How He Thought of Me | Dave's Place

My First Shrink

Every time I ever went to a therapist, I went because I was in physical pain. The first time, because the whole idea was so foreign to me, it took me months to finally pull the trigger. I also felt reluctant because I was afraid of what he’d say. I was afraid he’d tell me to give up the thing I loved the most.

The pain began as a mild irritation beneath my breastbone, as if someone were reaching forward and touching me there, gently and insistently. I couldn’t understand what that was, tried to relax and rid myself of it. Somehow that made it worse. It would tighten and grow more insistent, tighten other muscles around it, even muscles in my back. It went from being a finger pressing that spot to a little monkey fist grabbing it, holding on, tightening. Ease up, I would think to myself. Please. That made it hold on tighter.

This pain was showing up every day. It seemed to get worse as the day went on.

I was a teacher at a secondary school in Winston-Salem, three sections of seventh grade and one of ninth; I was the chairman of the English department, because I had been its first English teacher, the year it started, when I was 22. Now I was 27, and an institution at the place (it happens fast). My job was a lot of work, but I was good at it. I felt secure.

My real ambition was as a writer. I gave every spare moment to that. The first year I taught, for instance, the first real break in the school year was a Christmas program on a morning in December, after which school let out early; I went home, ate lunch, and sat down that afternoon to write a short story. I had started doing that in college—not just farting around, but finishing stories, so I wouldn’t be a dilettante[1]—and over the course of those years wrote thirty or forty stories, some of which I sent to magazines, but none had gotten published. For the first two years of my job—though I ached to be writing—my work was too time-consuming and I was able to write only at breaks.

In my third year, I was teaching only seventh grade (there were four sections that year), I had done the preparations before, and I decided to get up early—4:50 seemed good—to write a novel. I thought of short stories as my training ground and the novel as my true form. It was scary to do that (it seemed crazy, kind of presumptuous. What if I gave up? What if I couldn’t finish?) yet my wish to do it was so strong it carried me through.

I still remember those mornings. My son had been born in August, and I could hear him in his crib making sleeping noises. Next to his room was our bedroom, and next to the bedroom my study, where I sat with a cup of coffee at a desk that looked out a window. It was pitch black as I began, and the sun gradually came up, as I wrote with my narrow point pen on a legal pad. It took me two years to finish. I called my mentor and he gave me the name of his agent. I was convinced that my writing career was about to begin.

The day the agent returned that manuscript was one of the worst shocks of my life. I can still remember the dreadful look on my wife’s face as I walked in the door and she showed me what had come in the mail. I smiled and shrugged, oh sure, rejections, they’re part of a writer’s life, I’ve gotten a million of them, but inside I was devastated. It was as if the world had turned upside down. This is not what was supposed to happen.

My mentor knew a number of editors; I continued to send it off, and it continued to come back; one time, the rejecting editor (at Viking) had been a classmate of my wife’s at boarding school. It was as those rejections came in that the little fist beneath my breastbone tightened more and more.

My wife was unhappy too, for a variety of reasons, and she began seeing a counselor first. She didn’t like where we were living and wanted to find some way to get part time child care and get back to work. She knew right away that therapy was helping her and soon knew—if she hadn’t before—that my unhappiness was part of the larger problem; she urged me to see a counselor too. By that time I’d seen a doctor multiple times about the pain, which he called gastritis. He recommended a bland diet and a mild tranquilizer, had me chewing antacids like peanuts. Nothing worked. The pain got worse and worse.

I didn’t want to see a counselor because I was sure what he would tell me: you’ve given it a good try, you’ve done a lot of writing, but it’s becoming obvious that this hasn’t worked out, and it’s never going to. You just don’t have the talent. On the other hand, you’ve had great success as a teacher. Your students love you, the school loves you; you’re probably on your way to being a Dean, if not Headmaster. Teaching is the true talent of your life. A mark of maturity is to see that. And it’s time that you got mature. It’s time you grow up. You’re 27 years old, for God’s sake.

I had told almost no one of my ambitions to be a writer. I didn’t want to become one of those people who talked about it all the time but hadn’t done anything. The people who did know assumed I wanted to be rich and famous. (At one point my cousin spoke of “your wish for renown as a writer.” I couldn’t believe how little he understood me.) I’m not saying I didn’t want renown, or that I didn’t want to make money. But those things had nothing to do with why I was writing.

I was writing because it was keeping me alive. It was the truest life I had. If I gave that up, I would be dead inside.

It was also keeping me sane. It was enabling me to put one foot in front of another, to wake up in the morning (as my brother put it) and not say oh shit.

Finally, though, the pain was too much. I called the pastoral care center where my wife was going and asked to make an appointment. The receptionist said, “Could you tell me something about what the problem is?”

“My stomach hurts,” I said.

That was enough for her.

My counselor was a Baptist minister named Bob Money, a warm, caring friendly person. I did not, as I might have, burst into tears when I met him, but when he asked why I was there all my ambitions and wishes and frustrations about being a writer poured out of me. I talked about nothing else that first day and continued talking about it at the second appointment. He sat there listening, for something like ninety straight minutes. I told him how heartbroken I was by all the rejections. I hadn’t even admitted that to my wife (that was part of the problem, obviously. I didn’t understand that then. I was trying to spare her). It poured out of me, a litany of frustration.

At the end of that session, he asked me to go home and make a list of the five most important things in my life. It seemed like one of those therapy exercises, and since this was pastoral care I knew what it was supposed to look like: 1. Jesus Christ 2. My family 3. My country, or however it went. I don’t actually remember my list, but I tried to be honest. I put my family ahead of writing, which was true. But that was where the conflict was. I couldn’t give up either one. But my depression about the rejection of my writing made things difficult for my family.

When I came in the next week I showed him my list. We chatted about the various things, and he sat looking at it. Then he turned to me and said, “Have you noticed that teaching is not on this list?”

“No,” I said. “Actually, I hadn’t.” Teaching was my job. What did that have to do with what was important to me?

“And yet you spend eight or ten hours every day teaching or preparing to teach.”

Yes. At least.

“So here’s a question for you. Writing is number two, and yet you squeeze it into this very short period at the start of the day. Can you think of any way, any way at all, that you can arrange your life so that you can give more time to your writing?”

More time to my writing. Shit, I don’t know. Get up earlier?

“I’m not sure.” I was puzzled by the turn the conversation had taken. “To tell you the truth, I thought you were going to tell me to give up trying to be a writer.”

He got a shocked look on his face, as if I’d said something horrible. And then he said to me the kindest, most compassionate words that anyone had said to me in my life. If anything could have brought me to tears, it was those words.

“Oh no,” he said. “Of course not. I could never think of you as anything but a writer.”

[1] I can’t remember what writer it was—maybe Paul Goodman—who said that you could tell an artist from a dilettante because an artist finished things.