Life returned to normal for me and Barbara. I was driving buses for Durham. We were living in Aptos. Through that winter and into the spring we were just waiting. We didn’t know when the program would be broadcast. Spring? Summer? We didn’t know.
Sometime in late winter I started recording the parts of the program that would stitch it together. I’d drive up with Barbara or sometimes my son Rodney, and we’d meet an engineer named Larry Blood at KUSP, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Cruz.
It seemed to take forever. I have a good voice for radio, or people tell me I do, but I don’t have radio-perfect diction. It took me quite a few takes to get some of the lines right. We’d have to tape them over and over.
For example, Dave and Piya had interviewed a woman named Angelene Forester, whose mother received the first transorbital lobotomy that Walter Freeman ever performed in his Washington, D.C., office. We had tape of Angelene talking with her mother.
“He was just a great man,” her mother said.
“As a child, you kind of see into people’s souls,” her daughter agreed. “And he was good, at least then.”
It was a powerful piece of tape. The problem was the mother’s name. It was Sally Ellen Ionesco. Sally-Ellen-EYE-OH-NESS-CO.
I don’t know about you, but for me that’s hard to say. The script called for me to say, “His patient was a housewife named Sally Ellen Ionesco.” I stumbled over it so many times that we rewrote the line. In the broadcast, I just referred to her as “Ellen Ionesco,” without the “Sally” part.
In May 2005 Barb and I moved house. I had recently cashed in my 401(k) plan from driving buses. I had enough money to buy my own place. We found a spot in a mobile-home community designed for seniors. I was barely old enough. Barb wasn’t nearly old enough. But it was a good location, and it was affordable. For the first time in my life, I was living in my own home. That felt great.
Waiting for the radio broadcast to take place wasn’t great. It seemed like it took forever. Finally, we were told it would air in November.
In advance of that, I met a few reporters. I met a whole crew from People magazine. They came up to San Jose to meet with us. They bought me a wardrobe for the photo shoot. They said they wanted me to look nice for the pictures. I could have looked nice wearing things out of my own closet, but I wasn’t going to say no to some new clothes. We went down to the beach in Santa Cruz. They took pictures of me wearing tan slacks and a brown Pendleton-style shirt.
Then it was time for the main event.
Once again, I refused to fly. We arranged tickets for the train. Barbara couldn’t get off work. So I took my son Rodney. We had a nice ride across the country. Then, Barb’s schedule changed and she was able to join us. Rodney and I arrived in New York and got picked up by a Sound Portraits person at Penn Station right around the same time that someone else from Sound Portraits was picking up Barbara at JFK.
The broadcast was scheduled for Wednesday, November 14,2005. The premiere was scheduled for the Monday before. It would be held at Bellevue, the famous New York mental hospital. The reception would be in the hospital library.
I knew all about Bellevue. Any person my age did, from cartoons and TV shows of the fifties and sixties. That’s the place where they took the crazy people. And that’s where they took us that Monday night.
It was almost empty when we arrived. I thought maybe no one was going to show up. Then people started coming in. I couldn’t believe how many of them came. There were two hundred people, plus a lot of press. There were people from CNN and the New York Times.
It looked like a cocktail party. People were standing around, chatting. But it was kind of weird, because a lot of them were chatting about me. That was a new thing. People were looking at me. People were nodding at me, like they knew me.
They sat me and Barbara and Rodney down right in the front row. Some of the other people from the broadcast were there, too, like Carol Noell, Freeman’s colleague Dr. Lichtenstein, and Freeman’s biographer, Jack El-Hai.
I was nervous. I felt like I was baring my soul. Everything about me was going to be out there, for the whole world to see and hear. What would that be like? I had kept these things secret from most of the people I knew for almost my whole life. As far back as Agnews and Rancho Linda, I never told anyone about my lobotomy. Now I was doing a national radio broadcast that was called “My Lobotomy.”
The program ran twenty-two minutes. It was very serious, very somber. It began with voices I didn’t know. And music. It was very sad music—a piano playing something soft and sad underneath these voices—that I found out later was written by Philip Glass. The voices were talking about Freeman, and his lobotomy.
“We went into a room and there was a stretcher there…”
“He came in with something of a flourish, and he had his valise…”
“And the first person was brought in and strapped down, and given an electroshock.”
“He had an instrument…”
“It was an ice pick.”
“And then he’d shove it up into the forward part of the brain…”
“There was total silence among those of us who were watching. It was riveting.”
There was total silence in the Bellevue Hospital library, too. You could feel the heaviness in the air. Then—the voice of Dr. Freeman, from an old, scratchy recording: “This is Walter Freeman, M.D., Ph.D. I am seventy-two years old now….”
And then, not scratchy and old, but sounding like I was right there in the room, it was me.
“This is Howard Dully. In 1960, when I was twelve, I was lobotomized by this man, Dr. Walter Freeman. Until this moment I haven’t shared this fact with anyone, except my wife and a few close friends. Now, I’m sharing it with you….”
The audience heard me interview Frank Freeman. He remembered a drawer in the house where his father kept several ice picks. “A humble ice pick!” he says.
He has an aw-shucks sort of personality. He says things like “Good heavens!” He says it was “a darn good experience” to finally meet one of his father’s patients.
He doesn’t seem too concerned when I tell him I’d been lobotomized at the age of twelve. Then I ask him if he’s proud of his father.
“Oh, yes,” Frank says. “He was terrific. He was really quite a remarkable pioneer lobotomist. I wish he could have gotten further.”
Other interviews follow. There’s Angelene Forester and her mother, Sally Ellen Ionesco. Then comes Dr. Elliot S. Valenstein, author of Great and Desperate Cures, the history of brain surgery. He gives some historical context for the invention of the transorbital lobotomy, and tries to explain how such a brutal operation became so popular.
Next is the interview with Carol Noell. You hear us being introduced, shaking hands. You hear Carol describing her mother, who’d been operated on when Carol was just a little girl.
“Isn’t she pretty?” Carol says. “She was so smart….”
During this part of the program, sitting in the dark in the Bellevue library, Carol took my hand, and held it tight for the rest of the show. She was obviously upset. She needed someone to lean on. Barb was a little bothered by this. But it didn’t mean anything. Carol just needed someone to hold on to right then.
The conversation on the tape gets emotional. You can hear Carol’s voice breaking. It’s hard for her to talk about. She asks me why we’re stirring up these painful things that happened so long ago and can never be corrected.
“How come it is that we’re at the age we are and we can’t seem to say, ‘Okay, that was then, this is now’?”
“Because it’s not okay,” I tell her. “It’s not finished.”
The sad piano music comes back up. Then it’s Dr. J. Lawrence Pool.
“I am now ninety-seven years old,” he says. “I dedicated my life to brain surgery. I did not approve of Dr. Freeman’s ice-pick method—no. I tell you, it gave me a sense of horror.”
Then the audience heard me going to the George Washington University archives. “My file has everything,” my voice on the tape says. “A photo of me with the ice picks in my eyes, medical bills. But all I care about are the notes. I want to understand why this was done to me.”
First, I read out loud from Freeman’s notes: “‘Mrs. Dully came in to talk about her stepson who is now twelve years old.’” Then I speak: “It’s pretty much as I suspected. My real mother died of cancer when I was five. My dad remarried, and his new wife, my stepmother, hated me. I never understood why, but it was clear she’d do anything to get rid of me.”
There were more sections of the notes, the buildup from Lou’s first meeting with Freeman to that terrible entry on December 3, 1960: “‘Mr. and Mrs. Dully have apparently decided to have Howard operated on. I suggested they not tell Howard anything about it.’”
There was total silence in the Bellevue Hospital library. On the tape, there is only the sound of my voice, recorded as I sat reading Freeman’s notes, finding out for the first time what really happened to me, and why.
“‘December 17, 1960: I performed transorbital lobotomy.’”
“‘January 4, 1961: I told Howard what I’d done to him today and he took it without a quiver. He sits quietly, grinning most of the time and offering nothing.’”
You can hear, on the tape, how hard this is for me. I say, “And I was supposed to fight all this? No way. How is a twelve-year-old kid supposed to stand up to something like this? It just wasn’t fair….”
I didn’t know what Piya and Dave had done with that part of the tape they had on me from the archives. At the time, I’d broken down and cried. On the tape, I exhale heavily. Then the music comes back up. Now it is a lone violin, sorry and sad, joined by a string quartet.
The sound of my voice returns: “When my stepmother saw the operation didn’t turn me into a vegetable, she got me out of the house. I was made a ward of the state. It took me years to get my life together. Through it all I’ve been haunted by questions. Did I do something to deserve this? Can I ever be normal? And, most of all: Why did my dad let this happen? In forty-four years, we’ve never discussed it once—not even after my stepmother died. It took me a year of working on this project before I even got up the courage to write him a letter.”
The sound changes again. My voice changes again. You hear me say, “I’m here with my dad. I’ve waited for over forty years for this moment. Thank you for being here with me.”
It’s almost impossible for me to say this on the tape. You can hear how difficult it is. My voice breaks several times. At the moment, it was incredibly emotional. Piya and Dave recorded it just as it happened. I was almost overcome with feeling. You can hear that on the tape.
And you can hear how, for my dad, it’s not emotional at all. He says, “I’ll tell you anything that needs to be answered,” like he was taking a test at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
I ask him, “How did you find Dr. Freeman?”
“I didn’t,” he says quickly. “She did. She took you.”
I push him a little. “My question would be, naturally, why would you let it happen to me, if that was the case?”
He says he doesn’t dwell on the “negative.”
I push harder still. You can hear on the tape how difficult it is for me. “But this was, this has really affected my whole life.”
“Nobody is perfect,” he says back at me. “Could I do it over again? Would I have? Oh, hindsight’s beautiful. Fifty years later, can I say this was a mistake? So was World War One a mistake!”
You could almost hear the audience turn against him. There was a gasp or two. There was some mumbling. The energy in the room changed. It was as if he had admitted everything. It was all out in the open now. This was the guy who had let me down.
But the tape doesn’t attack him. What comes next is maybe the most powerful moment in the whole program.
“Although he refuses to take any responsibility, just sitting here with my dad and getting to ask him questions about my lobotomy is the happiest moment of my life,” my narrator voice says.
Then you hear my voice change, and it’s clear I’m talking with my dad again.
“I want to thank you for doing this with me. I never thought this would ever happen.”
“Well, you see?” my dad says, all chirpy and cheerful. “Miracles occur!”
“Actually what I wanted to do was tell you that I love you….”
“Whatever made you think I didn’t know that?” he says. “You shaped up pretty good!”
“…and I feel very happy about that.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear!”
The piano music comes up again. Even now, it’s almost impossible for me to listen to that moment without crying. It’s heartbreaking. I’m opening up everything to him. I’m telling him I love him. I’m almost begging him to say he loves me, too. And he doesn’t.
The narration continues. “After twenty-five hundred operations, Walter Freeman performed his final ice-pick lobotomy on a housewife named Helen Mortenson in February 1967. She died of a brain hemorrhage, and Freeman’s career was finally over….”
The last interview is with Rebecca Welch, from the day she and her husband took us to meet her mother, Anita McGee. Rebecca begins to cry when she asks me, “Do you know how many people…can’t do what you’re doing, and you’re doing it for them?”
The section ends with the sound of Rebecca and her mother singing “You Are My Sunshine.”
Then my voice returns.
After two years of searching, my journey is finally over. I’ll never know what I lost in those ten minutes with Dr. Freeman and his ice pick. By some miracle, it didn’t turn me into a zombie, or crush my spirit, or kill me.
But it did affect me. Deeply. Walter Freeman’s operation was supposed to relieve suffering. In my case, it did just the opposite.
Ever since my lobotomy I’ve felt like a freak—ashamed. But sitting in the room with Rebecca Welch and her mom, I know that my suffering is over.
I know my lobotomy didn’t touch my soul. For the first time, I feel no shame. I am, at last, at peace.
The end credits come on, with that piano music again. Then the program ends.
There was total silence in the room. The audience seemed to be in shock. Then they began to applaud. There was a lot of applause.
Dave Isay got up and made some remarks, and then introduced me and a few other people who were going to take questions from the audience. I was in a kind of daze. I was overwhelmed. And I was scared. The program had been very emotional for me. I had never heard it with the music in. I’d also never been in a crowd like this, with all eyes on me. And all of those people were applauding me. It was very powerful. And now I was going to have to answer questions from the audience, or maybe even the press.
Most of them were more like comments than questions. People wanted to talk about how the program made them feel. It was easy. I was afraid we’d get some hostile remarks, or hostile questions.
There was only one. Some person insinuated there was something dishonest about the way the show was written—that I was obviously not smart enough to have written my own lines, and that I didn’t talk the way they made me talk on the broadcast. A person with a lobotomy couldn’t be that creative or that artistic.
That wasn’t true, but it was upsetting to hear someone say it. What did they know about what I was capable of saying or writing?
Luckily Dave took the question. He said that the whole program was a collaboration, and that many people had contributed to every aspect of it.
In fact, I think every word I say in the broadcast is something I had a hand in writing, or at least in choosing the words. I didn’t do the research on Dr. Freeman’s early experiments with prefrontal lobotomy. I’m not a scientist, or a historian. But I helped write the words I would say about that, once I had the information.
The following day we traveled down to Washington, D.C. It was the first time I’d been there since we got my archives. It wasn’t snowy now. The city looked different. We rested in the hotel, and waited for the broadcast.
I called my dad to tell him the broadcast was scheduled for that Wednesday. All he said was, “Oh, okay. Good luck.”
Later on, I had a call from my younger brother Brian. It was pure coincidence. I hadn’t heard from him in a long, long time. He was calling to say he had some pictures to send me, pictures from our childhood that he had come across in his house.
I thanked him and said, “You know where I am, don’t you?”
He said he didn’t.
“I’m in Washington. They’re about to broadcast my story on NPR.”
He said he’d listen.
We went over to the NPR studio for the actual broadcast. I sat in the control room with Dave, Piya, Barbara, and Rodney. We listened. There were lots of high-fives when the program ended. There was a feeling of exhilaration, and of relief. It was over, finally. It had happened.
But it wasn’t over. After the show, Dave and Piya and the rest of us were standing around on the street outside the studio. We had given up our badges and IDs, and were getting ready to go back to the hotel. Someone came running down and said, “We crashed the server!”
There were so many e-mails coming in, so fast, that the National Public Radio Internet server collapsed under the weight of them. They had something like four thousand e-mails come in all at once, just at the end of the show. Dave said that the Sound Portraits server had crashed, too. Since it was a small one, that was no big deal. But the NPR server crashing—that was a huge deal. The NPR server had never before crashed in its history, someone told us. They had more e-mail on the lobotomy story than on anything they’d ever done.
Because of that response, someone quickly organized a show for the next day. I was scheduled as a guest on the NPR call-in radio show called Talk of the Nation. Dr. Valenstein was also on, by telephone, from his home. We took calls from people who wanted to talk about lobotomy, or share their opinions, or ask questions. The most common question was “How could this happen?”
We stayed that night in Washington. Barb flew home the next day. Then Rodney and I got on the train and began the long ride home.
My father never really told me what he thought of the broadcast. Neither did Brian. I know they both heard it. Brian didn’t have anything to say about it. My father’s only remark was that they had taken his comments out of context. He didn’t say he was angry, and he didn’t say he was unhappy with the way it came out. The comment about World War I, he said, wasn’t fair.
By the time I got back to San Jose, the reader e-mails were being forwarded to me. Someone from NPR printed out a whole batch and sent them to me. It was overwhelming. A lot of it was applause for the documentary itself.
“Yesterday’s show must go down as one of the greatest and most moving pieces I have ever heard on the radio,” one listener wrote. “That is the most powerful piece I have ever heard on radio,” another said. There were lots of letters like that.
A lot of other writers said they had never written to NPR before. “I have been a dedicated listener for more than 25 years, but in all that time, I have never taken a moment to write to you about any story,” one woman said. Another person said, “After 25 years of listening [to NPR] and never writing to express how many stories have deeply affected me, I have to say that ‘My Lobotomy’ may be the finest piece of storytelling I have ever heard.”
Some of the letters were from physicians. One of them said, “As a doctor I find it sad that lobotomy was welcomed by ‘traditional’ medicine…. I know we must always watch out for ‘quacks,’ however most people do not realize that many of the most dangerous, outrageous therapies are the ones approved by the ‘traditional’ medical establishment.”
A lot of other letters were written by people who identified with how I felt and how I was treated as a boy. Some of them said they were lucky not to have had a lobotomy themselves. “As a person who suffers from depression and anxiety, I might have been a patient of Dr. Freeman,” one listener wrote.
In many of the letters, people talked about crying during the broadcast. They said they cried in their kitchens, in their cars, caught in traffic, or in their offices. One man said he had to fight back tears while he was working out at the gym. Another said that she and her two children were all crying. One man said he had listened to the story twice. “Cried both times,” he wrote. “Will most likely listen to the story again online. Will cry, again.”
Almost all of the letters talked about how honest I was, how brave I had been, what courage I had, or what a hero I was. (A lot of them also said I had a “wonderful radio voice,” and several urged NPR to hire me as a full-time correspondent. Memo to NPR: I am still available.) Many of them wanted to commend me personally for having survived my journey. I was really surprised by how people wanted to congratulate me for doing what I had to do to survive.
To my amazement, I got a letter from a woman named Nancy Greene, who said she had worked in the Santa Clara County Probation Department at the time I was made a ward of the court and sent to Agnews. “I am so happy you have a good life,” she wrote. She said that she was sorry about what happened to me, and that she’d do anything she could to help me put together the “puzzle pieces” of my life.
Even more surprising, I got a letter from Linda Pickering, the daughter of Lou’s sister Virginia. She’s the one who, according to her mother, said I gave her “the creeps.” She wrote to tell me how moved she was by the broadcast. She must have seen People, too.
“I want you to know how happy I am for you,” she wrote. “You are truly a miracle. I was only 17 when this travesty happened to you. All I remember is the face of a lost little boy. I remember that my parents were dead set against this happening to you, and I know they told my Aunt Lou exactly how they felt. It was the wrong thing to do.”
Linda went on to congratulate me for what I had made of my life, against the odds. “You have turned out to be a very successful citizen, good husband and great commercial bus driver,” she wrote. “Handsome, too!”
In her letter, she put in a kind word for Lou. “I do want you to know that [Lou] didn’t stay the way she was in those days. People mellow as they age. They also want to atone for all the wrong things that they did during their lives. I have to believe that she regretted what she did to you before she died. She became a soft-spoken, gentle woman. You have a wonderful gift of compassion and forgiveness, and I hope that you can forgive her.”
Wow.
I had said in the radio broadcast that, sitting with Rebecca Welch, I was at last at peace. I felt a lot more of that reading those letters. I had sometimes been bothered by ideas that I had during the recording and interviewing of the show that I was doing something wrong. Was I sensationalizing my tragedy? Was I cheapening it?
Back when he was trying to get me to agree to use my own name, to build the show around my experience, and to interview my father, Dave Isay had offered to make me a financial partner in the broadcast, and to share the earnings from the show with me.
Was I going to be criticized for making money off the misery I had experienced? Did I have the right to do that? It was my story, after all. It was my misery. I wasn’t taking anything from anyone. I thought I was doing something noble.
The e-mails confirmed that for me. They made me feel noble again—not because I had these experiences and survived them, but because I came forward and told the truth about them, and, in doing that, helped people.
In the meantime, I went back to driving the bus for Durham.
Not long after the broadcast, I was contacted by some publishing people and asked to think about writing this book. I got excited about that. There were so many things that had to be left out of the radio show. We had recorded more than a hundred hours of tape, and we had only twenty-two minutes of radio time. This would be a chance to really get to the bottom of the whole story.
The book might also mean a little money. And I needed money. My son, Rodney, had lost his job, and he had to move in with me and Barb in our new place. Then my stepson, Justin, had similar problems. He was a husband now, and a father. So he and his wife and child moved in with us, too.
It’s a one-bedroom, one-bathroom place. We were all over each other. No one had any privacy. I wished I had enough money to get an apartment for them. But I was having trouble keeping my own head above water. My cell phone got turned off, because I ran up such a huge bill on the train trip to New York and Washington and back and I couldn’t afford to pay it. The bank was threatening to repossess my car. I had complaints from the people who ran our mobile-home park, saying that kids were not allowed to stay there, even as overnight visitors. If I didn’t hurry up and find my sons a place to live, I was going to be looking for someplace to live myself.
That spring, I was invited to a high school reunion. The folks from Los Altos High School, who would have been my classmates if I had stayed in school, invited me to come to a Friday night party and a Saturday night reunion. After some hesitation, Barbara and I decided to go.
It was the right thing to do. I made a few contacts. I got to spend a little time with my brother George and his wife. I got to renew a few acquaintances with guys I knew in junior high school.
But when it was over, I felt left out. I felt left behind. I had nothing in common with these people. My life had been interrupted in ways they could never understand. Their lives had gone forward in ways that would never include me. I left the reunion feeling discouraged and alone.
Then something changed. I was offered a speaking engagement.
In the middle of the year I was contacted by someone representing the National Guardianship Association. This was a group of professional guardians, the people who are hired or appointed by the court to watch out for people who can’t watch out for themselves. They were holding their annual conference in Newport Beach, California. One of them had heard the NPR show. They wanted me to come talk to their members.
I prepared a presentation for them, a package that combined the radio broadcast and a CD slideshow of pictures of me, Dr. Freeman, Lou, my dad, and so on. I made some notes on things I would want to say to people who worked as guardians. Mostly I wanted to tell them what happened to me, and how it might not have happened if someone had been looking out for my interests.
Barbara and I drove down. We stayed one night in Hollywood, and the next day drove to Newport and checked into the hotel.
The event was held in a huge ballroom. I was the keynote speaker. My talk would be the last event before the awards luncheon. It would be attended by all of the conference attendees. I got to the ballroom, and almost fainted when one of the conference aides told me the room was set up for four hundred people.
The room filled up. I tried not to look, or count how many people were sitting there. Then a woman with the NGA took the stage. She said, “We are now going to hear from Howard Dully, who has an extraordinary story to tell. When he was twelve years old, he was given a transorbital lobotomy. He spent the next forty years finding out why. Please help me welcome Howard Dully.”
There was warm applause. Everyone watched the stage. But I didn’t walk to the front of the room. Instead, I waited until the room got dark, then started the radio broadcast. As the sound of my voice filled the room, I started the CD. People could hear me saying “My name is Howard Dully” just as they were seeing a photo of me as a child.
The audience was very quiet. At certain points during the twenty-two-minute broadcast, they got even quieter. At the point when I’m reading from Freeman’s archives and I say, “December 3, 1960: Mr. and Mrs. Dully have apparently decided to have Howard operated on,” the room was totally still.
The radio broadcast ended. The lights came up. I walked to the stage. The applause thundered like a wave breaking over me. I was choked up. I was in tears by the time I got to the front of the room. So were several women in the front row. There was a lot of applause.
I talked for a few minutes, telling them some more details about my dad, Lou, Freeman, and the others. Then members of the audience had questions.
“Wasn’t there any governmental control of lobotomies?” one man asked. “Was anyone ever helped by them?” another wanted to know. “How did you feel, mentally, after the operation?”
I answered as best I could. I said I also wondered about the authorities who might have protected me. I told them I thought some people had been helped by lobotomies, but far, far more had been hurt. I told them that after the operation I felt drunk, and not quite there. “I still feel, today, like I had one too many jolts of electroshock.”
One person asked how I thought the lobotomy had affected my brain, and another wanted to know how it had affected my life. I said that I didn’t know what had happened, organically, to my brain. “But I’ve had a terrible, disastrous life,” I said. “Not because of the operation, but because of what happened after. I didn’t learn how to live. It wasn’t because I was a bad guy, or because society was wrong, but because I didn’t know how to live.”
I answered questions for about thirty minutes before the NGA hostess told the audience we needed to wrap up and move on to the awards luncheon. But there were still ten people holding their hands up, so I took a few more questions. One woman wanted to know how I got along with my father today. Another person wanted me to talk more about being locked up at Agnews. A couple of people didn’t have questions at all—they just wanted to thank me for coming and telling my story.
“I want to thank you,” I said. “I have spent a lot of my life trying to turn something that was very negative into something that’s a little positive. Coming here, and talking to you—it helps me. Having the opportunity to talk to people about my lobotomy has made it possible for me to understand, at last, that there’s really nothing wrong with me. I’m just human.”
The NGA representative finally had to tell us to stop. The awards luncheon was scheduled to start, but all four hundred of her attendees were sitting and listening to me talk. So I thanked her, and thanked the audience, and we concluded. I was rushed at the stage by another ten or twenty people. I spent the next fifteen minutes being thanked by them, individually, for coming out and telling my story.
When it was over, walking toward the luncheon, holding Barbara’s hand, I realized that I did feel, at last, truly at peace. I felt useful. I had found my place. I was no longer ashamed.