Hi snake charmers,
It's a new week so I'm writing a new transmission. Same rules. I'm writing from Brain School and I'm writing without stopping, trying to stamp out this precious desire for perfectionism by outpacing it.
Maybe some of you don't know what Brain School is, so I'll tell you. Brain School is actually called the OCD and Anxiety Treatment Center. I call it Brain School because my friend who went here called it that and she's funny and god knows we need funny and also because it makes me feel the Center is a science lab where minds simmer in vats and top scientists with beakers hold OCD solutions up to the light and shout: Eureka!
In fact The OCD and Anxiety Treatment Center is a gray stucco building located in a strip mall in Bountiful, Utah next to a mortgage company and a pizza shop. Upstairs there's a dentist's office and I like to imagine the confusion of elderly couples who come to get a root canal and find someone in the lobby licking a doorknob or spinning around in circles to simulate a panic attack.
There are no gleaming labs and rows of beakers here. It's more of a gray scene: gray carpet, gray walls, gray, gray, gray. There is a sense of disjointed aesthetic confusion everywhere. The hallways must be decorated somehow, and so someone has taken it upon themself to create large, framed, posters with inspirational words in die-cut vinyl letters. COMPASSION! It commands me as I walk, forever five minutes late, toward the group room each morning. SELF-AWARENESS!
The words sit without context, trying their Pinterest best to remind us clients of the right way to be. Scattered amongst the inspirational signs are framed blurbs pimping the Center. "You gave me back my mother," says the sign beside the exit. My therapist is an inveterate smart-ass who suffers daily under a poster that says Validation in cursive. We roll our eyes about it together, and this is how I know I can trust him. I ask him if I can bring a new sign for him, and if he will put it up no matter what it says. He says he will. If I have a few good days in a row I promise myself I will make my vinyl sign, which will say, in honor of Thomas Hobbes, "Life Is Nasty, Brutish, and Short."
I came here starting in January because for the last four years I have lived in almost constant terror. I thought what I was feeling was a ten, the max amount of pain a human could be in. I was wrong. In July, after six months of relative okay-ness (with an emphasis on relative), I started to cry one day at a vegan diner with a friend and never really stopped for six months. I was so anxious in the mornings I would lie dead still in my bed for three hours, afraid to even turn my head. I thought if I moved it would waken the monster that lived in my chest and she would stomp and rage and send her panic daggers all through me. When I did move, it was to run to the bathroom and vomit, vomit, vomit. My body was a hellscape and I lived there. Before I taught class at CUNY each day, I'd go into a bathroom stall and cry as quietly as I could, then wipe my face and pinch color back into my cheeks and go teach 19-year-olds about sentence structure.
Anyway, you know this story. What you might not know is that, sometime in November, I was eating tacos with a friend who has OCD and she looked at me with a deep-seeing kindness and asked if I had ever considered that I might have OCD, too.
Reader, I had not. In my mind, OCD was about washing your hands a lot and needing everything to be just so. But my friend told me that wasn't the case. There was something, she told me, called mental OCD — where both obsessions and compulsions happened in your mind. Some people called this condition Pure O, I learned, which sounded so hot and dangerous to me that I felt momentarily proud to potentially have it. As it turned out, my friend explained, Pure O was not hot at all. In fact, it felt like eternal torment.
I went home and started reading about OCD. I signed onto the Center's portal and filled out their intake form. On average, one question asked, how many hours a day do you fixate on the idea you have done something terribly wrong? 1-2 hours a day, 2-5 hours a day, 5-8 hours a day, all day. I checked all day and moved on. By the end of the intake, I was weeping. I thought I had known all the nooks and crannies of my brain. I thought I had seen it all. But all along, there had been a beast in the attic, sending his crazy all through the house.
So I changed my entire life to do something about it. I sublet my room for an indefinite amount of months. I quit my teaching job. My friends raised a shit ton of money for me to afford outpatient care. And then, in December, I flew to my childhood home of Salt Lake City, moved my one big bag of stuff into my brother and his girlfriend's spare room, and began attending Brain School — Monday through Friday, 10 am to 1 pm. Day in, day out.
The first day at Brain School was jarring. When I imagined the program in my mind, I imagined long, tearful individual therapy sessions supplemented by long, tearful group therapy sessions. In fact, 90% of your time in Brain School is spent in the same large room as every other person in Brain School, working on what are called exposures. I'll do a longer OCD breakdown post soon, but for now it suffices me to say that exposures involve doing the things that terrify you the most so that you can learn that the terrors might not be that terrifying. So, for example, if you are afraid of contamination — if you believe, like people with contamination OCD believe, that germs will actually kill you — you spend the exposure hour walking around the room asking people for handshakes or high fives. Or if you are afraid, as many people with OCD are, that you are a pedophile, you spend the hour writing "I may or may not be a pedophile" on the board like a mentally ill Bart Simpson.
So anyway, the first day at Brain School a health tech led me to the exposure room and had me start watching an orientation video. But I couldn't concentrate on the video because the scene around me was way more interesting. At 10:05 AM, a woman walked in the door and emptied a Mary Poppins-sized purse onto the floor. Lipstick and notebooks and markers went everywhere. Then, without saying a word, she sat down in the middle of the mess and started to journal. Moments later, a Utah County-coded girl with a Precious Moments-style face and perfect beach waves entered the room. She was wearing pink from head to toe: pink velour pajama pants, pink t-shirt, pink pointy nails. I am going to be performing Adele, she said to everyone and no one. Then she sat down at a piano and started to sing. All around the room, people started to rustle in their seats. We all knew this banger. When the song swelled to its crescendo some people couldn't help themselves. Nevermind, I'll find someone like youuuuu, they sang, quietly at first and then stronger. I wish nothing but the best for youuuuu-uuu! And just as suddenly, it was over, and the girl in pink packed up her music and left.
I have always considered myself a vulnerable person. But when that girl sang Adele for us I felt, as I said in my last post, an unbearable desire to rush her out of the room. Don't do this, I wanted to say. You don't have to do this.
The obsessions you can have as an OCD person run the absolute gamut. To illustrate the point: A week into treatment, my first therapist (pre sarcasm-forward dude therapist) was walking me to our one-on-one session one day when she looked at me with mischief. I feel like you might like to see the prop closet, she said. And she wasn't wrong. She took me down a hall and down another hall and into a large walk-in room. Inside were shelves filled with every possible thing a person might be terrified of. There were bags of fake puke and bags of fake shit and bags of blood and urine. There were plastic snakes and plastic bugs in clear Ziploc bags. There were ropes and syringes. There were plastic baby dolls waiting to be held by people who were afraid they would drop them. These were the exposure props — the things that stood in for the things that scared us, the things we would use to get better. It looks like a 5 year-old started a BDSM shop, I told my therapist, and she agreed.
There was nothing in the exposure prop shop for a girl like me. There was no prop for a person who, without warning four years ago, had become obsessed with what seemed like an indisputable fact that she was an abject failure. There was no prop that would allow that girl to face her compulsive belief that the universe was vast and meaningless; no prop that could outwit death; no prop that could convince her perfection-pilled mind to unburden itself and believe, perhaps for the first time, that it was okay to be average, that it was okay to be insecure, and that it was okay to rely on people — and that relying on people didn't mean, as the hell-witches in her brain assured her daily, that she was a horrible, wretched burdensome little piece of shit who was bothering people by simply existing.
No. The plastic frogs could not help me. The fake barf would not help me. Instead, my therapist explained, my props would be other people. I told her about my first day, how shocked I was at the normalcy of people being their most feared selves in front of each other. It gave me a rash, I told her. It made me panic. But that's the cure, she said. That's the cure.
I thought of a friend's wife who had gone into outpatient treatment a few months back. She was pregnant and had become consumed by a devouring depression. She had lost her youthful life now that she was pregnant, her free life without this child who would soon need all of it. At the McDonald's drive-in one night, she began weeping to Tracy Chapman's Fast Car. She wanted that ticket to anywhere. That plan to get her out of there. Sometimes, she told her husband, she was afraid she would kill her baby. She was a bad mother, she thought. A terrible would-be murderous mother.
The first week she went to her outpatient program, my friend's wife came running into the house with an announcement. Guess what? She said. Other people wanted to kill their babies too! She had spoken her worst fear — the thing that made her believe she was the worst — and other people had spoken it back. She was not alone. She had gotten hell camaraderie: the solidarity of people also in hell.
*
OCD is many things. It's a meaning-making illness, determined to squeeze some hidden importance out of the miscellany of living. It's a certainty illness, bent on knowing something for sure in order to avert disaster. But, as the OCD researcher Michael Greenberg says, it is also an illness based on the fear of intolerable emotions.
The OCD sufferer has a core fear, Greenberg writes. Maybe they fear that they are secretly bad. Maybe they fear that the world is germed and trying to kill them. Maybe they fear losing all their money maybe losing a loved one maybe losing face at work. The fear itself doesn't really matter, content wise. Because the fear is not actually about the thing they fear happening. The real fear is the emotion they associate with that event coming true. Because somewhere secret and deep down, the OCD person fears experiencing a certain emotional state forever. For some, it is shame. For some, it is sadness. For me, it is loneliness.
I suppose it is time to tell you that I have perfectionism OCD (among other strains), which means for me — and my perfectionist brain is screaming at me right now, shouting at me not to reveal this to you — that I want to be so socially perfect and so dazzling and compelling that it is impossible not to love me. Because if you love me — if you admire me, if you are obsessed with me — you won't leave me. Because if you leave me: Abandonment. Loneliness. Forever.
It might go without saying that my secret fear, the thing I am constantly trying to hide about myself, is that I am not dazzling at all, in fact: not admirable, not lovable, not compelling. My secret fear is that I am utterly, irreparably bad. Most days, I don't even know what the badness is. I simply believe that there is something about me — some stink, some off-gassing from a rotten core — that is intolerable to others.
From these fears come compulsions — or what the Big Baddies at Brain School call neutralizing behaviors. Neutralizing behaviors are any behaviors someone uses to keep their core fear from coming true. When you neutralize, you get a little rush of feel-good chemicals for a moment. I like to think of them as little Snack Packs of dopamine: a guilty decadent spoonful of happiness that leaves you mind-sugared but ultimately miserable. And that means, of course, that you have to do it again. And again. And again.
Obsessive. Compulsive. Irrational. Insatiable.
My perfectionism is a highly-trained joy-burglar. It is so good at its job that for years I didn't even realize it was there. I mean, sure, I knew I was an extravagant-ass motherfucker whose need to go big or go home often sent her, well..home. Crying. I knew that when someone gave me a compliment it felt like my heart was the boiler room on the Titanic: Orange. Glowing. I knew that as soon as the glow faded, I needed some worker type with a shovel to shovel more compliments and shovel them faster. I needed the glow to last. I knew that, for me, admitting I was scared or insecure was the worst thing I could possibly admit. Those were loser feelings. That was loser behavior. And I was not a loser. I was a queen. And I knew, somewhere in my brain, there was an endless, byzantine spreadsheet. Every time I admitted something "bad" about myself — something weak, something needy — a disembodied hand made its mark. One deduction point. In the sum column: abandonment.
But at the same time, I didn't know any of this. The problem with perfectionism OCD is that it hides its tracks. It doesn't want anyone to know you're trying — not even you. Still waters run shallow, it assures you. This is all of you there is to know: this gleaming social creature with all her brilliant little accomplishments. And so it was that for years I went to therapy and talked about things that were hard for other people to admit. I told my therapist I wanted to die. I told her shameful things. I told her about the morning anxiety and the existential depression. And because those things were hard for other people to talk about, I thought myself vulnerable. Honest. But the things I could not tell her — the things that were odious for me, that made my perfectionist brain go into an absolute panic — was that I didn't like myself. That sometimes I felt I could not survive myself. That I wanted everyone to love me. That I was, in a phrase, terminally lonely.
I didn't say any of this to anyone until the first day at Brain School, when I met with my brilliant new therapist and she looked me in the eye and said, You're one of those people who is going to try to get an A in therapy. It's my job to help you get a C. Then she spent the next hour reading my brain like it was a book. For the first time in my life, she helped me admit what was actually going on. And when I did, I actually and truly believed I was going to die. Perfectionism hates being found out. And we had found it out.
The strange thing was, the solution to wanting everyone to like me was not to stop wanting people to like me. It was to admit that I did. It was to admit that I was just like everyone else. I wanted love. I was scared. I was lonely. I was, just like everyone, capable of being hurt.
My therapist told me that every day at breakfast she tells her kids the same thing. I love you but you're not special. We're all just like everyone else, she says. It's the kindest reminder we can give to each other.
For me, this was a terrible truth to hear. When she said it, the gifted child in me shrank three sizes in horror. For most of my life, I had tried to pretend that I wasn't like anyone else. Other people loved people — but people admired me. Other people got love. I got obsession. I was special. Ms. Pritt told me so in first grade, when she put me in the Lions reading group and gave me my own hall pass to go to the library whenever I wanted, to read books that were "more at my level." And I hadn't stopped being special since. My life, as I imagined it as a young person, was destined to be big. My life would be important.
And for many years, it was. And then the doom came and I couldn't keep it all up. I was too tired. Too heart-helled. And because I could no longer perform at a satisfactory level — because I could no longer earn love with each accomplishment and each social success — I was not special anymore, my brain — capable, as it was, of only two extreme settings — told me I was now the opposite of best. I was a failure.
That first day at Brain School, I told my therapist in despair that maybe I should just give up on trying for the big life. Maybe I should just marry a man and have a baby and become an insurance saleswoman and move to Duluth. My therapist laughed. Our goal is Duluth, Ash. People are happy in Duluth.
Subtext: I love you; you're not special.
In the meantime, I lived in Salt Lake (which, as my friend Quinn reminded me, was sorta like Duluth). I couldn't get knocked up and move to Minnesota — not yet. Instead, I had to go to emotional Duluth. Going to emotional Duluth looks like admitting that you want the same love, time, and attention as every other basic ass person on this basic ass earth. Going to emotional Duluth is learning to want love — actual, real-live love — instead of attention. Going to emotional Duluth is learning to tell other people your flaws and your wants, your fears and your desperate little needs, and to believe that it is possible that you could tell them that and they wouldn't be disgusted. Wouldn't leave. In emo Duluth, you allow yourself to be the hairless little mewling ape that you actually are, to want and want and want and to risk everything that these wants require.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. If you know me in real life, you're probably confused. But you're already emo Duluth! You might say. You're the most emotionally vulnerable person I know! You write a literal public blog about the worst things you think and feel! At least, this is what many of you have said when I've tried to explain it to you in person. And in many ways you're right. I have always been a person who shares things about me. I have always been a person who has admitted my unflattering traits, my difficult emotions, my real feelings. I have always tried to let myself need each other, to ask for what I need from my friends and family. But just because I am okay admitting some difficult emotions doesn't mean I'm good at admitting others. And just because I try to rely on other people doesn't mean there isn't a screaming banshee in my brain convincing myself that I have truly and utterly fucked it all by doing so. In my mind, as I said above, the unacceptable emotions are fear, insecurity, and need. Every time I experience them, my perfectionist brain rumbles to life and gives me fresher and fresher hell for even feeling that way. And if I admit it? If I admit I'm terrified of doing a journalism interview or worried that no one will show up to the party or that I am devastated, still, by relationships that ended years ago — if I tell you that after all the parties and the social events I come home and go full fetal, if I tell you that sometimes the need I feel in a romantic relationship is so vast it scares me, if I let on that I need your admiration to live — well then, that will be odious for everyone and I will hate me and you will hate me and everything will end, full stop. Loneliness forever.
If I tell you that the years since my divorce have been intolerable precisely because they forced me to act like everyone else — to admit rejection and defeat, to draw down my fun-person credit card with so much crying and complaining that I fell into usurious fun-debt to everyone; if I tell you that being publicly depressed and imploding publicly felt like the most humiliating thing I could have ever imagined; if I explain to you that the whole point of perfection is to appear effortless in the ways that matter most to you in particular, and I tell you that the most important ways for me to be effortless was to be a big thinker, a giant thinker, to succeed at every artistic and ambitious thing I ever tried, to never be afraid, to make everyone like me so much they couldn't help liking me more — well then perhaps you will understand what it feels like to no longer be able to keep all that up, and what sorts of things a brain might tell someone like me when I no longer could.
It wasn't just that I was depressed. It wasn't just that I hated myself. It was that my brain had become a putrescent petri dish for growing intrusive thoughts: intrusive thoughts that told me that that I had become synonymous with failure; that nothing I did in the future would ever make up for what I'd done in the past; that I was no longer capable of love; that I was even less capable of being loved; that I would never like anyone again and never have a career again and never figure out where I belonged again; that I couldn't apply for even the simplest barista job because I was incapable of pouring a cup of coffee; that it had all been a jig and now the jig was decisively up; and that when the music stopped I would stop with it: that I would cease to exist. That I would die. Well. That is the difference between depression and OCD.
It's so hard to tell you this — you, reader, whoever you are. I feel like a magician who has revealed her secrets. Worse, I feel like a bad person. It's vain to want people to love you this much, I told my therapist. It's embarrassing. I told her that sometimes — and feel free to cancel me — it would feel better to have contamination OCD, as horrible and unenviable as that condition is. At least no one thinks that someone afraid of touching a doorknob is a total asshole, I said. At least they're not some thirsty little bitch with special kid syndrome who wants to be the center of attention every goddamn second.
You want to be the center of attention? My therapist said. There's your first exposure. I want you to tell people that. And so, for an entire hour, I walked from person to person in the group room. How are you, I'd say — not sure how to start my suicide mission. Good, they'd say, even though we both knew that was a lie. I just wanted to let you know, I'd say — I just wanted you to know that I love being the center of attention, I said, and waited, my whole being braced against what was next. My body felt like it was on fire. My brain felt like angry magma. This is so humiliating how could I want this how could I feel this why am I telling anyone this, I thought, twisting and twisting my hands. But the world didn't end. Cool, one person said. Me too, another person said. I want to be the center of attention, I said again and again. Me too, other people said, again and again and again.
Next, I had to ask for compliments. I walked up to an old man writing out a list of his sins on the board and made him tell me what he liked the most about me. I had to interrupt a woman having a controversial conversation about abortion and ask her to tell me what she admired about me. And when the compliments weren't good enough — when someone said Um, I like your pants? — I had to say No, give me a better compliment. I want a better one.
The trick was admitting I wanted something I had convinced myself it was bad to want, and to find out that other people didn't care that I wanted that, and in fact, wanted the same thing.
All around me, every Monday through Friday, everyone else around me was doing what scared them most, too. Someone with work OCD was turning in a resume with obvious spelling errors. Someone with scrupulosity was reading the daily news and convincing herself that she was not responsible for the problems of the word. Taylor Swift's eating disorder, she wrote on the board, is NOT my fault. She sat down, then stood back up and added an exclamation point for emphasis. A queer dressed in a Bass Pro Shop fishing hat and camo overalls was approaching me, eyes down, gnawing on their lip ring. I was wondering, they asked me without looking up. I was wondering if you could tell me about a recent break-up you've gone through? In fact, I had had a recent breakup. In fact, it had been the hardest part of my entire experience at Brain School. For weeks, everything in my body had screamed at me to break up with this person, to terminate what had become a situationship of great agony and moment. But for weeks — terrified, as many with relationship OCD are, of endings — I couldn't do it. Finally, I had done it, but on that day the queer with the camo overalls approached me I was not yet convinced that it wouldn't kill me, and so when they asked me if I had any experiences with break-ups I wanted to share, well, I wanted to be casual and cool and say something snarky about my ex, wanted to show that I wasn't hurt or affected at all. But instead, I started to cry, and they did too. We sat there for the whole hour, our arms wrapped in a long and shuddering hug. It's so hard, said this person who had never met me before. It's so, so hard, they said, and patted my head with their wonderful butch hands. I am lonely, I said finally, and it was the scariest thing I had ever told anyone. I am lonely.
Me too, they said. I'm lonely too. And then we didn't say anything at all for a long time.
When you have OCD — or any mental illness, but OCD in particular — you learn that you are always the weirdest or most extreme or most feeling person in the room. And well, you get the message. You learn that something about you is not okay, that you're too much of something and not enough of another. You start to fear that other people are going to notice it. You begin to feel like you are being watched constantly, sniffed out for being wrong. And after long enough of that, you learn to watch yourself, to manage or hide or finesse the thing you believe to be intolerable about you. As for me, I got it in my head that what was intolerable was needing anything. What was intolerable was yearning: to be seen, to be known, to be understood. You could ask people for some things, I thought, but you could not ask them to really see you and you could not ask them to stay. Those were the rules. And so I hid. And so I finessed.
But when you're mentally weird, you also learn a flip lesson. You might be strange, yes, but you are also special. OCD is your superpower! people shout at you, clapping you on the back for having a cursed brain. You're so empathetic! So kind! So … organized. And so it is that you learn that you are worse than everyone but that you are also better — as if being special is a farthing people toss at you out of guilt for pitying you first.
This feeling — of being both superior to others and inferior to them — is also how I would describe the experience of shame. Certain that you are worse than everyone, you take satisfaction in the idea that you are also better — different in talents, unique in your ability to tolerate suffering. Smarter. Less basic. Not so idiotic. This specialness is your armor. It's your weapon. If I'm not like anyone else, you think, then at least I can take comfort in the fact that there's nobody quite like me!
But perhaps, as my therapist said, the real truth — the thing capable of healing you — is that you're not special at all — that every day across America there are people just like you putting on their camo pants and their all-pink outfits and going out into the world nurturing a secret and terrible fear that they're not like anyone else, certain that this makes them terrible and contemptible and unlovable. Perhaps other people have also thought thoughts as bad as any you have ever thought and done the same strange, bizarre, ritualistic things you have done to survive as a conscious being on this often inhospitable planet. Perhaps we all drag our histories around behind us like tin cans on ropes, making our terrible noise, but perhaps everyone else does, too. Perhaps our wounded and combined cacophonies are the true signing of the spheres. Perhaps there is nothing new in this world, after all: perhaps every bad idea has already had its thinker and every terrible deed has already been done. Perhaps, as my friend's wife said with what I like to hope was well-earned jubilation, other people want to kill their babies, too — and it's knowing that that saves us.
Maybe there is no prop closet for what ails us. Maybe all there is, in the end, is other people, propping us up, acting as props. What I'm saying is that other people might be our exposures: terrifying in their capacity to confirm our fears, revelatory in their ability to prove us otherwise.
But most of us don't know how to do this. Most of us have been taught to see a suffering person and, instead of deciding to join the sufferer on an equal plane, to distance ourselves from it, to say: Not me. This pain is not mine. This pain has nothing to do with me. In fact all of our pain has everything to do with everyone else who has ever loved or known us, as well as everyone who has ever or will ever live, because it is what makes us human. And the exquisite thing about Brain School isn't the exposures or the Dialectical Behavior Therapy and it is certainly not the vinyl die-cut posters shouting at us to practice self-compassion. It is the other people. The fellow sufferers, the existential bedfellows. The woman who high-fives me every day despite believing that it will kill her; the woman painting watercolor in the corner despite the fact that water color shows all mistakes; the woman admitting in group that she, too, feels possessed by a demon; the woman who cried in group therapy one day and admitted she had nobody, not anyone except the people in the room we were in. The woman who listened to me weep one day and who said the thing I most needed to hear. You don't scare me, she said. Nothing you could say could scare me. And for the first time in my life, I considered that I might believe that.
What I'm saying is that love can't happen when one person won't admit they're human too, when they can't admit they feel what we feel, or can, at least, imagine it. It can't happen when we are afraid of being contaminated by another person's experience, when we are afraid of ourselves. If someone wants to kill their baby, they don't need someone to tell them it's wrong and they don't need someone to tell them what to do. They need someone to have the bravery to say that they sometimes want to kill their baby, too.
There's that old idiom: I pity the fool. But the fool is not to be pitied. Because the fool is brave. Because the fool is all of us — the only difference is she admits it.
The fool does many important things but the thing they do first and foremost is they set off. They set off and they bare themselves to the elements. In the tarot, the fool is naive; he is at the beginning of his journey. Blithely he walks, coming dangerously close to walking off the edge of the cliff. Beside him, his little dog. But I believe there is also a fool at the end of the journey, too: the fool who is ragged, the fool with one orange left and a smattering of hope, the fool who dares everything not because he hasn't known suffering but because he has: because he is so terrified and so tired that he becomes tenacious once again, willing to try anything. These people should not be looked down on, and they should never be pitied. They should be esteemed. They should, as one of my therapists once advised, be put up in a lovely part of town and given a nice, soft bed; they should be brought treats and colorful things; and this should all happen because they serve a vital public function, which is, simply, that they are honest about their condition and the condition of the world. Maybe they don't know how to remember their phone or apply for jobs or make a salad for lunch, but they call life what it is, and that — that is not nothing.
Ultimately, I am not interested in Brain School itself. Nor am I interested in therapy writ large. Because therapy can be many things, some of them helpful, some of them not. I am interested, instead, in campaigns of deep and abiding emotional solidarity, of practices that help us admit what we most fear in ourselves in order to meet that fear in others, in order to treat people as our equals.
Find the others, Timothy Leary once said, the freaks that make you realize you're normal. And that's what I've been busy doing.
My son went through the same program a few years ago. I remember him sending me a text one of his first weeks there thanking me for taking him to treatment because he had, for the first time, met people who understood him. A place he felt he belonged.