Ten years ago roundabout today—somewhere around St. Patrick’s Day, or it could have even been St. Patrick’s Day, I no longer remember—I walked out of my job near Bryant Park and had a psychotic break in the Panera Bread on Fifth Avenue, just down from the New York Public Library near where Lord & Taylor used to be.
I’d had a mental breakdown a few days before, as I remember. The details of this time, which I’ve already written about elsewhere, are now blessedly hazy, and I don’t wish to recall them. Perhaps one day. But not today.
What I do remember though is lying on the hardwood floor of my Queens living room wailing out to nobody, and then calling my best friend, or maybe she called me, I no longer remember, see above.
I told her I was done, couldn’t live like this anymore, and couldn’t continue doing to the people in my life what I was doing to the people in my life by continuing to live like this anymore, and I was going to make it stop. She made me promise not to until she could figure out how to get me out of New York and safely to her house in Chicago. “Then you can do whatever you want,” she said, but I had to make her this deal. Begrudgingly, angrily, I did.
A few days later, around St. Patrick’s Day, or later in March anyway, my brain fully broke. I remember sitting in that Panera (despite the stakes it will never not be funny to me that it was a Panera) and writing something awful in my journal about my mother, whose severing of ties because of my sexuality in the cruelest, most robotically brutal terms possible is what precipitated this breakdown, though I’ve since come to understand it was merely the final Jenga piece that toppled the tower.
I had begun crossing out whatever horrible thing I wrote very violently, grunting and grinding my teeth while delivering a furious internal screed as I scraped at the paper with my pen until I had cut through all 100 pages of the journal right down to the cover, whereupon I looked up from my work, heaving with the effort, to see that people were staring—that I had obviously made some kind of scene, that my internal screed may have in fact been external.
I suddenly felt like I might piss myself so I gathered my things and went to the bathroom and when I looked in the mirror I did not see my own face but rather something else entirely, which I can thankfully no longer recall. I can only remember how it felt, which was terror.
It terrified me so much in fact I went reeling backward into the wall, and when I tried to compose myself and pee my dick wouldn’t work so I burst into tears and went down into the Bryant Park subway station to jump, like I’d thought about, and had come close to doing, off and on for the past six years. Spoiler alert, I didn’t do it—something about that exhilarating wind being pushed through the station by an approaching train filled me with the fear that the train wouldn’t be enough to do the job and I’d end up handcuffed to a gurney in Bellevue, and then I’d be well and truly fucked because everyone would know how well and truly fucked I really was, and there would be no coming back from that.
In any case, now here it is, 10 years later, and I feel such a pressure to make something of this, to spin it into some poignant tale with a moral, conjure up some hopeful keyhole glimpse into the meaning of life and, perhaps especially, to be funny about it, because that is what everyone always expects of me and always has, and I have spent most of my life obliging. I feel a pressure as well as a responsibility to make this mean something, especially just in case someone who needs to hear it as desperately as I did in 2014 might be reading.
But I find that I don’t know what to say, and I suppose that’s because I don’t know that person from 2014. I carry him inside me but I don’t know him—in part because so much has changed and in part, I guess, because so much hasn’t.
I’ve blocked a lot of him out. I am afraid of him. I worry for him and I worry about him. I am forced to carry him with me like some animal in a cage and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t worry, frequently, that he will one day figure out how to pick the lock on its latch.
I have run away from love for 10 years because I am likewise terrified of the day someone discovers that cage at the back of my closet and realizes he’s gotten himself into a whole heap of trouble.
Locked up in a cage at the back of the closet, underneath all the clothes that no longer fit me because of what the past 10 years have done to my body, wedged among all the old books I can’t part with, the camping equipment I no longer have the time or money to use, the boxes of bric-a-brac still wrapped in the Los Angeles Times from 2003 and the Chicago Tribune from 2005 and the New York Times from 2014, all the times I’ve run away and all the places I’ve run away from—all shoved back there, covered over with junk so I don’t have to see or hear him: That’s about as much as I can manage where he is concerned.
I didn’t realize until now how angry I still am about him and for him but also at him, which seems so silly and stupid. It’s not his fault he was abused. It’s not his fault he was indoctrinated. It’s not his fault he was borne of people who had no business giving birth to a goddamn loaf of bread let alone children, it’s not his fault that Christianity is a compendium of abusive legends that help abusive people level-up their abuse, or that he was bullied every day from age 7 until pretty much graduation, or that his best friend Michael died out of nowhere in 2002 or that a group of gay bashers cornered him and his friends in a parking lot in 2006 or that a guy assaulted his throat with his dick in 2011 or that he’d inherited all the family mental illnesses, illnesses he wasn’t even sure were real because he was raised by people who think mental illness is fake and treating it is Satanic.
None of that is his fault. He did his best and failed, because brains can only take so much before they crack and give way like old concrete in an earthquake. None of that is his fault. That’s just physics.
Still, the anger comes. Why couldn’t you be stronger? Why couldn’t you figure out the very simple things about life you forced me to pay for nine years of therapy to learn, like that nothing lasts forever and the sun will come out tomorrow come what may and whatever? Why couldn’t you just believe in yourself and keep putting one foot in front of the other? Why couldn’t you just love yourself even though your mom doesn’t and your dad only just recently figured out how to, sort of, in a half-measures kind of way that feels like he climbed Everest? Why did we have to do *gestures vaguely* all of that?
Ah but that’s how they get you, isn’t—depression and trauma, they say, is partly borne of turning in on ourselves because we have no other recourse. My mother will never make amends—she won’t even speak to me. My dad won’t either—I don’t think he can bear to, which is at least something. My brother is even more broken than I have ever been, it turns out, which is quite an accomplishment, so there’ll be no reconciliation there. My best friend will never come back from the grave and that guy won’t unram his dick from my throat and my upbringing will never rewind like a VHS tape and play a different plotline, so I punish myself instead. I should quit doing that, one of these days.
In the past decade I have revisited all of the locations where my life unfolded, good and bad—it felt like the thing to do, so I did. First to Paris and London, the latter of which I found so full of Michael I could barely stand to be there. That trip happened to fall, by chance because I’d forgotten, on the third anniversary of all this, and when I realized it I went about a series of ceremonial burials of everything that had nearly broken me.
On an amble through Hampstead, I found a streetside garden, and I sat amongst the vines and brambles and flowers just starting to poke through the wet dirt and cried, and told my Dad and myself and, I don’t know, God or whatever, that I was leaving my rage and vitriol here in this garden, so I’d know where it was and how to get to it if I ever needed it again.
In Paris, I went to Shakespeare & Co. and sat at one of their typewriters and wrote letters to myself and to my mom, which I then folded up and tucked into random books on the stacks, as is something of a tradition in the place. I have no memory of what they said, nor of where I put them, only that one of the store’s cats watched me place the one to my mom and meowed at me as I left the room, which probably means nothing but sure felt like it meant something.
On a trip to Detroit to visit a friend that summer, I went to my childhood home, and stood in the dirt road looking at it, remembering everything that happened in there. Hearing my mother scream at me and me scream at her and my brother, feral with rage, stomp across the floor with a coat hanger in his hand, shoving it toward her face to emphasize every word, bellowing into her gasping sobs with his head cocked down at a 45-degree angle to make sure she knew how much bigger he was, how easily he could destroy her, how desperately he wanted to. And, it must be said, the extent—tiny, but still—to which she deserved it.
I remembered all the times I came into the family room as a kid to ask her to play with me and found her catatonic on the couch at noon, knocked unconscious with what I now know was a broken brain and heart with no ability to cope. The day she shut down like a short-circuiting robot when I asked about her father’s suicide and stared at the wall behind the stove so long she burned the potatoes. The times I heard her sob on the phone to her mother about money, or scream at me for leaving a spoon in the sink, the time she threw a remote control at my head when I stood up for myself and I was too shocked to throw it back so I just stood there, holding her gaze, waiting to see who’d blink first. (It was her.)
I remembered a few good things too—Christmases and visits from my Aunt Kris and summertime dinners on the patio and wintertime colds and flus while watching Jumpin’ Jack Flash and The Great Outdoors taped off HBO, laughing through our misery. The good things are so much harder to recall, though. That’s one of life’s true cruelties. The good stuff is always so much harder to recall.
In any case I stood under the big maple tree that drove her crazy with its helicopter seeds all over the lawn and tried to suss out if her meticulous backyard was still intact and if the flower boxes she and the neighbor lady built together were still there and the tulip bulbs she’d let me plant along the fence as a kid were still coming up all these years later, because it felt like there was some meaning in that, like if I could get my eyes on those, their permanence, then something about my upbringing would finally make sense.
I couldn’t see any of that without trespassing, though, and in any case the new owners had completely destroyed the front yard, they’d ripped up all the pachysandra and cut down the burning bush and painted the red door a grating shade of brown and my stomach was starting to go wonky and it felt like the thing to do to just leave this where it lies. So I did, looking back in the mirrors as I went, the same way I had that morning in 2001 when I drove off in a U-haul for Los Angeles while my mom sobbed in the middle of the street. Whoever wrote that whole “objects in mirror may be closer than they appear” thing had a real sense of humor.
I also made several trips to Los Angeles, where my unraveling began, way back in 2002. I went to all the old haunts and hiked all the old hikes and beached the old beaches and ate anywhere that still existed among the handful of places I’d go gorge myself in solitude—Palermo, Fred 62, El Cholo, Philippe, the one remaining Dupars—in order to cope with a life I did not know I was not equipped to navigate. My mom slept and screamed. I ate.
On one of those trips, in 2021, I also drove from Michigan all the way to LA, just like I had in 2001, revisiting some of the same routes and locations—the swirling cantilevers of I-70 across the Rockies, the ancient Mexican cemeteries of Taos, New Mexico, the plot of orange desert where I wept at a purple 2003 sunset in Utah, the burned-out chaparral between Vegas and Barstow and finally the snaking 15 freeway through the Cajon pass, every ounce of tension in my body disappearing as I freefell out of the high desert and into the eucalyptus of LA—retracing my steps through the places I’d passed on the three cross-country moves I made in four years, when I was running, and running, and running away from what I sensed back then was coming for me, eventually, in 2014.
I felt like if I did all this I would understand what happened to me, how it all began, where it all went wrong, how I got from bright-eyed kid in a U-Haul to the blackened creature craving his own blood in 2014 to the stronger, tough-skinned 40-something whose resilience and wisdom have come at the cost of his ability to dream.
Last year, I even went so far as to move back to Michigan, a place I swore I’d never give more than a passing glance for the rest of my life. It felt like the thing to do. The last thing on the list.
But of all the places I’ve lived and grown and broken, the one I have not revisited is New York, and I don’t know if I ever will. I am afraid of it. I am afraid of what will happen if I step foot in it again, that my brain will collapse before the plane even touches down at LaGuardia. I am slowly working on a book about everything that has happened to me; a sort of travelogue of all these places and experiences and lessons. I will have to go to New York one day to do it any justice. There is a non-zero chance it will end up like most books—unfinished, buried in a hard drive, waiting.
I heard a bit of advice once—I can no longer remember from whom and Googling it has proven useless, as Googling so often does nowadays—that nobody should attempt to write a memoir until 10 years have passed. You cannot have adequate perspective and understanding, the thinking went, until you’ve gotten the panoramic view that comes with a decade’s distance.
So I suppose I expected some kind of catharsis to come this March. Some kind of meaning, some kind of “ah ha! Yes of course, it was THIS that happened to me” or “it was THERE where I went wrong.”
Instead, there is just that I am here. Extant. For better or worse. My life is neither as bad nor as good as I imagined it could be when I drove out of Manhattan in 2014, broken and folded up next to defeat in a way I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
I feel in many ways like I don’t know who I am, not in the sense that I haven’t done the work to find out but in the sense that all the context is gone. The memories have been locked away to protect me, the corroborating photographs of my 6th birthday and 3rd grade school play and high school graduation and first day of college and everything else that happened to me up to the age of 30 or so are all in my estranged mother’s attic in Scottsdale, if she hasn’t already flung them into a dumpster in a fit of good Christian pique, that is.
It’s a strange thing, to find yourself unrecognizable. To be occasionally reminded that you were once this and that and also this other thing, but to have no proof and no recollection of it at all, like getting 30 mins into a movie and realizing you’ve seen it before even though you don’t remember having done so, or even what happens in the end or, really, what it was even about in the first place.
But it occurs to me that this is probably less to do with loss and more to do with gain—the real disconnect is between who I actually am and who I became in order to survive.
“I feel like I’m split in half,” I told my first therapist Nigel back in 2008, when I should have known 2014 was coming but was too afraid to be honest even with my therapist. “There’s the inside half that’s real and the outside half everyone knows.”
“Is that half not real too?” he’d asked in return.
“I don’t know,” I’d responded, but what I’d meant was, “no Nigel, it’s not. Even a little bit.” It’s the avatar I created way back in my earliest days so that maybe, one day, someone would actually love and respect me—or at least leave me the fuck alone.
I am not there yet, but that inside half… I am trying very hard, really very hard, to just relent and let him be the whole thing. He’s all I have anyway, all I can really recall with any certainty. I am further than I ever have been.
Perhaps it’s not forgetting so much as you just stop recognizing those avatars when you finally start letting them go. Perhaps what you were just ends up some old photographs in a box in your estranged mother’s attic, just paper and gloss, the colors fading a bit more with each year’s humidity shifts. And then you go take new ones. In better light. With wider aperture.
Or maybe not. Who knows. Ask me in another 10 years.
This is so beautiful. I am so glad you are here and share your experience and writing.
If you are still in Michigan, we must share a meal together. Oh the things I can help you see about who you truly are...someone who was created to be loved and loved well without condition or limitations. If your interested in catching up, I'd love to see you cousin😁🩷