Read My Mind

On September 24, 1978, I jumped out my dormitory window at the prestigious Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts. I fractured my back and my right ankle and disappeared from that campus in a wailing ambulance.

After six months in a metal back brace, I moved to New York at the urging of my parents. One and a half years later I suffered a second psychotic break and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. My search for the therapist who could heal me began. For sixteen years, I couldn't read and struggled with a diagnosis that crippled me. After rejecting a series of ineffective professionals. I finally found Lou.

He is African-American, a Buddhist, a meditator and a weightlifter. Our work together revealed that Lou was an unconventional therapist. In an early session, he had us exchange the contents of our pockets. I was the recipient of a double handful of change, small bills and a chain of tiny Tibetan prayer flags. Lou was wise enough to let me come out ahead. He had many tricks for increasing rapport, including matching my breathing and position. Having discovered that I was predominantly visual, he took care to say "I see what you mean" as opposed to "I hear you." One day, Lou said that a time line runs through all of us. "What is in front of you?" he asked. I didn't hesitate. My dismal past stretched to the horizon and beyond. My time line was inverted. Where another persons' future glowed, I was fixedly staring at the terrible events that had befallen me since my 24th birthday.
Why had I attempted suicide? The answer seems to lie in the fact that I had experienced two failed love relationships back to back before I entered the Fletcher School. My career plans - which included doing economic research in West Africa - were getting way ahead of my personal life. Recently I have read Carol Gilligan's "In a Different Voice." She observes that many women of my era unconsciously silenced their voices and short-circuited their own development in order to maintain relationships with men. Another researcher, Jean Baker Miller, notes that for some women loss of relationship is tantamount to a total loss of self. I feel that this is what happened to me.

I review these relationships in "Read My MInd." The first was with a Princeton man - a Canadian hockey player with a big brain and a bigger ego. The second was a Dutchman who was ten years older than I was. I couldn't find parity with either of these men and that was the only thing that mattered to me. My desires were set squarely against what my culture had to offer at that time. I would become a sociological casualty.

I mean to train a powerful beam on what passes for serious mental illness in our culture. I believe I have untangled my personal riddle. The psychiatrists who treated me held out no hope that I would ever grow or evolve. I feel I have been lucky enough to outlive my diagnosis.

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