across the river at Boston University, I met a tall freshman who seemed intriguing and felt an instant spark. We walked the wet streets, talking until late. Heading to her dorm to pick her up the following weekend, I felt almost sophisticated in my corduroy sport jacket and faded jeans. Later that evening she filled me in, furtively, about her former boyfriend, an older guy from the Navy. “You can’t believe the feeling when a guy you’re into slowly undresses you. Every nerve in your body is exposed.”
Excited beyond belief, I wondered if I could rise to the challenge. But our quick love affair overwhelmed me. What might it mean to be that close to someone? Could I tell her what I’d learned from Dad? In the end I couldn’t bring myself to call her back. Loneliness was better than exposure.
Vietnam, how the brain processes information, the origins of creativity: Each evening dorm conversations grew intense. The grass I smoked took the edge off my worries, as excitement filled the spring air. The social deviance seminar was reaching its conclusion, probing why societies form ingroups and outgroups and whether psychoactive medications are overmarketed agents of social control or needed treatments for biologically based forms of mental illness. Scrambling, I tried to ride the crest.
In late May, the athletic department announced a meeting for freshmen intending to try out for varsity football in the fall. The whole thing felt like past history but the memory of my near-miss in tenth grade was close at hand. I entered the classroom to see a crowd of eager guys awaiting instructions from the assistant coach. Yet there was something about the way my stomach was feeling, plus all that congestion inside my head, that blocked my focus. I listened for a few minutes but coursework beckoned. Realizing that this chapter of my life was over, I tiptoed to the door. Just as I put my hand on the knob, the coach spotted me, as his derisive words rang out: “Look, men, there’s one who’s not sure he can stand the heat.” The sound of laughter filled my ears.
Back in my room I tried to study but couldn’t concentrate. Exhausted but strangely wired, I went to bed on the early side but my head was too clogged to sleep. The pattern had started back in ninth-grade football when I was a defensive back, trying to tackle a running back downfield who had already made a big gain. Knocked down by a blocker and lying on the ground, I tried to grab the runner’s leg but another kid’s shoe got under my faceguard, his cleat almost crushing my nose. It wasn’t broken but I’d had trouble breathing ever since.
My runaway thoughts took over: Just as the first pale morning light would appear behind my curtain following a sleepless night, I’d drop over a sharp edge, my mind spiraling out of control. The pattern was clear. Dad ended up at Norwalk after three nights without sleep, beginning his lifetime of mental illness. How could I just wait out a descent into madness? I had to do something.
I remembered my migraines. When the pain reached its peak, the only relief was to give in to the crippling nausea and crouch by the toilet until my insides nearly burst. Maybe now, if I could rid that crud from my stomach and clear the congestion from my head, sleep might come. What other option did I have?
As though in a trance, I hauled myself out of bed, hoping my roommates were asleep. I chugged some water from the faucet to make sure there was something inside to throw up, having digested dinner long ago. I looked down at the smooth white porcelain of the toilet and the dingy tiles of the bathroom floor. I bent down, my knee aching on the hard surface, leaned over the toilet, and stuck my fingers down my throat, way down, the way I sometimes had to during the final stages of a migraine when I couldn’t get it all out despite the raging nausea. What choice did I have? I was convinced that my sanity depended on it.
The first gags and retches ended up in a futile cough. But I kept at it and the eruptions began to convulse my body, yellowish mucus and bile spewing forth into the glistening water. Gasping, I rinsed out my mouth, washed my hands, and stumbled back to bed, where, exhausted, I fell asleep. My eyes were tinged red in the morning. My body may have suffered but the purges had saved me. Hadn’t they?
Without any release for the images Dad had provided me, I couldn’t digest what he’d said about his lifelong schizophrenia. Through the crudest possible method, I expelled what I’d taken in.
In June I saw my year-end report of all As. Yet for my most important course—understanding myself—I had barely passed. Each day the contrast stared me in the face.
* * *
Ron had always been offbeat, even back in junior high when I first met him. He was strong, loud, and intense. His dad was an engineer and his mom a teacher. He called them by their first names, which everyone thought was weird. Ron didn’t smell good, especially after exerting himself in woodshop class. Maybe no one had shown him how to use deodorant. But he was super-smart and super-athletic. By high school, the coaches had molded him into an incredible defensive end. Ready to run down any ball-carrier, his neck collar and arm pads giving him the look of a gladiator, he played a key role on our undefeated teams. Ron got into Harvard on sheer academic and athletic talent.
During freshman year I often headed over to his dorm in the evening. The living room was always filled with roommates, weed, and great music. We talked intently of psychology and world issues. But every once in a while Ron did something strange, like the time his mom sent him a huge box of cookies in the mail from Columbus, a week’s supply at least. We opened it with a couple of other guys, each of us eating one or two. The next night, I headed back for more. With a strange look on his face, he told me they were gone. “Come on, Ron, what do you mean?” I asked. Where was he stashing them?
“I finished them after everyone left last night,” he continued.
“That’s impossible! There were at least a hundred cookies in there.”
“Oh ye of little faith,” he responded sardonically, his grin twisted. “I ate them all!”
A couple of his roommates soon came in and confirmed the story. That’s Ron, their shrugs said; they couldn’t believe it either. If Ron had an impulse, there was no stopping it.
The summer after freshman year I was back in Columbus and so was Ron. He called one night and we decided to drive over to the OSU campus and see what was happening. His hair was really wild by then, not just long like everyone else’s but all over the place. Picking him up, I could see that his eyes were huge, his gaze intense and erratic. As we crossed the Olentangy River on a warm June evening, throngs of people crowded the sidewalks. “Do you see them, Hinshaw?” Ron snarled, staring out the car window.
“See who?” I answered, trying to keep my eyes on the road.
“All of them, right there!” Ron called out. “They look like people, but they’re not. They’re robots!” At first amused, I was now hearing alarm bells. “You can’t tell by looking at them,” he was now shouting, “but they’re mechanical, pretending to be human. They’re machines, gears and wires inside. People are mechanical grasshoppers!”
Had Ron smoked a joint? Or was he voicing a metaphorical belief about human alienation? I somehow knew that neither was the case. He calmed down a bit as we went into a bar. Back then in Ohio, at 18 you could get low-alcohol beer.
Worried about him as we headed home, I asked if he wanted to spend the night on our couch in the family room. Like a lost puppy, he accepted eagerly. I set him up before going upstairs, where for once I fell asleep within minutes.
The next day, after Ron had walked home alone at some point early in the morning, Mom had a haggard look. “Did you see the family room this morning, Steve? Wrappers everywhere, records out of sleeves, everything a total mess. Loud music until four a.m. Neither your father nor I could sleep a wink.”
I was stunned, suddenly guilty that I’d invited him over. Their bedroom was right over the family room but I hadn’t heard a thing. Mystified, I apologized. Later on, Dad came over to talk. He had dark circles under his eyes but tried to smile. “You were just trying to help your friend, weren’t you,” he said. “He’s not in very good shape, is he?” Dad had a sixth sense for particular forms of distress.
Back in Cambridge in the fall, Ron didn’t go out for any varsity sports, even though he would have been first-team in anything he tried. Without warning, he dropped all his classes. If I saw him around, he looked otherworldly. One day he suddenly left Cambridge, no one was sure for where. A former roommate said a few months later that Ron had ended up in a mental hospital somewhere, maybe New York. “He’s got schizophrenia, that’s what I heard,” said the roommate with a bewildered expression.
No one saw Ron again. He’d vanished into the ether. But he stayed on my mind.
Desperately, I tried to work it out. Dad had been diagnosed with schizophrenia since the 1930s—the often lasting condition with hallucinations, fixed delusional beliefs, illogical thinking, and difficulty processing and expressing emotions. Ron had developed it, too, but with a huge difference. Once Ron began his collapse, he never got better. Neither had my cousin Marshall out in California, Uncle Paul’s oldest son, who had been in and out of mental hospitals since his first term at UC Berkeley in 1968, without any sign of improvement. Yet Dad seemed so normal much of the time, at times super-rational even if a little detached. How could they all have the same condition? In class, I drew genograms, squares for male relatives and circles for females, shading in the shapes for cases of mental illness. With diligence, I might crack the family code.
Each time Dad and I headed back into his study during a visit home, my heart accelerated. He might start by asking about my interest in psychology, speaking excitedly about his own fascination with both psychoanalytic models and behaviorism during his years in college. He discussed philosophy and the ideas that had always thrilled him—the origins of knowledge, the progress of science, the sense of ethics people live by. Cautiously, in the third person, he raised the topic of schizophrenia once more. “When one has heard exultant voices and angelic choruses praising the Lord all night long, as I have, such a diagnosis is understandable,” he said. I had a glimmer of doubt but said nothing. Dad’s pattern seemed altogether different, leaving a major problem to be solved.
Although shattering, everything he told me made a strange sense. There must have been something this huge, this catastrophic to have produced the vast hangar of silence surrounding my life.
* * *
Back in high school we took a summer family trip up to northern Michigan, a break from my cross-country workouts before the football conversion, Sally’s chorus practices, Dad’s summer teaching, and Mom’s course prepping. Boyne Mountain was a small peak, but compared to the glacier-carved plains of most of Michigan and Ohio, it seemed plenty tall. Eager to take the chair lift and hike the trails, I asked Sally to join me. But her expression instantly revealed her long-standing fear of heights. “I want to,” she said plaintively, “but the chairs are so high off the ground! If I looked down, I might faint. Really, Steve, I probably would.”
Thinking fast, I replied, “If I sit next to you and we concentrate on the view, we’ll be up to the top in no time. It’ll be more fun than you think.” I let her know how proud she’d feel and what a great hike down we’d have. After she finally relented, we walked from the station to wait for the chairs to swing around the bend and approach us from behind. When the chair hit the back of our thighs, we sat back as the guy swung the metal bar over our heads. With a surge, we lifted off the ground, rising through the pine forest with a rush of air on our faces as the slope receded beneath our legs, 20, 40, then 60 feet below.
The view was stunning in the now-cooler air. But looking over, I saw that Sally was stricken. Her grip on the bar was so tight that the color had drained from her hands. “I’ve never been this scared in my life,” she croaked. “Look how high we are!” The chair rocked back and forth in the wind.
“Don’t look down,” I ordered. “Hang on. We’ll soon be up to the top.”
“Steve,” she cried, her voice breaking as she grabbed my arm with one hand. “I can’t stand this another second. I’m going to jump.” I felt her abruptly re-arrange her body, her hands groping to lift up the bar, the ground far beneath us. This was no idle threat. The panic in her voice was unmistakable.
“Sally, if you jump you’ll break both your legs,” I spoke loudly, trying to stay calm. “You could fall on your head.” Indeed, she’d have certainly died. “Stay right here!”
Should I grab her? But the seat was starting to rock. I concentrated on talking firmly, without a trace of doubt. “Sally, listen to me. Close your eyes; you have to.” I craned my neck to look toward her. This was my only shot. “Good, keep them closed. Now do this—think of our cat at home.” It was Thai-Thai, our Siamese. Sally’s love of cats was incredible. “Think of petting your beautiful cat and how good it will feel when we’re back at home to see him. Think only of the cat. We’ll be off this lift in a couple of minutes.”
Hesitant at first, she began to sit back, her eyes tightly shut. I told her about things she liked: her friends, the cat, anything to keep her mind occupied. Hurry, I silently ordered the chair lift. She kept her eyes shut tight as I talked.
After a few interminable minutes the ground came up fast beneath us. I lifted the bar over our heads and held her arm, telling her to open her eyes before pulling her off as the chair quickly swung around for its return trip. The lush countryside spread beneath us. Though pale, she had her feet on the ground. Never had I heard her so thankful. “I was ready to jump,” she said.
“Believe me, I know,” I replied. “You had me worried.”
I couldn’t get over the vice-like grip of her terror. I wasn’t sure how I’d known what to say to her up there; it had just come to me.
Beginning my second year of college, my new plan was to drop pre-med courses and major in social relations, the interdisciplinary department blending sociology, social psychology, and anthropology, now merging with the small experimental psychology department dominated for years by B. F. Skinner. It might ultimately lead to a Ph.D. in clinical psychology if I could put in the work and get enough experience both clinically and in research. Maybe, just maybe I could learn enough science to understand mental illness and use any skills I had to help people—the way I had helped Sally.
I sought field work, and the medium-security prison south of Boston offered the opportunity to teach a psychology class. Passing through the metal detector each week, I felt the trickle of fear spread over my skin. My co-instructor, a senior, and I brought up classic psychology experiments and showed films of these in a sterile, cinder-block room. Each inmate received a certificate at the end of the term, a small item, but one that might make a difference at a parole hearing. It was the least I could do, I thought, for those who’d turned abuse and deprivation into hurting others as well as themselves.
I headed back outside the gates each week but didn’t gloat over my freedom. My own incarceration felt internal. How might I break out into a more authentic way of living, beyond my constant overscheduling, my lurking fear over what I’d learned but dared not share? More than I knew at the time, I identified with the inmates.
The fall semester was relentless, with endless reading lists and countless papers to write. Autumn faded fast, the trees devoid of leaves before October was over. In November spits of snow alternated with clear, freezing days. Every week or two, after hours of congestion and unease, I hauled myself out of bed for another torture session in the bathroom. By mid-year I’d lost ten pounds.
Every few weeks I walked over to the textbook section of the bookstore, a vast windowless annex. Row after row of new books gleamed, listed alphabetically by course. I always started in the “P” section housing the psychology books. But even the subareas of psychology—cognitive, developmental, biological, personality, clinical—loomed large. Down the aisle lay the other “Ps”: paleontology, philosophy, physics. Opening a book at random, I scanned the dense opening paragraphs. I was entering other worlds, but how could I get immersed without becoming lost?
On some daring afternoons I went to other aisles: “A”—astronomy, anthropology, Asian studies; “B”—botany, biochemistry. In the dull glare of the fluorescent lights overhead, each book called out. But I feared that I might lose myself if I entered worlds of thought that were too different from my own. Quickly retreating back to the “P”s and psychology, I took a deep breath. I had returned to the place I needed to keep my focus.
The battle lines were being drawn. Could I learn anything important if I were afraid to truly explore? Might I transform the knowledge of my family into anything useful? Every night, even the ones I didn’t end up in the bathroom, the questions swirled.