July 23, 1982 (Day Five)
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ahunter3= July 23, 1982 (Day Five) =
Today’s AA meeting revolves around the first of the twelve steps, “admitting that we are powerless over alcohol.” Gary Stevens wants to define my disinclination to make such an admission as a case of me being in denial about it. This was predictable. If I’m surprised about anything it’s that they’re only starting in with me about it now.
I’m glad I got Mark Raybourne for individual counseling and not Gary; Mark certainly has his shortcomings but Gary annoys me more. I think he does it on purpose, in fact: irritating the clientele as a method of prompting them to change their position or behavior. Gary has light brown hair and a beak of a nose; he’s strutting around in an unbuttoned dress shirt like a rooster: behold, I have a chest!
“Wake up and smell the coffee”, Gary tells me. “We’ve all been right where you’re at, saying we don’t see ourselves as alcoholics, don’t hear what people are telling us about our drinking, and refusing to say it. Just like the three monkeys, you know? See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. But you know that’s not gonna fly here.”
“I understand why this is the first step for an alcoholic coming to terms with their drinking problem”, I reply. “You can’t address a problem until you can acknowledge that you’ve got it. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who doesn’t acknowledge having such a problem is actually someone who does, but who hasn’t yet made that first step.”
“Talk plainly”, Gary Stevens urges me. “Don’t be playing word games with us here.”
“I thought I was being plain. Let’s try again, shall we? All alcoholics who don’t recognize that they’re alcoholics are in denial. But not all people who don’t consider themselves alcoholics are alcoholics in denial.”
“Are you talking about yourself?”
“I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’m talking in the abstract.”
“Well don’t talk in the abstract. Talk about yourself.”
“Hi, I’m Derek, and I’m not an alcoholic.” Pause. “This is where you all say ‘Hello, Derek’; that was your cue. I have never experienced myself as powerless over alcohol because I haven’t made an effort to quit drinking and then failed to do so. I haven’t made any effort to modify my alcohol consumption behaviors. You’re welcome to make the case that I should, but you don’t even know what they are yet. It’s not currently a concern of mine, though, and you don’t get to define my concerns. If I had decided that I should modify my drinking habits, and then found that I couldn’t, then it would make sense to consider that I was powerless over alcohol.”
“You’re very clever”, Emily pronounces, “but you’re pointing out something that we’ve all heard and most of us have said, and it doesn’t mean your drinking isn’t a problem.”
Party line. Just on the verge of exaggeration. I still can’t tell if she’s into this or if she’s making fun of them.
* * *
“All right”, I tell my psychodrama group, “Here’s the scene I came up with. I’ll need one person to play my dad and one to be my mom. I’m going to propose that y’all buy me a piano, since you’ve spent a lot more than that sending me to college and other schools which didn’t work out, and I think this might work out. And you argue that I’m being self-centered and irresponsible to think you owe me that after you’ve wasted so much money sending me to college and other schools and it didn’t work out. And then I’ll say I could have a career as a musician and you say that’s not practical and it’s just a hobby, and we can probably improvise from there.”
“Oh, that sounds good”, Marie says, clapping her hands. “Yeah, so a little bit about what your parents are like. Is he loud? Is he one of those ‘my way or the highway’ dads? Your mom, is she going to be worried you’re making a mistake?”
“She’s worried and hurt, for sure, but also the one more likely to make an absolute statement right off the bat. He’s all about showing he’s really listening and really cares, as long as I eventually accept his conclusions. No yelling. If they can make me yell, then I lose for acting immature. We’re southern, but we kind of act like yankees from those black and white movies from the fifties. No one gets to yell or stomp feet when we argue.”
Jeremy makes a deep appreciative nod. “Oh, that tells me a lot about you. Yeah, I can see that, that perfectly fits you. All right, Ronald, you want to take a go at being Derek’s dad? Noelle, you up for playing the mom?”
As typical of psychodrama, after running the scenario, I, as “director”, coach Noelle and Ronald towards some modifications in how they portray my folks; Marie and Jeremy and the other participating patients all make comments and suggestions. I am shooting for more accuracy; they, of course, are seeing what’s hitting my buttons and evoking a response from me playing myself, and trying to flush more of that out. Then we run it again with the changes.
After that comes the feedback section —
“I gotta say, I have to side with your folks”, Jake says. “I mean, it’s their money and you don’t get to tell them how to spend it. It’s like if I buy you a Christmas present. You can’t say ‘No, you have to get me this instead’, right?”
“Well, I agree with that”, I reply. “I’m an adult. I don’t seem to be very good at it, but I’m past the age of being entitled to support from them. So it’s not that they owe me. But it’s very frustrating that when it was their idea they were all for paying for me to get a future, and I tried their idea; but it didn’t work out. So I see a direction I want to try, I think I can write music and play it on the piano and sing, and a piano is a lot cheaper than a college tuition. But that they won’t pay for.”
“So you do think they owe you”, April says. “You’re saying since they paid for college they owe you a piano. You know, dude, that doesn’t make a whole lotta sense.”
I need to pause and run that through a few times. I know it looks like April’s got me quite stuck, but never mind that. I’m occasionally making ‘please wait’ gestures to them all. Finally —
“It’s really not about them owing me, but how it feels, the emotional side, is a lot the same as that of being owed something. Something like ‘I wanted something better out of this, and I expected better from you’. I’m disappointed in them. Oh, and it’s mutual. What I get from them is ‘We’re so disappointed, we had such high hopes’. I’m owed something more abstract than a piano. They feel like they’re owed something too.”
“Okay, I hear you”, April answers. And other people in the room are exchanging the kind of glance I associate with Whoa, Derek just made sense. I often don’t, to people, but I do land one occasionally.
“Derek”, Marie suggests, “I want you to say something to your parents here. Take some time, but say what you’d actually say to them if you had them here to listen.”
Following Marie’s advice, I do take a moment to assemble my thoughts into words. Then —
“You get worried and disappointed whenever these plans for my future don’t work out, so having a plan that works is very important to you. And you want me to take it seriously, so that, ideally, having one that works is very important to me, too. But you mostly haven’t included me in the planning before the ‘pick from these options’ stage. The one major exception was me saying I wanted to learn auto mechanics at vo-tech instead of going to college, and that’s the one course of study I finished successfully. The jobs I could find weren’t enough to let me move out on my own, but it wasn’t a failed career yet and still you pitched to me to go back and try college again, that was your idea...
“Sorry”, I interrupt myself, “ I’ve gone off on a tangent. I want to go back to the being worried and disappointed thing. That’s really what I want to talk about. I’m doing my most focused thinking about what I actually should be doing with myself, I’m taking it very seriously. And you addressing me like I’m irresponsible and unconcerned about my future is getting to be annoying. Not everything that hasn’t worked out pleasantly in my life is my fault. That doesn’t necessarily make it somebody else’s fault, but it’s still true.”
* * *
There was that moment in the psychodrama when I’d had that feeling of connection to the roomful of people I was speaking to. When I say making sense, I don’t mean “Hello, my name is Derek” or “Well, if you want to get on Interstate 40, take Interstate 25 south until you get to Albuquerque”, those things make sense, but they’re not new thoughts, they’re familiar patterns; I’m really talking about expressing something that they’ve never heard put into words before, but talking about everyday familiar life and its aspects, so there’s both a spark of surprise and a spark of recognition.
I have a lot of stuff I want to talk about that I think could hit people that way. Comedians do that. Tickling that spark of recognition, you know? I’m all serious and pompously full of intentions and I wouldn’t make a good comedian, but I want to hit people that way too. I came here hoping to sharpen this, so show me how to reach people in such a way that I can make that happen more often.
You want to know what I want to do with my life, Daddy, Mama? I want to be a political social activist. I want to start a movement. But I don’t know how.
Because a lot of the time when I try to talk to people about this stuff, those sparks don’t happen. People think I’m trying to be interesting to make myself popular. Some of them think I’m trying to be interesting and failing rather badly at it. Others assume I want to prompt a debate, and the ideas are just startup fodder to fuel a good debate. And a whole lot of people just think I don’t make any sense.
So yes...I had a good experience in psychodrama. I felt heard, but I also got challenged, I mean a legitimate challenge to my own way of looking at something personal. For all that Elk Meadow is frustrating, I could actually get something real out of this, something that I need.
I walk to the short hall with the little piano and sit down. The bench creaks. Piano is a Yamaha, a popular practice-room spinet, glossy black, straight lines, functional. I take out a pen and some scratch paper — the back side of someone’s discarded Elk Meadow schedule filched from the trash can — and shake the pen vigorously to get it to flow more evenly. An hour later I have four verses and a piano part for a new song called “Waves.” It’s specifically about being here, and the challenge to stay vulnerable enough to get something out of it while simultaneously being tough enough to engage with it and not be controlled by the people who like to push other folks’ buttons a little more than they should.
Another half-hour later, I’m singing it and playing it and totally getting into it. It’s got passion and fragility, intensity belted out on the high notes in places and in other spots the piano ringing a suspended chord and the voice part shimmery and delicate on top of it. I picked well when I chose the key of A major, I sound damn good on those high E’s.
I once again get the sense that there is another person standing behind me. The way the hallway is set up, anyone from our unit walking past the piano comes from behind and to the right of it. So anyone coming to hear would come up from behind me.
Perhaps me becoming aware of her is expressed in some way that she picks up on; Ellen steps forward. Green and white cotton shirt, sash tied around the waist, arms loosely crossed. I pause, and she speaks. “You wrote a song about being in here.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“I thought you hated it here”, she says, glaring at me suspiciously.
“It’s complicated. I could get some good help here and really grow, but the stakes are high and they’re my stakes. I’m here for a consult and some help but I’m in charge. I’m not turning my mind or my life over to anyone else.”
“Everyone wants to take over mine. I mostly don’t let them but I fuck everything up when I’m in control.”
“Do they fuck things up for you any less when you do let them?”
“No. I just sometimes get tired of fighting, and fine, you steer, I don’t really care. It’s better in here.” With that, Ellen nods and walks back down the hall. It’s the least hostile she’s ever spoken to me.
I return to working on my new piece.
* * *
“What do we think of Derek’s growth and progress at this point?”, Irma asks the full community group. I am this evening’s subject matter because there were complaints about the “cram” posters still being on my door, and then other people (Jake, April, Noelle) actually rose to my defense, saying I was participating here in earnest and not just insulting everyone.
My counselor Mark is recognized and stands, looking contemplative. “Derek has reached some real important understandings, and I think we would all acknowledge that. His biggest barrier is that he intellectualizes and avoids his personal issues a lot of the time.”
Gary Stevens seconds all of that and adds, “He hides behind a lot of ten dollar words and ivory tower blather when he wants to avoid addressing things that others have brought to his attention.”
George is the first resident to speak. He states, “I think Derek is coming around, but he still, his first instinct is to bullshit, and he still goes with that a lot of the time.” George, a Black man probably in his upper twenties from the look of him, always seems a bit amused. I remember him saying the other day that maybe Ellen doesn’t like me because of my sexual orientation, spoken with the same sardonic smile.
Joanne’s take on me is, “I think Derek really likes to hold himself apart. He’s afraid of not being accepted so he holds back and says ‘I’m not really one of you’, and also I think he’s very unhappy with himself’.
Jeremy from psychodrama says, “Derek has a lot of courage, and he’s very smart. Some of what comes off as intellectualizing is him processing. I think he gets there eventually and sees what he needs to see, but like anyone, it’s hard going at first.”
Emily is recognized and states, “Derek distracts from his own issues by talking about social causes and politics. It’s a fancy way of saying everything is somebody else’s fault. That’s not him processing, that’s him refusing to process and I think we should call him on it more often.”
I have had the opportunity on previous occasions to see other residents put on the hot seat in community group. Ellen. Ronald. There seems to be a sort of script for how this goes: the mostly critical comments eventually make the targeted person angry in places where they feel like somebody has misrepresented how things are, and they start defending themselves, then they get piled on for being defensive and get pushed to admit they’re guarding themselves against the truth, after which there’s a sort of reconciliation and it gets called a growth moment.
I can look out of one cynical eyeball and one earnestly trusting one and see the same thing in stereoscopic vision: it isn’t good to respond until I’ve heard everything these people have to say and given it thoughtful consideration. There might be truth, partial or otherwise, in some of these observations. But it also makes sense to thwart the script and not rise to the bait and put a bunch of defensiveness on display.
There are a few more people who add their agreement to the notion that I intellectualize, and seconding what Emily had said about me invoking social and political situations when talking about my stuff, that doing that was a way of not dealing with my issues. I nod occasionally to show I’ve been listening.
It winds down. No one seems to have anything else to add.
Dr. Barnes asks, “Well, Derek, do you have any response to all this feedback? I know you have some thoughts to share with us.” Slow and deliberate, he sounds like he’s willing to listen to my side. His hands are open, palms upward, and he spreads them apart from each other in inquiry.
“I think...”, I begin, “... that for everyone, resistance to threatening ideas can take the form of clinging onto ways we’ve already got, ways we’re already comfortable thinking of those matters. And we shove information and experiences into those boxes even when they don’t really fit, to avoid dealing with them. For me, a lot of my familiar boxes are intellectual. I’m sorry if I come across sometimes like some stuffy stilted college professor who thinks he can learn life all from reading books. I don’t think that intellectual concepts are... you know, like ...something’s wrong with them automatically. It’s not that they’re intellectual and use a bunch of complex concepts and, how did Gary put it? ‘Ten dollar words’. That’s not what makes it defensive. It’s the act of not listening. Thinking that if I can put my thoughts into words better than you can, they must be better thoughts. That’s arrogance. And, to make it personal, thinking I’ve already heard what you’re saying before, so I don’t need to listen to all of it. I’ve caught myself doing that a lot. So have some of you, I guess, and you should keep on calling me on it. I’ll try to listen more.
“Now, the thing about bringing up social and political matters when I talk about myself... it’s one thing if somebody says ‘Don’t complain about my temper tantrums and missing work, that asshole Ronald Reagan got elected’, or ‘Why are you after me for my drinking and drug habits, what about the exploitation of South Africa?’, then yeah, that’s deflecting, and I agree it isn’t directly relevant, or not likely to be. But when I bring up political content, it’s almost always because I think it really does matter, and sometimes it does. Like a person being asked why they can’t manage to keep a job might bring up racism, if there’s discrimination and a belief out there that people of their race are the wrong people to give those kinds of jobs to. That doesn’t automatically mean that they’re right, or that you have to agree with them about everything, but it isn’t irrelevant.”
“In here, we want you to focus on you”, Dr. Barnes counters. “You can’t go out and fix the world and solve its problems when you haven’t dealt with the mess in your own life.”
“My own life isn’t just me by myself. When someone asks me to describe how things are for me, they mean my situation. Me in a context, me in an environment, with other people and what they expect and how I deal with them — which might be badly, it might be stuff I need to work on, but that’s social and political right there, the expectations and the roles and how things are set up.”
“I think Derek is intellectualizing again, don’t you?”, Barnes responds.
“If I am”, I retort, “I’m doing so relevantly, and calling it intellectualizing doesn’t make it wrong. Or defensive, or avoiding or whatever.”
“I think you’re just afraid to confront your own worst enemy, because unfortunately he isn’t out there with expectations and roles, he’s right there where you are.”
“And I think you and your staff like to ask us where we’re at, and I’ll give an answer like ‘I am a male nursing student on a medical floor in Athens Georgia’ and you’ll say, ‘No, don’t talk about that outside stuff, we want to know where you are at’, so I’ll say ‘I am a lonely shy stubborn sissy person trying to cope with a world I find strange’, and you say, ‘No, don’t talk about the strange world and how you’re different or special, we want to know where you are at’... so I’m reduced to saying ‘Well, I’m directly above the center of the earth, with my head in the air and my feet on the ground’. Even that includes context. The only me that there is is in a context. It’s the only where that I’ve got to offer you, and that’s where I’m at!”
“Derek...you think you know everything and have nothing to learn from anybody, because you’re used to spewing that intellectual nonsense and having everyone accept it and ignore that it doesn’t make any sense.” Dr. Barnes pauses to spread his arms, as if to gather and embrace the room. “You need to learn when you aren’t the expert. You are in Elk Meadow Clinical Retreat, which is a state-of-the-art recovery and rehabilitation facility, and I have advanced degrees and the advantages of years of practice. You aren’t the first person to come in here and try to snow us with a stream of pseudo-educated word soup.
“Now I suggest you listen to the people in this room. Many of us are experts at this, and others are your own colleagues and fellow sufferers, and yet you’d rather stuff your fingers in your ears. You haven’t solved your problems so far, so, since you’ve opted to be here, why don’t you let us take a crack at it? You know, I have an international reputation for the work I’ve done in my field, and people come from all over to listen to my lectures. Or to apply to be in this facility. We save people here. Let us help you.”
I shake my head, disappointed that Barnes isn’t actually listening to me. Guess he just likes to adopt a pose that comes across as thoughtful and sincere. I tell him, “I’m here to listen and consider what you and anyone else here has to say, but the name of my treatment team leader is Derek Turner. The final decisions about what’s in my best interests, therapeutic or otherwise, are mine. I can’t take responsibility for my life if I don’t have authority over it, because responsibility and authority are two words for the same thing.”
“Oh, listen to...”
“You’re!!” — I actually manage to cut him off — “used to controlling people in here with reward and punishment. You’ve learned how to isolate us so that the only sources of approval or disapproval are people who are all afraid to express anything that you haven’t ratified. Your tiers of privilege are all about residents proving that they can be an obedient part of Dr. Barnes’ echo chamber. Anyone who doesn’t echo doesn’t advance to the higher levels. It’s how dogs and rats are trained, with rewards and withholding of rewards and penalties and so on. Well guess what? I do need approval and acceptance eventually, from someone, but I don’t need it today, and I don’t need it from you. Or from anyone else whose strings you’re pulling.”
After that, there comes a long queue of people, primarily but not limited to staffers, taking their turns describing all of what I’d just said as a continuation of my stubborn denial of my own issues, and a typical example of me intellectualizing.
I listen patiently and smile a lot and reply seldom, occasionally stating that I’ll give what they just said all the attention that it deserves.
I do see a few people sitting more quietly and looking thoughtful. I might be making sense to someone.
* * *
After group, I walk past Dr. Barnes’ office door and read the black nameplate on his door. “Dr. James F. Barnes, M.D., Pc.”
Then I go into my room, take out a sheet of typing paper and a standard black ink pen and write “Derek S. Turner, H.B., Pt.” in hollow outlined letters, and fill in all around outside the letter borders with the black ink to the approximate dimensions of a nameplate. I then cut out that black rectangle with its white letters and carefully tape it to the door below my “cram” posters.
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I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
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Index of all Blog Posts
Today’s AA meeting revolves around the first of the twelve steps, “admitting that we are powerless over alcohol.” Gary Stevens wants to define my disinclination to make such an admission as a case of me being in denial about it. This was predictable. If I’m surprised about anything it’s that they’re only starting in with me about it now.
I’m glad I got Mark Raybourne for individual counseling and not Gary; Mark certainly has his shortcomings but Gary annoys me more. I think he does it on purpose, in fact: irritating the clientele as a method of prompting them to change their position or behavior. Gary has light brown hair and a beak of a nose; he’s strutting around in an unbuttoned dress shirt like a rooster: behold, I have a chest!
“Wake up and smell the coffee”, Gary tells me. “We’ve all been right where you’re at, saying we don’t see ourselves as alcoholics, don’t hear what people are telling us about our drinking, and refusing to say it. Just like the three monkeys, you know? See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. But you know that’s not gonna fly here.”
“I understand why this is the first step for an alcoholic coming to terms with their drinking problem”, I reply. “You can’t address a problem until you can acknowledge that you’ve got it. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who doesn’t acknowledge having such a problem is actually someone who does, but who hasn’t yet made that first step.”
“Talk plainly”, Gary Stevens urges me. “Don’t be playing word games with us here.”
“I thought I was being plain. Let’s try again, shall we? All alcoholics who don’t recognize that they’re alcoholics are in denial. But not all people who don’t consider themselves alcoholics are alcoholics in denial.”
“Are you talking about yourself?”
“I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’m talking in the abstract.”
“Well don’t talk in the abstract. Talk about yourself.”
“Hi, I’m Derek, and I’m not an alcoholic.” Pause. “This is where you all say ‘Hello, Derek’; that was your cue. I have never experienced myself as powerless over alcohol because I haven’t made an effort to quit drinking and then failed to do so. I haven’t made any effort to modify my alcohol consumption behaviors. You’re welcome to make the case that I should, but you don’t even know what they are yet. It’s not currently a concern of mine, though, and you don’t get to define my concerns. If I had decided that I should modify my drinking habits, and then found that I couldn’t, then it would make sense to consider that I was powerless over alcohol.”
“You’re very clever”, Emily pronounces, “but you’re pointing out something that we’ve all heard and most of us have said, and it doesn’t mean your drinking isn’t a problem.”
Party line. Just on the verge of exaggeration. I still can’t tell if she’s into this or if she’s making fun of them.
* * *
“All right”, I tell my psychodrama group, “Here’s the scene I came up with. I’ll need one person to play my dad and one to be my mom. I’m going to propose that y’all buy me a piano, since you’ve spent a lot more than that sending me to college and other schools which didn’t work out, and I think this might work out. And you argue that I’m being self-centered and irresponsible to think you owe me that after you’ve wasted so much money sending me to college and other schools and it didn’t work out. And then I’ll say I could have a career as a musician and you say that’s not practical and it’s just a hobby, and we can probably improvise from there.”
“Oh, that sounds good”, Marie says, clapping her hands. “Yeah, so a little bit about what your parents are like. Is he loud? Is he one of those ‘my way or the highway’ dads? Your mom, is she going to be worried you’re making a mistake?”
“She’s worried and hurt, for sure, but also the one more likely to make an absolute statement right off the bat. He’s all about showing he’s really listening and really cares, as long as I eventually accept his conclusions. No yelling. If they can make me yell, then I lose for acting immature. We’re southern, but we kind of act like yankees from those black and white movies from the fifties. No one gets to yell or stomp feet when we argue.”
Jeremy makes a deep appreciative nod. “Oh, that tells me a lot about you. Yeah, I can see that, that perfectly fits you. All right, Ronald, you want to take a go at being Derek’s dad? Noelle, you up for playing the mom?”
As typical of psychodrama, after running the scenario, I, as “director”, coach Noelle and Ronald towards some modifications in how they portray my folks; Marie and Jeremy and the other participating patients all make comments and suggestions. I am shooting for more accuracy; they, of course, are seeing what’s hitting my buttons and evoking a response from me playing myself, and trying to flush more of that out. Then we run it again with the changes.
After that comes the feedback section —
“I gotta say, I have to side with your folks”, Jake says. “I mean, it’s their money and you don’t get to tell them how to spend it. It’s like if I buy you a Christmas present. You can’t say ‘No, you have to get me this instead’, right?”
“Well, I agree with that”, I reply. “I’m an adult. I don’t seem to be very good at it, but I’m past the age of being entitled to support from them. So it’s not that they owe me. But it’s very frustrating that when it was their idea they were all for paying for me to get a future, and I tried their idea; but it didn’t work out. So I see a direction I want to try, I think I can write music and play it on the piano and sing, and a piano is a lot cheaper than a college tuition. But that they won’t pay for.”
“So you do think they owe you”, April says. “You’re saying since they paid for college they owe you a piano. You know, dude, that doesn’t make a whole lotta sense.”
I need to pause and run that through a few times. I know it looks like April’s got me quite stuck, but never mind that. I’m occasionally making ‘please wait’ gestures to them all. Finally —
“It’s really not about them owing me, but how it feels, the emotional side, is a lot the same as that of being owed something. Something like ‘I wanted something better out of this, and I expected better from you’. I’m disappointed in them. Oh, and it’s mutual. What I get from them is ‘We’re so disappointed, we had such high hopes’. I’m owed something more abstract than a piano. They feel like they’re owed something too.”
“Okay, I hear you”, April answers. And other people in the room are exchanging the kind of glance I associate with Whoa, Derek just made sense. I often don’t, to people, but I do land one occasionally.
“Derek”, Marie suggests, “I want you to say something to your parents here. Take some time, but say what you’d actually say to them if you had them here to listen.”
Following Marie’s advice, I do take a moment to assemble my thoughts into words. Then —
“You get worried and disappointed whenever these plans for my future don’t work out, so having a plan that works is very important to you. And you want me to take it seriously, so that, ideally, having one that works is very important to me, too. But you mostly haven’t included me in the planning before the ‘pick from these options’ stage. The one major exception was me saying I wanted to learn auto mechanics at vo-tech instead of going to college, and that’s the one course of study I finished successfully. The jobs I could find weren’t enough to let me move out on my own, but it wasn’t a failed career yet and still you pitched to me to go back and try college again, that was your idea...
“Sorry”, I interrupt myself, “ I’ve gone off on a tangent. I want to go back to the being worried and disappointed thing. That’s really what I want to talk about. I’m doing my most focused thinking about what I actually should be doing with myself, I’m taking it very seriously. And you addressing me like I’m irresponsible and unconcerned about my future is getting to be annoying. Not everything that hasn’t worked out pleasantly in my life is my fault. That doesn’t necessarily make it somebody else’s fault, but it’s still true.”
* * *
There was that moment in the psychodrama when I’d had that feeling of connection to the roomful of people I was speaking to. When I say making sense, I don’t mean “Hello, my name is Derek” or “Well, if you want to get on Interstate 40, take Interstate 25 south until you get to Albuquerque”, those things make sense, but they’re not new thoughts, they’re familiar patterns; I’m really talking about expressing something that they’ve never heard put into words before, but talking about everyday familiar life and its aspects, so there’s both a spark of surprise and a spark of recognition.
I have a lot of stuff I want to talk about that I think could hit people that way. Comedians do that. Tickling that spark of recognition, you know? I’m all serious and pompously full of intentions and I wouldn’t make a good comedian, but I want to hit people that way too. I came here hoping to sharpen this, so show me how to reach people in such a way that I can make that happen more often.
You want to know what I want to do with my life, Daddy, Mama? I want to be a political social activist. I want to start a movement. But I don’t know how.
Because a lot of the time when I try to talk to people about this stuff, those sparks don’t happen. People think I’m trying to be interesting to make myself popular. Some of them think I’m trying to be interesting and failing rather badly at it. Others assume I want to prompt a debate, and the ideas are just startup fodder to fuel a good debate. And a whole lot of people just think I don’t make any sense.
So yes...I had a good experience in psychodrama. I felt heard, but I also got challenged, I mean a legitimate challenge to my own way of looking at something personal. For all that Elk Meadow is frustrating, I could actually get something real out of this, something that I need.
I walk to the short hall with the little piano and sit down. The bench creaks. Piano is a Yamaha, a popular practice-room spinet, glossy black, straight lines, functional. I take out a pen and some scratch paper — the back side of someone’s discarded Elk Meadow schedule filched from the trash can — and shake the pen vigorously to get it to flow more evenly. An hour later I have four verses and a piano part for a new song called “Waves.” It’s specifically about being here, and the challenge to stay vulnerable enough to get something out of it while simultaneously being tough enough to engage with it and not be controlled by the people who like to push other folks’ buttons a little more than they should.
Another half-hour later, I’m singing it and playing it and totally getting into it. It’s got passion and fragility, intensity belted out on the high notes in places and in other spots the piano ringing a suspended chord and the voice part shimmery and delicate on top of it. I picked well when I chose the key of A major, I sound damn good on those high E’s.
I once again get the sense that there is another person standing behind me. The way the hallway is set up, anyone from our unit walking past the piano comes from behind and to the right of it. So anyone coming to hear would come up from behind me.
Perhaps me becoming aware of her is expressed in some way that she picks up on; Ellen steps forward. Green and white cotton shirt, sash tied around the waist, arms loosely crossed. I pause, and she speaks. “You wrote a song about being in here.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“I thought you hated it here”, she says, glaring at me suspiciously.
“It’s complicated. I could get some good help here and really grow, but the stakes are high and they’re my stakes. I’m here for a consult and some help but I’m in charge. I’m not turning my mind or my life over to anyone else.”
“Everyone wants to take over mine. I mostly don’t let them but I fuck everything up when I’m in control.”
“Do they fuck things up for you any less when you do let them?”
“No. I just sometimes get tired of fighting, and fine, you steer, I don’t really care. It’s better in here.” With that, Ellen nods and walks back down the hall. It’s the least hostile she’s ever spoken to me.
I return to working on my new piece.
* * *
“What do we think of Derek’s growth and progress at this point?”, Irma asks the full community group. I am this evening’s subject matter because there were complaints about the “cram” posters still being on my door, and then other people (Jake, April, Noelle) actually rose to my defense, saying I was participating here in earnest and not just insulting everyone.
My counselor Mark is recognized and stands, looking contemplative. “Derek has reached some real important understandings, and I think we would all acknowledge that. His biggest barrier is that he intellectualizes and avoids his personal issues a lot of the time.”
Gary Stevens seconds all of that and adds, “He hides behind a lot of ten dollar words and ivory tower blather when he wants to avoid addressing things that others have brought to his attention.”
George is the first resident to speak. He states, “I think Derek is coming around, but he still, his first instinct is to bullshit, and he still goes with that a lot of the time.” George, a Black man probably in his upper twenties from the look of him, always seems a bit amused. I remember him saying the other day that maybe Ellen doesn’t like me because of my sexual orientation, spoken with the same sardonic smile.
Joanne’s take on me is, “I think Derek really likes to hold himself apart. He’s afraid of not being accepted so he holds back and says ‘I’m not really one of you’, and also I think he’s very unhappy with himself’.
Jeremy from psychodrama says, “Derek has a lot of courage, and he’s very smart. Some of what comes off as intellectualizing is him processing. I think he gets there eventually and sees what he needs to see, but like anyone, it’s hard going at first.”
Emily is recognized and states, “Derek distracts from his own issues by talking about social causes and politics. It’s a fancy way of saying everything is somebody else’s fault. That’s not him processing, that’s him refusing to process and I think we should call him on it more often.”
I have had the opportunity on previous occasions to see other residents put on the hot seat in community group. Ellen. Ronald. There seems to be a sort of script for how this goes: the mostly critical comments eventually make the targeted person angry in places where they feel like somebody has misrepresented how things are, and they start defending themselves, then they get piled on for being defensive and get pushed to admit they’re guarding themselves against the truth, after which there’s a sort of reconciliation and it gets called a growth moment.
I can look out of one cynical eyeball and one earnestly trusting one and see the same thing in stereoscopic vision: it isn’t good to respond until I’ve heard everything these people have to say and given it thoughtful consideration. There might be truth, partial or otherwise, in some of these observations. But it also makes sense to thwart the script and not rise to the bait and put a bunch of defensiveness on display.
There are a few more people who add their agreement to the notion that I intellectualize, and seconding what Emily had said about me invoking social and political situations when talking about my stuff, that doing that was a way of not dealing with my issues. I nod occasionally to show I’ve been listening.
It winds down. No one seems to have anything else to add.
Dr. Barnes asks, “Well, Derek, do you have any response to all this feedback? I know you have some thoughts to share with us.” Slow and deliberate, he sounds like he’s willing to listen to my side. His hands are open, palms upward, and he spreads them apart from each other in inquiry.
“I think...”, I begin, “... that for everyone, resistance to threatening ideas can take the form of clinging onto ways we’ve already got, ways we’re already comfortable thinking of those matters. And we shove information and experiences into those boxes even when they don’t really fit, to avoid dealing with them. For me, a lot of my familiar boxes are intellectual. I’m sorry if I come across sometimes like some stuffy stilted college professor who thinks he can learn life all from reading books. I don’t think that intellectual concepts are... you know, like ...something’s wrong with them automatically. It’s not that they’re intellectual and use a bunch of complex concepts and, how did Gary put it? ‘Ten dollar words’. That’s not what makes it defensive. It’s the act of not listening. Thinking that if I can put my thoughts into words better than you can, they must be better thoughts. That’s arrogance. And, to make it personal, thinking I’ve already heard what you’re saying before, so I don’t need to listen to all of it. I’ve caught myself doing that a lot. So have some of you, I guess, and you should keep on calling me on it. I’ll try to listen more.
“Now, the thing about bringing up social and political matters when I talk about myself... it’s one thing if somebody says ‘Don’t complain about my temper tantrums and missing work, that asshole Ronald Reagan got elected’, or ‘Why are you after me for my drinking and drug habits, what about the exploitation of South Africa?’, then yeah, that’s deflecting, and I agree it isn’t directly relevant, or not likely to be. But when I bring up political content, it’s almost always because I think it really does matter, and sometimes it does. Like a person being asked why they can’t manage to keep a job might bring up racism, if there’s discrimination and a belief out there that people of their race are the wrong people to give those kinds of jobs to. That doesn’t automatically mean that they’re right, or that you have to agree with them about everything, but it isn’t irrelevant.”
“In here, we want you to focus on you”, Dr. Barnes counters. “You can’t go out and fix the world and solve its problems when you haven’t dealt with the mess in your own life.”
“My own life isn’t just me by myself. When someone asks me to describe how things are for me, they mean my situation. Me in a context, me in an environment, with other people and what they expect and how I deal with them — which might be badly, it might be stuff I need to work on, but that’s social and political right there, the expectations and the roles and how things are set up.”
“I think Derek is intellectualizing again, don’t you?”, Barnes responds.
“If I am”, I retort, “I’m doing so relevantly, and calling it intellectualizing doesn’t make it wrong. Or defensive, or avoiding or whatever.”
“I think you’re just afraid to confront your own worst enemy, because unfortunately he isn’t out there with expectations and roles, he’s right there where you are.”
“And I think you and your staff like to ask us where we’re at, and I’ll give an answer like ‘I am a male nursing student on a medical floor in Athens Georgia’ and you’ll say, ‘No, don’t talk about that outside stuff, we want to know where you are at’, so I’ll say ‘I am a lonely shy stubborn sissy person trying to cope with a world I find strange’, and you say, ‘No, don’t talk about the strange world and how you’re different or special, we want to know where you are at’... so I’m reduced to saying ‘Well, I’m directly above the center of the earth, with my head in the air and my feet on the ground’. Even that includes context. The only me that there is is in a context. It’s the only where that I’ve got to offer you, and that’s where I’m at!”
“Derek...you think you know everything and have nothing to learn from anybody, because you’re used to spewing that intellectual nonsense and having everyone accept it and ignore that it doesn’t make any sense.” Dr. Barnes pauses to spread his arms, as if to gather and embrace the room. “You need to learn when you aren’t the expert. You are in Elk Meadow Clinical Retreat, which is a state-of-the-art recovery and rehabilitation facility, and I have advanced degrees and the advantages of years of practice. You aren’t the first person to come in here and try to snow us with a stream of pseudo-educated word soup.
“Now I suggest you listen to the people in this room. Many of us are experts at this, and others are your own colleagues and fellow sufferers, and yet you’d rather stuff your fingers in your ears. You haven’t solved your problems so far, so, since you’ve opted to be here, why don’t you let us take a crack at it? You know, I have an international reputation for the work I’ve done in my field, and people come from all over to listen to my lectures. Or to apply to be in this facility. We save people here. Let us help you.”
I shake my head, disappointed that Barnes isn’t actually listening to me. Guess he just likes to adopt a pose that comes across as thoughtful and sincere. I tell him, “I’m here to listen and consider what you and anyone else here has to say, but the name of my treatment team leader is Derek Turner. The final decisions about what’s in my best interests, therapeutic or otherwise, are mine. I can’t take responsibility for my life if I don’t have authority over it, because responsibility and authority are two words for the same thing.”
“Oh, listen to...”
“You’re!!” — I actually manage to cut him off — “used to controlling people in here with reward and punishment. You’ve learned how to isolate us so that the only sources of approval or disapproval are people who are all afraid to express anything that you haven’t ratified. Your tiers of privilege are all about residents proving that they can be an obedient part of Dr. Barnes’ echo chamber. Anyone who doesn’t echo doesn’t advance to the higher levels. It’s how dogs and rats are trained, with rewards and withholding of rewards and penalties and so on. Well guess what? I do need approval and acceptance eventually, from someone, but I don’t need it today, and I don’t need it from you. Or from anyone else whose strings you’re pulling.”
After that, there comes a long queue of people, primarily but not limited to staffers, taking their turns describing all of what I’d just said as a continuation of my stubborn denial of my own issues, and a typical example of me intellectualizing.
I listen patiently and smile a lot and reply seldom, occasionally stating that I’ll give what they just said all the attention that it deserves.
I do see a few people sitting more quietly and looking thoughtful. I might be making sense to someone.
* * *
After group, I walk past Dr. Barnes’ office door and read the black nameplate on his door. “Dr. James F. Barnes, M.D., Pc.”
Then I go into my room, take out a sheet of typing paper and a standard black ink pen and write “Derek S. Turner, H.B., Pt.” in hollow outlined letters, and fill in all around outside the letter borders with the black ink to the approximate dimensions of a nameplate. I then cut out that black rectangle with its white letters and carefully tape it to the door below my “cram” posters.
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I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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