Head Case (22 page)

The day after I'm formally offered the job of programs and events coordinator for the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at USCB by a man in Human Resources named Darwin (“If you get a call from Darwin, call him back ASAP. Darwin is in charge of selection,” says Laura), Dr. Marsha Linehan appears on the front page of the
New York Times
Web site: “Expert on Mental Illness Reveals Her Own Fight.” The founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, now sixty-eight, was once a seventeen-year-old in a locked ward. In the program, we used to mimic her stern drawl as she introduced a new behavior skill on the DVDs we had to watch each week in group. Who was this doctor with the paisley neck scarves, beamed into this cold spare treatment room to save us all? I had watched a clip of her giving a lecture, in which she said that she worked with suicidal patients because she needed the worst cases in order to prove that her program really worked. I thought I heard her snicker.

Even the group leader used to sing “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha” in that singsongy Brady Bunch imitation. Seeing a photo of Dr. Linehan's arms covered with cigar-sized burns and diagonal slashes feels like finding out that the girl you used to make fun of in the cafeteria goes home at night and rips her hair out.

We like to hear that our professional figures are vulnerable: the neurologist with Asperger's, the therapist with borderline personality disorder. It humanizes them. Does Marsha Linehan have imposter syndrome? Between patients did she ever sit slack-jawed at her new desk as I do, wondering how the hell she got herself into this? How is it that her references glowed about her, that her interview was like a slow-motion dream where she was soaring over the Grand Canyon? Did Marsha Linehan ever feel confused about how best to interpret “business casual”?

The balance of power that we need to believe in when sitting in a cold room in that thin hospital gown, legs dangling over the examining table, who or what we need to put our faith in to believe that we can be healed (that by merit of having bodies, we deserve to be healed), is slippery by function. Humans depend on other humans to heal and be healed. You wouldn't take your car to a mechanic who's never been in a crash, and I'd never take my heart to a therapist who hasn't broken one and had hers broken. In DBT, I always felt as if something integral was missing when Marsha was hologrammed in from DVDs. In the interview, she mentions the answer that she used to give patients who asked about the burns and cuts on her arms. “Do you want to know that I've suffered?”

When I type
imposter syndrome
into a search engine, the automated suggestions include:

Imposter syndrome graduate school

Imposter system academia

Imposter system test

Imposter system book

Imposter system cure

“How did you end up here?” my new boss asks. When I tell her that I followed Charlie, she says cheerfully, “I'm a trailer, too. My husband was at Yale when we got this call. People tend to stay here for a while; it's an easy place to be.”

The blue of the ocean here is so rich that it's overwhelming, like International Klein Blue. The waves look stiff and thickly peaked, like a prop cardboard cake frosted for a TV commercial. It's the kind of disarming beauty that makes one mistrustful; especially when viewed from the back of a bus on my commute to work. Mainly, I am suspicious of my own luck. I'm working at a university that never would have accepted me as a student during an economic period when most of the friends whom I went to grad school with have gone straight back to working retail if they are lucky. I have business cards, a name plate in front of my office door. My last name card previous to this position was threaded through a shoelace and worn around my neck. The job will act as a trellis, a supportive structure to wind my concept of time around. It's also an obligation that forces me to get dressed, leave the house, and interact with people.

After I am at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center for a couple of weeks, I am asked to run some papers to another part of campus. “How is your sense of direction?” my boss asks.

“I … don't really have one,” I say.

“That sort of thing is always interesting to me, how people think differently…”

Laura must have mentioned something. I tell her the whole story. In telling her about my brain, I use my hands, first clasped together and then slowly spread apart to explain how the matter was pushed back by the pooling reservoir of cranial fluid.

As part of my job responsibilities, I make a monthly calendar of events and update the Web site; I schedule a lecture series. I set up receptions and take them down. I make hotel reservations and order sandwiches and pour wine and raise my hand at the end of lectures to ask questions. At first, I think,
Oh god, what have I gotten myself into
? I set deadlines in the past instead of the future, or accidentally extend them by a month. It's exhausting, and for the first couple of months, every day I'm afraid that it will be my last.

“Babe, you've got to calm down,” Charlie tells me. “You don't understand; this isn't some barista job. They can't just walk in and fire you. You could develop a crack addiction, go to rehab, and come back, and they still couldn't fire you. Relax.”

This is especially generous of him because we're completely falling apart, although we're only beginning to admit it to ourselves. He is beginning to admit it to himself. I refuse to talk about it with anyone because I'm still convinced that I can fix it. I am the problem, my reactionary attitude, my insecurities and fears. This is good news, I think, because I can apologize, I can promise to get better, I can buy myself time, try harder, become an updated version of myself. If he cheated, as he often tells me he's considering, then he would be the problem. But he doesn't. He confesses his desires, feels better, and when his desires return—for a woman at the bar, a fellow grad student, a mutual friend—he confesses again. If only I was someone else, then he would want me. I have to become a stranger to him if I want to be known again.

At work, I stay late and come in early; I make drafts and revisions, I take breaks from deadline projects when I get too tired to see them correctly, and eventually I start to feel less like the Trojan horse sent to inadvertently take down the tiny civilization of the UCSB Humanities Center.

This is the first job where I am transparent about my disability and where I feel supported enough to ask for accommodations. My boss knows that if she orders a pizza for the lunch meeting and asks me to pick it up, I will need the total of the order from her beforehand in order to precalculate the proper tip on my phone. I think this is a kernel of what it means to be an adult; understanding your limitations and discerning from experience when to push yourself and when not to.

Rilke says “learn to love the questions.” I love my litter of neurological questions fiercely, and like most things we love, I sometimes resent them because I have no choice other than to love them. There's so little we know about the brain and even less about the mind. I tend to want to lean on the support of hard scientific facts about my brain, but in the end what I understand of my condition feels less medical and more like an alchemical blurring of philosophy and anatomy.

 

March 2012

Santa Barbara, California

In
The Odyssey
, the sea god Proteus punishes the king of Sparta for offending the gods by calming the winds that would carry the king's ship home. Proteus's daughter tells the king that if he can capture her father and hold on to him long enough, he will eventually tire and tell the king how to please the gods again, returning the wind to his sails. The king captures Proteus and holds on to him no matter what he changes into—a lion, a leopard, a pig, a serpent—until he finally becomes exhausted and relents. This is the name that Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the scientist with the twisted skeleton, chose for himself.

If I hold on tighter to the story that we are meant to be together, I am sure that it will become the truth. Charlie is shape-shifting as I clutch him, but my clasp only makes him thrash harder. Inevitably, I lose my grip.

Our therapist suggests that we should avoid all contact with each other for three months to a year; it takes us several failed attempts to actually stick to this. It feels like a performance piece. At CalArts, I read about the performance artist Marina Abramovi
ć
and her lover, Ulay, who ended their relationship by starting out on opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and walking toward each other to meet in the center. Once they met in the center of the Great Wall, they each said good-bye to the other and finished their walks.

We decide that I should be the one to leave. In April, I move to a room in a creaky Victorian less than a mile away from our old place. Upstairs from me is home to a former used bookseller, a violin maker, a bartender, a grad student, an aged yellow cat named Leelo, and thirty thousand books neatly shelved in the attic. The collection of books is also housed in the common space and the garage. My room is downstairs, next to a room that is used as office space for a real estate business run by the landlords (a father approaching his nineties and his sixtysomething son). I'm assured by the former bookseller that the landlords are almost never there, and that he will be picking up our rent checks. Anyone not blinded by that particular blend of urgency and grief known to the newly former live-in significant other can see where this arrangement is headed.

The real estate agent landlords are there constantly and it turns out the guy who picks up our rent is charging each roommate differing amounts in accordance with his mood. The real estate agents treat the house more as their vacation retreat than an office space; the Victorian has been in their family for generations, and they feel perfectly at home enjoying their morning coffee in the kitchen and opening the double doors to their office to include the parlor common space. My main objection is that to get to the bathroom in the morning, I have the option of either dodging the geriatric landlords enjoying their morning paper and coffee in the kitchen or attempting to exchange morning pleasantries with them while in my bathrobe. When I gently confront the former bookseller about this awkward situation, he says that there's nothing he can do about it. I'm out after a month and a half; most of my stuff is still at Charlie's since I haven't worked out a method to transport it all.

This time, my parents are driving down to help me. Charlie and I are only a couple of months into our latest attempt to avoid each other completely when we agree to meet at a posh bakery by his place to discuss logistics. It quickly spirals into a blowout fight, our biggest public argument ever, over whether my father can enter his house.

“I'm not comfortable with your father being in my house. This makes me really uncomfortable, the idea of him being in my house. I don't want him seeing my things. What if he touches my things?”

I don't know where the hell this is coming from. It's not news to me that he's particular about his possessions, but I never had any idea that Charlie was so intimidated by my dad. I forget that he has this effect on people outside of our family.

“If you're not going to help me move and you're not going to let him help me, how the hell am I supposed to get my stuff?”

I plead my case to our mutual therapist, who talks him down until he relents. It's May; the UCSB students are preparing to leave for the summer. The apartment units by campus are lined with sagging couches. I pick up secondhand Ikea furniture from outside sorority houses; my dad helps me load a used particleboard wardrobe into the back of the family minivan.

This time I move into a small studio with a loft bed, in a craftsman-style house that was originally cut into apartments to create housing for the nuns in the service of the church down the street. This seems like a woefully fitting landing for me to begin my newly single life in a small town with very few people my age. I use Charlie and my boss as references on my application. When the landlady finds out that I am on disability for a neurological condition, she calls Charlie for reassurance about my ability to get up and down from the loft bed. My parents, who were originally planning to drive down from Portland for a week to help me load everything out of Charlie's and into my new place, decide to stay for six weeks and sublet an apartment downtown. First, I load their minivan with the few boxes I had at the Victorian. “The feral cats here are actually very sweet,” my dad tells me, stooping down to pet Leelo, who is rubbing at his legs. “You know, it's fine. Santa Barbara is fine. It's plastic, but everyone needs plastic.” The first night alone in my new apartment, I discover that the previous occupant had stuck little glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling of the loft bed. It's my own tiny galaxy.

*   *   *

Aside from glimpsing him at a distance in his car, I don't see Charlie all year, even though my new place is one mile away from the cottage we shared. I stay on the humanities side of campus; he stays on the science side. Since I avoid the places where we used to go to together, I have no way of knowing if he is doing the same. It's 2012, the year when a few fringe believers are making noises about the apocalypse, as predicted by an ancient Mayan calendar. If the world came crashing down that year, I wouldn't have noticed.

During the beginning of our separation, I filled out a questionnaire that's supposed to help me get some distance from my emotions.

If your feelings were a color, what color would they be?

Purple.

If your feelings had a shape, what shape would they be?

Egg.

A purple egg. A real shiner.

On the bus to work, every so often a driver will ask me for my Medicare card. I use a “mobility” card, a card for disabled riders that you can only purchase by flashing your Medicare card and twenty dollars to a local transit authority worker who sits in a little booth in the transit office downtown. It would take a lot of effort to get a fake card, but this isn't about that; this is about a little game where the driver feels big and I feel small. I can't really explain why, even after I show him my card, I feel embarrassed. This small accusation that I'm not really the way that I am just hits too close to home for me.