“Helen said she didn’t believe my grief was real,” I tell Toni, “that real grief is quiet. Another time she told me that everything I was saying sounded rehearsed.”

“When feelings weren’t allowed in your family,” Toni observes, “they’re liable to come out defended.”

“What do you mean, ‘defended?’” I ask.

“Well, people defend their feelings in a variety of ways.” She lists four, which I resolve to remember, but on the drive home, reviewing our session, I can only remember three of them.

Later I plunk down on the sofa with a pencil while I’m microwaving some meatballs, determined to remember the one I seem to be blocking. As I write down various words that pop into my mind, suddenly it comes back to me—“manipulative.”

After giving some thought to what Toni said about feelings coming out defended, I wrote in my journal:

“When you haven’t been allowed to experience or express your feelings—fear, anger, grief—as a child, you’re not going to be able to experience or express them in a pure form as an adult either; instead they’re liable to be adulterated by other feelings and attitudes. For example, if your parents told you—or treated you as though—you were being manipulative whenever you expressed sadness, you’re liable to imagine or fear you are being manipulative whenever you do. If they didn’t believe your sadness was real, you may doubt or question its reality too, so that your sadness becomes contaminated with self-doubt, anxiety, shame, etc. that affect its expression.

“A therapist who isn’t experienced is liable to mistakenly assume that a client’s feelings aren’t real because they don’t look or sound like feelings in their pure form. So Helen could imagine that my somewhat histrionic grief wasn’t deeply felt because it didn’t look or sound to her like authentic grief. Unfortunately, it was. I suspect the way I expressed grief seemed histrionic to her because I unconsciously ‘amped it up’ in a desperate effort to overcome the incredulity that I expected, from experience, to encounter—as if sheer intensity were my only hope of breaking through the other person’s wall of disbelief.

“I say ‘unfortunately’ because Helen’s incredulity only served to heighten my own self-doubt, alienating me still further from my true feelings and compounding the problems I came into therapy with.”

After thirteen months of therapy with Helen, things hadn’t improved.

On one occasion she said that she didn’t believe my grief was real because authentic grief was quiet. (Not true, as anyone can testify who’s heard someone react to being told that a loved one has unexpectedly died.) 

On another occasion she said that in our sessions what I was saying sounded rehearsed. Well, I was often in so much distress that, just as I had with Dr. A, I unburdened myself in obsessive fantasies about my next session during the days in between. In fantasy, I was able to pour out my feelings without inhibition, but in my actual sessions, I still wasn’t.

And speaking of fantasizing, I did a lot of it when I was young. My most frequent fantasies were replays of actual interactions I’d had with people. But in the replays, I imagined being in the other person’s head, having a variety of positive responses to our exchange. I suppose I did this partly out of insecurity and the need to reassure myself that I’d acquitted myself well and made a good impression—which I suspect came from an absence of positive mirroring by my parents, essential to the development of self-confidence and self-esteem.

I also remember that when I told her about my vivid, empowering year in Spain—when, for a time at least, I came into my own—she deprecated my achievement, saying that one’s student years are easy compared to real life. Really? Just try, as someone who struggles with anxiety and depression, to adapt to life in a foreign country where you don’t know anyone and can’t speak the language yet. What I needed from Helen back then, perhaps more than anything else, was positive mirroring—to help me reclaim some of the self-esteem that was dragging around my heels at the time.

She also suggested, near the end of my therapy, that I’d developed the masculine side of myself but not the feminine. Years later, Toni would point out to me that since I was a child I’d tried to take care of the feelings of the people around me. “What could be more feminine,” I would like to ask Helen, “than caretaking?”

Then came a day when Helen said she didn’t see me making any progress and was handing me over to another therapist at the Center—Beth.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble. Dr. Johnson

“Last night I had a chill dream about celebrating my birthday with the Hartwicks, a family I never felt approved of me. I was supposed to appear on the balcony of a lavish art deco opera house with them for some formality—photographs? But I got lost in the crowded hall and couldn’t find the right stairway. Eventually I came upon an odd narrow staircase with unnaturally high steps, which I began to climb. They became narrower as I went—and slanted, as well. Still I continued upward, though there was hardly space for my feet and I had to cling to a ridge overhead to keep from falling. When I came to the last step, I found I had climbed a huge gilded frond, that was purely decorative—and ended dizzily high in the air, several stories above the floor. Now, cold with fear, so precariously balanced that I knew that with one false move I would pitch to my death, I began to inch my way down again with excruciating care.”

                                                                              …

“The huge gilded frond did actually exist—two of them, in fact, on the walls framing the screen in the art deco California Theater; they reached all the way to the top of the balcony though they didn’t have staircases.

On rereading this last entry after several months have passed, certain words strike me—formality , unnaturally, lost, gilded, decorative. Trying to integrate my impressions: the Hartwick family seemed admirably traditional and “formal”—pillars of the community—to me as a child. From the time I was young I was distressed by some of my own impulses and aspired (the staircase) to be correct and virtuous like they were (I’m going to join them on the balcony). My reward is conspicuous respectability (the photographs). But my outward adaptation to conventional mores proves a difficult way to go (unnaturally high steps, narrowing, slanting) and ultimate a false way—form, no substance (the frond is gilded, not gold, and merely decorative), and I find myself so alienated from my true feelings, so “up”tight, that I feel in psychological peril (I’m on the verge of falling to my death).”

“Dear Ella,

“I’ve had your letter on my mind for many days now, and though I’ve meant to write you back, I haven’t been able to get past the first few lines. This week has been so eventful, however, I now have something to write about besides my usual melancholy complaints.

“Last Monday afternoon I drove to Berkeley to pay my friend Linda a surprise visit, only to wind up on the receiving end of a surprise myself. Anne, Linda’s roommate, told me that Linda had been missing since midnight the night before, and she’d just gotten a call from someone who’d seen her at the Unitarian seminary near campus and said she’d been behaving irrationally.

“I drove up to Seminary Hill to look for her, retrieved her purse—somebody had found it on a sidewalk—and tried to talk a policeman out of towing her VW bug, which she’d left parked in the middle of an intersection. ‘Couldn’t we just push it to the curb?’ I wheedled. I also talked to various people she’d crossed paths with that day. She didn’t seem to know where she lived, they said. When asked where her home was, she said she didn’t have a home, and she was so suspicious she wouldn’t part with her car keys long enough for anyone to repark her car.

“I walked and drove around the neighborhood until dark but couldn’t find her anywhere. Anne had promised to keep me posted and called me the next evening to say that Linda was at Highland Hospital—in the psychiatric ward—because she’d set off a fire alarm in an apartment building and been picked up by the police.

“At the hospital the next morning, I rapped on the door of the locked ward, but no one came to let me in. Through a small window in the door, I could see people milling around, but they’d just stare at me vacantly, then wander off. I wouldn’t have figured out the protocol at all if another visitor hadn’t arrived just then and pressed a button over a grill—a buzzer over an intercom, of course.

“When I was admitted, I saw Linda shuffling into the TV room, eating ice cream.   She gave me a hug and convinced me that she was OK, explaining that she was on a three-day hold and expected to be released Friday; still, I couldn’t help noticing how badly her hands were shaking. That would have been that—I phoned her the next day and she seemed to be herself—but Friday, when I tried to reach her at home, I got Anne again. Though Linda seemed fine during the day, she told me, she got wild at night, shrieking, shoving furniture around, and tearing off her clothes. One night they’d even had to put her in restraints. Her psychiatrist’s diagnosis (and my mother’s): manic-depressive illness.

“Then yesterday, when I went for a second visit, she was so drugged, her arms stuck stiffly out from her body and she mumbled mostly incoherent things about her therapist coming on to her and the CIA being out to get her. At one point she actually dragged me into her room, then shut the door, which couldn’t be opened from the inside, so we were trapped together. Again I found myself rapping on a door to no avail…and I have to say, it felt like a long time before someone finally heard and let us out. Later it occurred to me that maybe Linda had wanted me to understand what it was like to be locked up that way.”

                                                                            …

When Earl and I were at Black Hawk recently, and I was stretched out under a tree to ease my back pain, he told me that sometimes Linda used to stay at his place during her psychotic episodes, and that he would hold her while she screamed.

These days I feel like being with people, but not like being with the people I know. This afternoon I was supposed to go with my new roommate, Meredith, and a company of strangers on a picnic, but it was cancelled in the night by…

Rain, blasting out of the sky when I woke, like the jet of a fire hose trained on our roof. Now it’s quiet, except for the trickle of rivulets down the sloping path behind the back porch. A slatted wood screen, stapled on a wooden frame, runs along the path and forms a flimsy stockade between this property and the next. Evergreen branches, heavy with rain, hang over the top from the other side, like children’s arms dangling over a banister. Raindrops are glistening like budding icicles on spidery twigs that have shed their leaves. Gazing out of my large triptychal window, I make believe I’m in the midst of a wood.

I roll down the matchstick blinds and crawl beneath my embroidered Indian bed cover. Through an opening in the blinds, I watch the undulating treetops. Entangled in those branches, I begin and end my dreams.

Lafayette is a small, upscale suburban community that once had a slum one short block long—a few ramshackle houses facing a one-story, five-unit-long apartment building on a street that was little more than an alley, called Bell Street. It was there that I moved when I left my mother’s house. My apartment had dark brown asphalt tile floors throughout, an inexplicable interior window in the dining area overlooking a tiny “laundry” room with a deep gray sink (no washer or dryer), and two bedrooms, which meant, on my meager salary, I had to find a roommate fast.

“Dear Ella,

“I’m typing to you from the dining room floor of my new apartment. My fingers can hardly locate the right keys in this position. The usual position wasn’t negotiable, however, since it would have involved bringing the only table in the house, a hinged contraption that folds out from the kitchen wall, and the only seat in the house, the toilet, into close proximity.

“It’s nighttime. I have every door and window open to cool off the rooms. The crickets are chirping raucously. The house is dark (I don’t own any lamps), except for a shaft of light from the kitchen.

“I moved in the night of the afternoon you left, taking one knife, fork, spoon, plate, etc. and some bedding. Before I went to sleep I turned on my clock radio for the first time ever and listened to a not so ‘mellowdrama’ about an Indian called Chief Edipo Rex who murders his father, etc. I was simply waiting for the announcer to announce the time so I could set my clock and retire. He never did. I slept with the window above my nose open out of paranoia about my gas stove—and dreamed a cyclone hit the house.

“I felt very lonely the next day and missed you. That morning, minutes after the store opened, I bought the shower curtain we saw with the coral shells.

“When I got back from dropping you off at the airport, a prospective roommate was waiting at the apartment. A divorced the mother of three teenage daughters who live with their father, she talked nonstop, mostly about her unstrung landlady, and found at least two occasions to use the simile ‘like a fart in church.’

“Enough old news. My several quarts of water and few hard peas have been on the stove struggling to become pea soup for more than two and a half hours. My itch is back. I bought my first two bottles of spice today—momentous decision: whether to buy the cheap little tin boxes and start a collection of those or the more attractive Spice Island bottles and start a collection of those.

“In the meantime I’m having trouble figuring out where to park my car. The first evening I tried to parallel park in front and ran my front tire over my neighbor’s brick entry. He came out and glowered at me. The next day I parked against the fence, but found if I allowed enough room for passing on the right, I couldn’t get out the door. Yesterday I left my car down the road for the night, expecting someone or other to object. When I went out the next morning, I discovered I’d been cited by a tree—there was a large leaf tucked under my windshield wiper.”

I’ve become depressed again, but the clarity hasn’t left me, which means it’s not simply an absence of depression—it’s a visionary state, which until now has made me happy but persists even when my spirits have plunged. I find myself with a Sunday afternoon on my hands and feel I can wring nothing out of it but distress. I’m alone, and it’s raining outside, and because tomorrow is a holiday, I feel no urgency to plan for school.

This much, however, is clear to me—that somehow I’ve got to make good with the limited choices I have—I can’t simply collapse and mildew in a heap because they’re so poor or because I have so few. I was happy this morning when I was writing, but now I feel all written out. Writing is a kind of massage that eases out the painful psychic cramps. But I doubt it’s good for me to spend so much time at it—it only aggravates my already acute case of introversion. Still, it seems the only dignified refuge.

This higher state of consciousness lasted only a matter of weeks, but it gave me the impetus to move out of my mother’s house—though, working only part-time, I would be a pauper.

“Today I saw a grove of fruit trees in a field of yellow flowers, and I relived, for a split second, the strange sublime scene along the road to Cuenca in Spain—where the trees were giant burls with shoots that exploded in yellow leaves like sparklers, backlit as they were by the sun; where the shadows were, for that once in my life, violet; and the grass, beckoning me like soft fingers, was pale and spider-spun. When I suddenly flashed on this memory, I broke out in goosebumps and somewhere I hurt. I got home and lay down and found myself smiling at something that got sweeter and sweeter…but later I couldn’t remember what it was.”

REHEARSAL

“I dreamed a child in my class came to see me and told me that he had seen poison oak up in a woody region where the children often played. I followed him under trees and up the hill to investigate. We came to the edge of a cliff. There the world dropped away to a green wilderness so far below I might have been seeing it from the window of a plane. Suddenly the ground beneath me gave way and I pitched down the slope. I had a fleeting hope for salvation—two plastic bags, a story in height, full of white gravel, were directly in front of me. But on impact, they jarred loose and tumbled down into that picture postcard abyss, with me free-falling after them. With unqualified belief, I knew that oblivion was at hand. I felt a first heave of fear against a door in my mind, but I threw my will against it, so that I could meet the end in full self-possession. In dazed waking astonishment, I experienced a transcendent sense of spiritual poise and power.”

“I went swimming early this morning. The air was cool, the water warm. Sunlight on the wavelets cast a pattern on the aqua floor of the pool—a shimmering undulating net, like meshed lightning. With a child’s absorption in her toes, I trod that enchanted trap.

                                                                              …

“The chilliness impelled me toward the pool gate with a clumsy, frantic patter. Barefoot, tanless, goose-fleshed, I hoped no one noticed me. It was late afternoon on a day of grayness and rain. Along the surface of the pool, a cloud of steam drifted, and became blindingly radiant when the sun glanced out. I dived into it, as into a snowdrift, and hung suspended upside-down in the water. Then, with a forward thrust, I propelled myself heels-over-head-over-heels, tumbling like an astronaut in deep space. When I surfaced, everything was quiet, except for the crickets, and the quake of my own laughter.”