Emily was at least as excited as I was that I got into UCLA’s top-tier law school. “My baby sister is going to law school!” Proudly, she paraded me around her office at the California Public Utilities Commission, introducing me to colleagues. As we approached the chief lawyer’s office, she said, “I really respect him. He’s brilliant in hearings and depositions.” When I extended my hand, he took it, looked into my eyes, and said, “Is there any way that I can convince you to do something more meaningful with your future?” He saw the surprise on my face and smiled ruefully. “Sorry. I don’t expect you to understand until you’re done, but by then, it will be too late.”
As my routine stabilized and I heard classmates making plans for summer internships and clerkships and specializations and career directions after law school, I sensed that there was a code, an unwritten book of rules, that I still wasn’t understanding. My professors were inundated and busy, and so were my classmates. I realized that what I needed was a guide, an interpreter or translator of this culture. I needed a mentor.
The annual UCLA Public Interest Law Fund auction was (and still is) one of the biggest events of the year. It was said that the specialty of public interest law gives the greatest satisfaction for the least pay. This was a job my friends would take, I thought, but I simply couldn’t afford it. At the very least, attending and bidding at the silent auction would support them. Plus, it just looked like fun, free wine and beer, and a chance to score some nice gifts: auction items I otherwise couldn’t afford, like high-priced haircuts, manicures, lunches, and dinners. Some of the faculty were putting themselves on the block. One professor would prepare a home-cooked dinner for six; another donated a week at his vacation home. But one offering in particular caught my eye: lunch with Sky Moore, a UCLA alum and adjunct professor in both the law school and Anderson School of Management. In addition to lunch, he offered a chance to review all his class and study notes from his student days and a $250 refund on the winning bid. Free time with a professor named Sky was better than a haircut, and just what I needed.
The bidding started at $300. There were at least four bidders. It went up to $400, then $500. I stayed in. At $550, lunch was mine; with the refund, I’d have $300 on the credit card—more than I’d planned to spend, but with any luck, worth every penny. We exchanged e-mails to set up the lunch meeting for the following week, and I rehearsed my half of the conversation.
We met at an Asian fusion restaurant near Sky’s office in Century City, and he asked all the usual questions: What aspect of law was I exploring? How were classes going? How did I get to UCLA? “I’m looking for a mentor,” I said, with my usual discomfort with small talk. “I need some guidance about where to go from here and how to put it all together. Do you think you could help me?”
“You seem pretty sure of yourself,” he said, smiling. “I can’t imagine that you need much help.”
I shook my head and took a deep breath. “Well, it’s complicated. I didn’t exactly take the direct route to get here,” I said. “In fact, I spent some time on the wrong side of the courtroom as a kid. I was a runaway when I was twelve, I was homeless, and I was locked up in juvy.”
He sat straight up in his chair. “Did somebody set this up?” he asked. “Why did you bid on me?”
“Nobody set this up,” I said, a little confused about his reaction. “I bid on you because your name is Sky, same as my sister. I thought it was some kind of sign.”
“Well,” he said, relaxing into his chair, “this is a trip. Because I’m more like you than anyone knows. I had a similar past as a kid, one that I’m not returning to, ever.” He mentioned having a sibling still on the streets. We were both amazed at the coincidence. Sky put his notebook and all the stuff about succeeding in law school to the side. “Okay, so how did you get here?” After I gave him the short version, he willingly took on the role of my first mentor at law school.
The jobs my fellow students all seemed to want were in corporate law. Sky warned me about the big firms and what they expected from new associates in exchange for high salaries—long days, late nights, lost weekends, and bad burnout. I had reason to believe him—one alum I’d met was only a year out and had deep, dark circles under her eyes. She’d left a high-end firm a month earlier and was looking to catch up on sleep before finding something new. I checked out her picture in the law school face book; she’d easily aged ten years since graduation. Other alums I spoke with were wearing elegant designer suits but confessed to buying them bigger every few months—no time to exercise, no time for vacation, and pounding down carbs or booze to counter the stress. I wondered about home lives, about spouses and children. The final straw was when a partner at a large firm warned me directly, “Any big firm will bleed you dry!”
About two weeks before an exam in criminology class, I was in a small-group study session analyzing a rape case. The husband had raped the wife. Was it rape? My hands started to itch and swell. The night before, I’d seen a small red welt the size of a nickel on my waistline, but I’d ignored it. Go away, go away. Now, looking at my hands, I stopped typing, closed my laptop, and walked out of the room. I couldn’t deny what was happening, and I knew if I stayed, it would only get worse. By the time finals came around, I looked like I had a bad case of the measles.
When I went to the doctor at the UCLA student health center, we tried to figure out the best mix of antihistamines and steroids to combat what was going on inside me. Many of these drugs I’d already tried; a couple were so strong they made me sleepy, the last thing I needed in law school, where students pride themselves on working the same number of sleepless hours that med students do.
“I think it’s caused by stress,” the doctor said. “Have you ever considered talking to a therapist?”
I had a hard enough time talking to people I knew well. Talking to Jake about the things that kept me off balance or uncertain upset him; we were on a path forward, and he didn’t want to hear about doubts that might set us back. Talking to Sky about the past was different. It wasn’t personal and felt more like an investment, a way to gain perspective. Classmates I spoke to were helpful but didn’t really know how to respond, and even this talk with a doctor in her exam room made me jumpy. Still, I’d gotten something out of talking to therapists in the past, so it didn’t seem totally off the wall. This was law school, not junior high—I had earned my way here, and no matter what I had to do, I was not going to drop out or let this sickness take me down. “Yes, I’ll make an appointment,” I said. “I have to do something.”
My doctor wrote down the names of three therapists who might possibly be willing to see me on a sliding scale, for a fee I could afford. I left messages with all three. Only one of them was taking new patients, and she scheduled an appointment immediately and gave me some of her background. Her name was Ceth, and she had worked with adolescents, specifically with teen girls, but was now in a much broader practice. “The first appointment will be free,” she said. “It’s an initial meeting, just to see how we can work together.”
The building Ceth’s office was in was not the sterile, intimidating medical space I expected; it was a prominent financial building on Wilshire Boulevard. I didn’t wait long on the couch in the waiting room, and the first thing I did when I walked into her office was let out a deep breath, relieved to be in a safe, confidential space. The office was clean, not cluttered. The lighting was low and warm, not institutional; it was simple and modern. I felt comfortable.
As Ceth and I began exchanging information, I found myself wanting to tell her everything, and soon I did—about my past, about my current life, about my fiancé, about law school classmates, and about ambitions.
My physical response to therapy came almost immediately—as soon as I was able to speak openly, the hives went away. Allowing a professional, a woman schooled in the intricate workings of the mind, to know my truth was like a child turning the light on in a dark room and realizing that the monster is just a chair. “But why can’t I forget these things, these images?” I asked. “Why do they come up in my dreams and trigger hives and night sweats? It’s been so many years, and I’m building a different life now—why isn’t that enough?”
“No one forgets that kind of trauma,” she said. “And it can’t simply be filed away. People deny it or medicate it, but ultimately it has to be faced. You spend so much energy holding it down that you barely have enough left over for anything else. It works for a while, but eventually your body revolts with hives, chronic colds, arthritis, asthma, even cancer.” These were all common in my family.
“It’s like I’m not even at home in my own body,” I said. I told her how awful I felt about not being able to have children, being scarred, and winding up covered in hives, all because of these things that happened to me when I was a kid.
“Do you want children?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but I want to be able to choose and not have to pay to make it happen.” Jake and I had never discussed children more than to say that if the doctors couldn’t make it happen when we were ready, then we’d adopt.
She nodded. “Your body’s reaction is telling you something. The triggers, like talking about rape and your recent surgery, are just that—triggers. What you’ve got to deal with is what’s underneath.” I thought back to my first therapy session when I was attending Cuesta.
“Imagine those memories are like a beach ball. And you are holding that beach ball underwater in a large pool. How much energy does it take? How much does it want to come up?”
I responded to Ceth, “My beach ball needs to come to the surface.” And then I told her the story of my first therapy session. “I was nineteen then, and not ready to let anything up. My therapist had warned me that if I chose to bring things out we’d do it slowly, together, and in the safety of her office.”
“And if you let it up too fast? What are you afraid of?” Ceth asked.
“I’m afraid of the splash,” I replied. “It’s like I’m in the water and I’m afraid I’ll get drenched.”
“Soaking wet or hives?” Ceth had a way of pointing out the obvious. I was strong enough to handle these memories and begin the process of allowing them to surface.
“What about the way I feel about my life right now? Is this really all about the past, or is it just the current stress of exams, law school, and normal life pressures?” I asked.
“It’s both.”
I thought about the selective way I’d controlled the various revelations to different people. My deductive math brain had kept the past locked up tight. The equations looked like this:
The past: rape + crime + prostitution + incarceration =
rejection + failure
The future: education + work + growth + freedom =
acceptance + success
I never shared anything that didn’t add up to positivity. When I thought about it honestly, I wasn’t even sure I’d ever told Jake my entire story. It was easy to say that I’d been kidnapped, that sex had been forced on me. But to admit that I’d gone back out on the streets, that I’d had sex with strangers, even after Icey was gone, even after I was back in school? That carried stigma and judgment. Hooker. Ho. I didn’t want those labels anywhere near me. I never felt or believed that’s what I was. I’d been a hostage to someone or something more powerful than I was, and I’d survived that. I was not a teen prostitute; I was a survivor, a graduate student, a fiancée, someone whose intention was to save kids like me. The beach ball came halfway up, and instinctively I quickly pushed it back down again.
“I wonder how you’d feel about bringing Jake in one day,” she asked.
“I wonder how he’d feel about it,” I said.
“Why don’t you ask him, and let me know how it goes. If he’s willing, we’ll all talk together.”
He was willing, but it took some time, and meanwhile the underlying tension and core fragility of the relationship that had revealed itself on the return trip from Europe lingered. It was as though we had been injured somehow and weren’t recovering. Nitpicky arguments blew up into full-on fights. One fight fueled another, and we didn’t spare the insults. “We have to separate,” he said. No, I’m not leaving, I’m not leaving. We can fix this!
Jake and I wanted to be seen as those peaceful, orderly, pretty people that everyone wanted to be. We wanted to be those people. But we were both having trouble keeping up with our own expectations of ourselves. We were not the couple in the upscale catalogs or the Sunday “styles” section of the newspaper; every move we made to prop up that image was followed by a fight that tore it down. What had for so long felt like progress to me began to feel like a charade. The masks we wear, the Cuesta professor had said. As focused and organized as my academic life had become, I still spent too long in front of the closet every day, pulling out items of clothing, putting them on, taking them off—and topping any outfit I chose with the diamond engagement ring from a man I knew I was not fit to marry.
When Jake at last came to therapy with me, I opened the door to my heart and told him everything about my past. It was a scene of such large emotion for me, I was so caught up in it, that I didn’t monitor his reactions too closely. I think I was too afraid of my own—that I would break out in hives, that I would lose control of my own words, that I would race out of the room and into the streets. When none of that happened, I looked at him, and what I saw told me the truth: He was alarmed, he was upset, he was flushed, he was quiet, and he was suddenly very, very distant. If the room had been any bigger, he would’ve been just that much farther away from me. Five and a half years gone. He was gone. In one therapy session, the snow-globe life we had created was shattered into pieces. The little man and woman inside, and all their little things—revealed to the world as lifeless miniatures of the real thing. We were ending our lie.
For safety, I went back to Barbara. She invited me to stay with her for a few days, and I burst through her door sobbing. “It’s broken,” I said. “It’s all over. It’s all broken!”
She knew exactly what to do. Pulling me close, she wrapped her arms around me. “You can begin again,” she said quietly. “The past is over. Now we start again.” She held me until my eyes were dry.
Jake had been my faithful cheerleader for years, and for a very long time after our breakup I could not figure out why he had used my past against me. As it turned out, he hadn’t. He was just as confused and trapped as I was.
Shattering our life together was his only way out of something that in some respects had always been a lie.
The tears rolled again when Jake told me the real reason for our breakup. He knew all along that he was gay. I wondered if he would have loved me if I were the opposite sex, but I didn’t have the courage to ask.