#after god knows how many years of talking and deconstructing things about myself in therapy. things i don't say here because i can't.

[feluka]

the only child poll got to me

[dex-starr]

It’s been just a little close to six years that I knew you wow. Life is so different in so many ways but so much the same. I’ve learned so much from it all. I’ve learned the most about myself and I’m confident in who I am — you had a hand in it but you also had a hand in deconstructing it. I rebuilt that part on my own. I’ve grown so much, but I’ve also remained true to the person I think I have been. I think I have a good heart but just a fuckton of flaws and maybe I have way less flaws than I think I do. Life was sure at a different place when I met you and we were together and honestly I could not foresee things getting so fucking tough and being so tough for so long.

Resentment built up but I think the difference was whatever my resentment was the fact that you had to deal with such a shitty hand mentally. Like fuck dude, I still feel some kind of compassion your way because of that and think you’re just misguided and had it tough. That you did the best you could with what you had in front of you. Maybe I’m projecting that but I’d like to be an optimist. I’ve always been an optimist.

I know the major resentment was I didn’t know how to help you. I think our experiences with therapy have been vastly different from the little you did share with me. I’ve talked about tough topics, I’ve talked about you. I’ve talked about feeling alienated and not belonging but being good at faking it. But I’ve been told that it feels and seems like I am going in there with an extreme purpose and maybe I am. Maybe I did learn how to exist with this brain and I just needed to fine tune it. I still need to fine tune in with respect to relationships. But there’s also parts I need to fine tune when it comes to being on the ace spectrum with being demi and literally being officially autistic and adhd as fuck. There are things I do that I don’t get why it goes poorly but I want to understand. I think that was my goal with you. To find out why some things were going so poorly and to understand why — unfortunately a lot of those things were with myself too and I was in crisis mode. My health is much better than it has been. Save for a few issues here and there.

I’m getting better every day after my body fell apart on me. I have energy again it’s actually great the only thorn in my side is work and that’s because I’m missing my adhd meds. But everything else? God I have some semblance of control now and it’s fucking great. I just wish I knew what the next step was

[drawbauchery]

The Second Session

fic by cartoons-tothemoon

“So, let’s review, last session, we broke you down to many of your core traits and neuroses.”

“Thanks for reminding me, it’s not like I have the capacity to remember last week.” Skipper muttered.

“Well, now we’re here to build you back up, and work from that onwards.” Hans said. He had his hands folded plainly in his lap, and he’d changed the lighting in the office. Skipper hated it. He hated having to sit across from a smug as shit Hans as he waited calmly and quietly for Skipper to begin talking, with that terrible, blinding light that gave off a strangely clinical feel that makes him more uneasy than anything else. He wonders if Hans would let him sleep for the hour he was meant to spend here. Sure, he’d be paying $35 for a nap, which was crazy in of itself, but he knows from experience that sometimes all you need is a good nap to be a functioning person again.

“I’m not in the position to really diagnose you with anything, and even if I was, I’d still need more time to get to know your mind before I could really prescribe anything for your current conditions.”

“Conditions?”

“Plural. Like children trying to sneak into a cineplex in a trench coat, what was once one turned out to be two or more disorders standing on top of one another’s shoulders. Bouts of aggression and insomnia tied to intense paranoia, a complex that comes from being a leader, and a fear of depending on others. Abandonment issues, repression-“

Skipper waved his hands in a forceful sort of wave, “yes, thank you. Just tell me what to do about it already.”

“What?”

“Just fix me already.” Skipper seemed frustrated. “You���re the one who thinks I’m broken in the first place, the only reason I’m here in the first place is to prevent any future surprise tea parties.”

Hans sighed. They were barely even 5 minutes in, and Hans just knew he was going to be spending the rest of the session constructing arguments for statements Skipper constructed in seconds.

“If this was only to prevent any more…surprise visits from moi, then I would’ve been fine with just the first session. And I think you know that.”

He did. He did know that. Hans suggested the idea of a second session, and so did Skipper, in the way that you do when you’re bonding with people you have a rather hostile history with. No commitment was really stated, which left the ball in Skipper’s court, but what was he supposed to do after that thorough deconstruction, let it simmer in his soul for the rest of his known life?

He couldn’t even let it simmer for a whole week at this point, after all, he was already considering asking RICO of all people if he was too arrogant a leader and intentionally pushing people away.

RICO.

It made sense at the time, Kowalski would question where he was learning such jargon and be able to draw conclusions based on his recent absence, and Private would do nothing but validate him. Because he was just that nice, he supposed.

“Second, it’s not about being “broken” or “fixed” or what have you, the fact of the matter is that you have the most high-stress job in your already high-stress career. As much as I enjoyed our battles in the fish markets of Denmark, it’s not like the experience hasn’t done something to me, or you for that matter.”

Hans sighed, he was already just so exhausted by this…session. He’d even revealed that he too shared in mental health struggles if Skipper was willing to pick up the scraps left behind for him. Skipper looked a little surprised, sure, but fell back into an understood complacency sooner than later.

Was this the closest they were ever going to get to a true understanding of the other?

He supposed he’d have to take it.

“And lastly, I can’t tell you how to “fix” yourself. I’m a therapist, not a life coach. I’m not here to give advice, I’m here to examine your trauma, and give you a better perspective on how to move forward. However, I can’t take those steps for you. You kinda have to figure out a lot of those things on your own.”

Skipper looked positively moody about this, but less in a spoiled, petulant five-year-old sort of way, and more…accepting of it. He looked tired, and less because it was barely just a quarter past 1. It was an abstract tiredness, one not born of resting or restlessness, but a thing all its own.

Skipper sighed. “Then what am I supposed to do?”

“This is a timely process for a reason, Skipper. Many people can spend years in therapy trying to handle these exact issues.”

“I didn’t realize this was a life sentence in the making.” Skipper muttered.

God, this was already such a process. Hans could tell that Skipper couldn’t stand the vagueness of this all. He was an action guy, he wanted an easy solution of doing task A to accomplish thing B, and achieve reward C, and go on with his life.

No, not even an easy solution. A clear solution. Skipper was a problem solver. All of this was already so abstract, and he didn’t even know if he was so vehemently against this whole process just because it was him, or just because it was therapy at all. He even had a client who after a bad experience with a therapist in middle school decided to turn her sessions into stand-up, just because she was already so familiar and so bored with the process.

Maybe that’s what he needed to channel. Therapy in of itself was at the best of times uncomfortable and at the worst of times boring. He was already dealing with a high energy, high stress client, who was uncomfortable as all hell with being there. If he put him back into a comfortable situation, he may or may not get something out of him, and if he doesn’t, at the very least make him more comfortable with spending time with him at all, off the clock, at least.

“What do you like to do, Skipper? In your free-time?”

Skipper eyed him suspiciously. “Uh, why?”

“I’m trying something. Trust me here.”

That could’ve been phrased SO much better, from nemesis to nemesis, but Skipper seemed willing in the moment to run with that trust. “I like working on my combat capabilities, driving around, sometimes I watch TV and movies, I help Private bake when he feels like it, I nap, I gamble…”

Skipper seemed to be drawing a blank for whatever reason. Surely, he had things he did in his free time, right? It wasn’t like he was ALWAYS on the clock, he just never really thought of certain periods of time as…free. What even counted as free-time anyhow? Was it just time that wasn’t spent doing other things? Under that definition, no time was free.

“Can I say this to you as both a friend, an enemy, and somebody who’s known you for quite a few years at this point?”

Skipper nodded hesitantly.

“Jesus Christ, you need some hobbies.” Hans stated, matter of factly. “Working on your “combat capabilities,” as you put it, seems to be a literal constant considering your job as…however your job is defined, so it’s less play and more work than anything else. You mentioned helping Private bake “when he feels like it,” and I wouldn’t exactly call napping a hobby, or gambling a healthy one.”

Skipper shrugged. It’s not like “Stomp the Wombat” ever left the confines of the lair, anyhow.

“It just feels like you don’t have a lot of things you do just for yourself, you know? Driving around and watching TV are the only hobbies that feel wholly your own, something you don’t do for work or for others. Keep in mind that you can keep doing these things you enjoy, but perhaps you should find other things for yourself. Like an instrument, or a cooking class.”

“I told the boys that I joined a bowling league just to be here.”

“And did that seem believable enough for you to do to be here?”

His silence told Hans everything, but not the literal everything of Skipper “going to bed” at 8 just to climb through his window at 12:30, shimmy down the fire escape, and walk to Hans’s office.

But he probably could tell anyhow.

Of course, this kind of put a blight on Hans’s plans to make Skipper more comfortable while being here, and as he told him such, Skipper proceeded to lay down on the couch. Hans couldn’t tell the exact reason for the action, but it did seem to be a point of exasperation for him.

“Well, damn, sorry I “foiled your plot” to make myself comfortable in the den of the beast.”

“Skipper, you insult me. You really think I’d decorate my den with wooden sailboats? Absolutely criminal.”

“You seem to forget that.” He muttered. Hans ignored it.

“Although the hobby talk didn’t exactly lead where I thought it could…It did lead me elsewhere.”

“Goddamn it.”

“What skill have you always wanted to learn? What’s something that you’ve wanted to try for just, so long, and never got the chance to?”

Skipper began to pick at his lip. This whole talk already made him nervous, but now what was he supposed to say? That he figured he’d be in the back of a truck with is hand hanging out the taillight since he was 14, for whatever reason, so he didn’t even bother considering his top 3 colleges, let alone any future ambitions?

Still, if he was quiet for too long, either Hans would judge him, or he’d render his lips a bloody mess, and that’d be a whole different thing to deal with.

“…Archery sounds fun.” He said. Hans nodded.

“That’s interesting. It’s closely related to your pre-established interests but it’s closer to a sport now than something to be used in an actual combat situation, which sort of allows it to be separated from your work.”

Skipper nodded as well, allowing Hans to believe that that was his thought process from the start, and more of just curious to see if he could shoot a flame off a candle like Annie Oakley.

“You mentioned you liked baking with Private. Do you like the idea of baking itself, or just doing it with another person?”

“Food is meant to be shared?” Skipper seemed to be asking, but also stated in a very definitive way. “It’s a process. It’d be weird not to help in the process.”

Hans pulled his hand away from Skipper’s mouth, where a few small cuts were beginning to form. “If you’d like to have a session where we did a low-stress activity you wanted to do, and we talked while doing so, I think it’d put you in the best conductive environment possible to actually combat the problems that seem so visible to me. This was a good first development, though. I just don’t know if I can expect on accidental issues to identify and attack every time.”

Hans sighed and got up from his chair to stare out the window. Skipper didn’t know why he did this, outside of being a dramatic bitch, but it got him to look anyhow.

“It’s so incidental, many people struggle with balancing work and life as is, but this could easily be one of the main causes of your paranoia, as well as causing a level of detachment and depersonalization, which relates to how you relate to others.”

And well, damn. What was Skipper supposed to say to that?

“Our time’s almost up.” Hans said, checking his watch. Skipper was coming to realize how strange time in therapy was. It simultaneously felt like hours and seconds passing all at once. Perhaps it was because there were no clocks, like a casino. Or maybe it was because going to therapy at 1 in the morning didn’t exactly give you a sun to follow in terms of time. Hans handed Skipper a weird sort of rack with string on it, along with some tissues.

“It’s a loom. Fidget with something that won’t bleed for the next five minutes, if you would.”

Skipper glared at him for the snide comment, but Skipper didn’t exactly put it back where Hans had stored it originally. Picking at the strings inanely didn’t feel as satisfying as his usual fidgets, but it would work until he lost focus and the skin had time to heal.

“I’m giving you three assignments until our next session.” Skipper would’ve originally rolled his eyes at the idea of homework, but there was something that felt already strange about this session. Last session, he was so thoroughly antagonized and owned in such a way that his entire psychological history had been exposed, but this made last session feel like…a misstep. It was almost like Hans was trying to give the rug back to Skipper after it had already been so unceremoniously swept away from him.

He seemed as unsure about this as he was, he even confided about the state of his own mental health, something he probably wasn’t supposed to do. Which, honestly, made Skipper feel better about the whole thing. He didn’t like being guided, and as much as he detested having to do this whole thing with Hans in particular, the idea of having to figure out a stranger at the same time they were trying to figure out him sounded like a nightmare. More than this already was.

The whole session felt off, sure, but it wasn’t as off as it could’ve been, and he knows it could only be worse.

“I want you to begin researching archery, if you really want to pursue it as a hobby, you should try to learn what you can about it before jumping in and figuring out it isn’t what you thought it was.”

“I want you to pay a compliment to each of your team members in a casual way, this’ll strengthen your bonds with them, in a way that allows you to affirm that you appreciate them, as much as they appreciate you.”

Okay, that sounded like hippie nonsense, but who was he to judge at this point.

“And finally, I want you to pick out a recipe to prepare during our next session.”

“Wait, what?”

“A recipe. Something that’ll take less than an hour. I have a friend who’d give me access to their kitchen in the middle of the night, so we’ll be on neutral ground, and I’m sure it’ll be more believable to your “boys” that if you really are doing something in the middle of the night, that you have physical proof of it. Considering how weirdly secretive you are already, the idea you covered up secret cooking lessons with a bowling league doesn’t sound too far-fetched.” Hans was muttering at this point. All these things answered questions he figured he’d have, but nothing that helped with where he was NOW.

“I know it’s a weird idea, but the clients who have had the chance to do different, vaguely active things during our sessions tend to be more open and honest with me about things that they’re worried about, things that they struggle with, and they can make for more engaging sessions where you actually take in what I’m telling you, and makes it less of a lecture.” Hans sighed. “If you hate it, we never have to try anything like that again, but, I do really want you to give it a try. This is a two-way street, I can only give as much as I myself get. I just got lucky this week.”

Skipper stopped strumming the loom.

“Text me the address.” He said, and Hans would have burst with joy if such a thing was appropriate in present company, until he realized.

“I…don’t have your number?”

“Oh, no, session’s over! Wow, how did the time fly? Guess you’ll just have to figure that out for yourself, what a swell talk we had, doc,” Skipper yelled as he headed out the door.

“Pay at the front desk!” Hans yelled back before relaxing into his chair. Skipper was never going to be an easy client to deal with. Maybe he wouldn’t ALWAYS dance around the issues at hand, but he was never going to REALLY come clean about it. There may be things they never talk about, the same way Hans did.

And that was fine. Maybe it made what little he did learn all the more rewarding. Maybe it made what little he learned all the more meaningless if Skipper ever reached a point of complete and utter honesty with him, a fantasy he knew would never see come to light.

But who was to say, really?

It was all a matter of time.

After all, this was only the second session.

(Ahh! I can’t believe I didn’t post another fic for a whole! Month! I think it’s just because I didn’t really know what to do for the second session, and I think you can kinda tell, considering it’s not like Hans knows what to do either. Do you guys really want a whole fic series about Skipper going to therapy? I have no idea. It’s pretty fun, though. I don’t know how Hans became a therapist, either, but I guess that’s just what the dude does now. By the way, the client who turned her therapy sessions into stand-up comedy? That was just me in high school with my mandated therapist. I once gave a funeral to a squeaky toy I broke in the middle of the session. It was simultaneously so sad and so funny at the exact same time.

This fic will be up on my ao3, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tadstrangerthings, as soon as @drawbauchery posts it!)

[penderworth]

The (first of more, probably) religious trauma entry

For a very, very long time, I’ve been putting off writing or talking about this, let alone remembering it. Because as much as I love nostalgia, I hate remembering things. Why should I? They’re gone. Remembering them sounds like an unproductive way to spend time. No wonder I have such a hard time with therapy: There’s a lot of remembering things in therapy, and my dad’s voice is what said that last sentence, not mine. But we’ll get to that.

My struggle to find belonging the past few years makes complete sense in the context of my church experience. It’s a very common one, in fact, for anyone who leaves church. I hear about it often, like earlier today on The Sunday Thing. I mostly left the church when I turned 21, but all this started way before that, when I was 14 or so and Church on the Mountain split. Friends and all the other younger people started going to Lighthouse, where they had night services and it was edgy. Charismatic! They had flags! Fuck flags, man.

Originally though, when the church split, I stayed at COTM because it was tough to get up to Mammoth. Then the youth group moved up there as well, so I started getting rides from friends. And slowly, unconsciously, to their disappointment, I drifted away from the religion of my parents. But it’s okay, the new church had flags! Only for a little bit, though, then the old church got some again too. The ouroboros of church trends.

The new church also had dancing, louder music, and all the other things one finds when they Google for “charismatic church”. We just lacked Benny Hinn, Sith supreme. Fascinatingly, though, in the past few years, I find myself drawn to many of the things I spoke against in the church. But was it ever me speaking? No. It was the judgement of my parents, carried on habitually, as all family opinions are. The genes of one’s ancestors must not just make up our bodies; why not encode some opinions, traumas, and other chaos in there as well, triggering it at just the right moments? But worry not: You can avoid all this by continuing to play the game of your parents’ child.

Back to the dancing. The only relationship I’d ever had to it was that one time I asked Kristen out at a wedding, hosted at our second house in Mammoth. But wait, let’s deconstruct that real quick. Why did I ask her to dance? Someone told me to. Either my parents or my peers, probably the former. Someone said that asking a woman to dance is the key to her heart. And my adolescent mind immediately said “Yes, please, the key to those boobs! I mean, oh wait, heart. Yes. We must get married first, then the boobs shall be available.” And even the very young me sought much success in the world, so pursued what he wanted.

Then other ideas floated into my relationship with dancing. “Men only do that at weddings.” “Well, see, that makes you gay...” “Oh that’s just something they did in the 60s.” “I don’t know man, I think you might suck at it. I mean, do you even have hips?” So when Lighthouse introduced this new physical experience of church, I repeated what I’d heard my parents say, in the way one does when they’re afraid of the other: “This is getting a little weird.” To which a child for whom the world is entirely made up of wonder and mystery should reply, “Yeah! And let’s try it out.” But that child was dying. His parents and culture had killed him with their occupations, marriages, gods, and ideas. So many ideas.

Of course at this point, dancing wasn’t enough, so they added extensions to their appendages by gathering sticks with thin, colorful fabric attached, that flowed weightlessly as they spun them around, praising God. For some reason, though, if gay people wanted to celebrate a part of themselves in the same manner, that was different. And if we asked why, it was complicated.

I grew disillusioned and judgmental with all of this. Part of me – the one who was becoming someone – wanted to belong here, to be a crucial part of this community. That’s why I would plant roots, serve on their teams, play on the worship team. I wanted them to see that I wanted to be there, that I was dedicated, that I wouldn’t leave. I was seldom returned this effort. Church seems to attract many wounded souls who also don’t know how to love, hence the desire for an unconditionally loving God. I mean it’s in the marketing, right? Makes sense.

So part of me wanted to belong there. But the parental voices within said something different: This scares me, this is weird, make it go away, I don’t want to talk about how I feel. Because that last one is really it, isn’t it? You don’t want to talk about your feelings. Even you, mother. You, who feel so deeply in moments I can’t, yet freeze in many of the ones that matter to me. And that is how behavior and habits pass down to one’s children. I like to imagine we do that to our children because there are many problems in our lives that we just won’t get the chance to solve before we die, and they demand to be worked out. So we procreate to create new chances for these issues to be resolved. We’re dedicated coders staying on top of our repo.

Of course at this point, I do wonder where we are going if this is indeed the course of the universe. What would become of us if all our issues were to be resolved? A question for another time.

I remember the first time I went to Lighthouse, at their older location. I felt cool. There was such potential in this new place. It was NEW. Sparkly. They had a cool sound system, lots of drums, and a hip worship leader. This seemed like progress. I’d learn new songs, meet bandmates, find myself playing the House of Blues one day. The dream! Also there were new girls I hadn’t met before. The girl who’d rejected me previously was behind me – this was a new slate, the first of many in my life where I could recreate who Jacob was, until I eventually lost him entirely.

For someone who was homeschooled, all this was exactly what I needed. I got to meet other people my age twice a week now: Youth group on Thursday and church on Sunday. I’m sure none of my passion was driven by the sexual urges of an adolescent. No, I would never have such thoughts during my special singing and praying time with God; who, by the way, I did not understand, but was told C.S. Lewis would explain to me one day when I’m older. And all this time, they thought I wouldn’t come back one day to bite them with a joke, like the serpent who didn’t get to taste that juicy apple.

There was one other time I saw other people my age: Swim team. But I never wanted to be there. Not like I wanted to be at a mini rock concert, singing loudly and pretending to have spiritual experiences, sometimes playing on the stage myself. I was also pumped up on all the Dr. Pepper and Mambas I could buy with my allowance. If the church and educational systems focused more on embodiment, I may have made better choices. Or maybe I would have rebelled and eaten even more sugar – who’s to say.

What’s unfortunate is I never truly felt at home at Lighthouse, because there was a war going on inside me the whole time. My family was telling me it was bad, sinful, even evil and “demonic” at times. They believed more in the God than the Holy Spirit part of the trinity, and rarely talked of the Son, Yeshua. But another part of me was just happy to be among peers; my parents’ church was mostly old people who never seemed to be listening to me when we had conversations. Eventually I left Lighthouse because I moved. The first of many moves.

In examining my experiences finding community since then, they’ve slowly declined into what is currently an absence of it. My most recent sustained experience of community was in Isla Vista. Everything fell into place for me to move there. It felt like where I was supposed to be – I took it as a sign from God, because it happened so seamlessly, unlike other life transitions I'd forced.

I had incredible housemates that first year in 2014, each of whom challenged me in more ways than any of my classes ever could – I’ve always been more fascinated with relationship and the human condition than I was with any subjects. One of the most memorable things of that first year was the beginning of a more substantial deconstruction for me. Getting into deep, circular, and unreasonable arguments with my housemate Tarra would leave me cursing God, quietly and ashamedly, for how he had failed to show her what love truly looks like within the heart. Love isn't trying to convert someone to your beliefs, which felt more like someone trying to prove to themselves that what they believed was good for them by marketing it to other people as such.

At this point, I still listened to my heart. I still felt it often. When I passed a homeless person on the street, I felt the pangs of their hunger, loneliness, and disconnection from the rest of us. But I was told that’s not what we do when we see a homeless person, so I had to block that feeling to prevent myself from becoming overwhelmed, especially after moving to a larger city. This became a habit for me: Assimilating the emotional and behavioral patterns of the people around me, often without a second thought. I still had a critic within me who challenged things, but most of its energy was spent at AppStorm, finding flaws in the creations of others. Because that’s the role of a critic, I was told: To be an asshole.

Toward the second half of 2014, my faith in this God began to shake until it shattered. Breakups with another person are terrible, but try breaking up with the morals, community, and afterlife package you were given upon your arrival in this world. That fucking sucks. No one likes it. Which is why it took me years, from ages 20 to 24 to finally file for divorce with my church, my God, and my afterlife insurance plan, as Pete Holmes would say. And after all the sex I’d had while traveling, it felt freeing for a bit – maybe I hadn't greatly sinned after all, maybe I could listen to my body. But breaking up with someone usually guarantees their voice will return to haunt you for a while. And this was a 24-year relationship, so there’s a bit of history.

The wonder of that child I mentioned earlier has, at this point, really begun to disappear. I see glimpses of it some days. If he were a roaring fire at the start, he’s now a barely glowing ember. The optimism of even the 22-year-old self has been replaced with a stagnant disinterest in what life could possibly have that won't lead to more unnecessary suffering. And without people to win over, he’s unsure that he’ll ever be able to procreate, to pass at least a few of his problems on to the next great programmer who starts a branch on this vast repo. Plus the fear of all the things above, as well as those of his ancestors, and the shame of being white, having a job, and living what most would call a really great life, haunt him daily. Without the balancing optimism of others in his life, he feels as if he’ll collapse under the weight of all this. It truly is too much for one person to bear, yet in the words of Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.

So he’ll run off now, to find some alternate realities in his dreams, where things are different. Perhaps those dreams are a future of this very timeline.

[pornosophical]

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by theory, well-fed complacent leather-coated, dragging themselves through the Caucasian campuses at dawn looking for an angry signifier.   The voices dissolved into the warm pre-dawn darkness as I watched vomit drip between the ferns and fallen leaves. Muttering consolations, my friend held my elbow. Only moments before we had been making impassioned if sloshy love in my single bed, while my 21st birthday party raged outside. Now I was hurling what seemed like a infinite fount of bile into the bushes behind my little room.   As my friend led me to bed, I thought: You really are 21 now. You got horribly drunk, dragged a guy to bed, and then got sick. Just like a made-for-TV movie. These thoughts were accompanied by an odd, abstracted rapture I have come to take for granted. For want of a better term, I'll call it the rapture of irony.   Halfway to my bed, I must have laughed out loud, because my friend asked, "What are you thinking about?"   "The narrative," was all I could manage. I wanted him to know that even in this humiliated, impaired state, I was fully cognizant of the mind boggling paradox of the situation. I may have been a walking cliché but at least I was self-conscious.

Carol Lloyd, I Was Michel Foucault’s Love Slave

As I drifted off into a tangle of dehydrated nightmares, I comforted myself with the thought that Theory had suffused my life so thoroughly that I couldn't get laid, get drunk and get sick without paying homage to Roland Barthes' notion of the "artifice of realism" or Baudrillard's "simulacra." Though now I live a practical life, with more actions and fewer theories, I still struggle with the convoluted mind-set of my higher education. Even after years of trying to acclimate myself to a more concrete world, this odd theology lives in me so much so that it is only recently that I have recognized it for what it is: a religious doctrine.

I am a child of Theory. I avoided this truth because I didn't want to confront the deep, strange river of pretentiousness that courses in my veins. But lately I've begun to think my predicament is less reflective of a private eccentricity than of a weird historical moment. The moment when the most arcane, elitist mental gymnastics Theory in all its hybrid forms was reborn as sexy, politically radical action. The moment when well-meaning liberal intellectuals who a decade before had dedicated themselves to activism, volunteerism and building social programs turned inward, tending to their private experiential gardens with obsessive diligence. Theory offered intellectuals the same escape from the public world that self-help and therapy offered the masses. But unlike self-help and therapy, which never claimed to be anything but psycho-spiritual Darwinism, Theory draped itself in revolutionary verbiage and pretended to be a political movement. For those of us who got liberal educations in the wake of this shift, being radical meant little more than voting when it was convenient, reading the newspaper and thinking about doing charity work. The only thing that separated us from the ignorant masses was our intellectual opinions, which we shrouded in baroque revolutionary rhetoric. The "tyranny of grammar," the "subversion of sexual mores in extinct Native American tribes," and the "colonialism of the novel" these were our mantles of honor.   Though I always believed that my upbringing was free of ideological trappings, I now see that the seed was planted long before I reached college. My eldest brother was a political activist in his teens, but with the onslaught of the '80s he threw away his ideals and pursued the good life: drinking from the corporate tit as an organizational consultant. After two years in Africa as Peace Corps volunteers, my parents shed their activist habits, moving to a resort town with the intention of getting rich building houses for retired millionaires. Aside from the little holes punched in their secret ballots and token checks made out to various nonprofit organizations, politically my family acted no differently than our blue-blood, conservative neighbors. They pursued the free market with a vengeance, bought as many nice things as possible and hobnobbed at the tennis club. But they still talked like the lefties they once had been. And how they talked.   At dinner we served up steaming topical cauldrons of death, child rearing, art and gender, then skewered them whole. We asked unanswerable questions and then imperiously proceeded to invent the answers. We had no interest in facts. Facts were just things you made up to win arguments. Once I brought home a boyfriend whose old-fashioned education and conservative family had taught him none of the liberal preference for ideas over facts. When the dinner conversation turned toward his hobby of California history and he began to speak in facts, my family paused to stare at him like he was sporting antennae. My mother hemmed; my father hawed; my brothers began to babble invented statistics. Through my family I learned to love ideas "for their own sake," which made me a kind of idiot savant (with emphasis on the idiot) and a prime victim for the God of Theory.   In 1978 my high school history teacher, a Harvard-educated, Jewish-turned-Catholic New Yorker, promised to give "extra credit" to anyone who read and did a book report on Paul de Man's "Blindness and Insight." (Though later exposed as a Nazi sympathizer, at that moment de Man still carried the mantle of "subversive" in the hippest sense.) Dutifully, I read every page understanding it the way a little boy understands the gurgles of his toad. I had no idea what it meant but the densely knotted language of ideas made my head implode and my body sing. For the rest of my high school years I would only have to read a paragraph or two of deconstruction's steamy prose to have a literary orgasm.   In his recent disavowal of literary criticism in Lingua Franca, Frank Lentricchia confesses that his "silent encounters with literature are ravishingly pleasurable, like erotic transport." My experiences with Theory were equally exalted delivering me into a paroxysm of overdetermined signs. In the blurry vertigo of those pages so full of incomprehensible printed matter I felt myself in the presence of a God: the God of complex questions, the God of language's mysteries, the God of meaning severed from the painful and demanding particularity of experience. In abstractions, I found absolution from a world in which I was utterly unprepared for any real responsibility or sacrifice. By surrendering myself to Theory, "reality" became a blank screen upon which I projected my political fantasies. My feelings of responsibility to a world that I had once recognized as both unjust and astoundingly concrete, slowly and painlessly seeped out of me until all that remained was the "consciousness" of the "complexity" of any "serious issue." I didn't need to fix anything, utterance was all, and all I needed were the words long and tentacled enough to entrap meaning for a slippery, textual moment.   Like any religion, Theory provided perks to the pious. In my freshman year, I took an upper-division class on the 17th century English novel. The books were long and difficult but I secured my standing in the class when I responded to the teacher's mention of deconstructive theory. "Yes, each idea undermines itself," I parroted, channeling the memory of my sophomore extra credit report. "Paul de Man says..." With that bit of arcane spittle, I hit pay dirt. The teacher gave me such a hyperbolic recommendation, I was able to transfer to a better school. Once there, I evaded undergraduate classes with their demanding finals and multiple writing assignments and insinuated myself into graduate theory seminars of all departments: anthropology, literature, political science, theater, history. With a host of other would-be intellectuals, I honed the fine art of thinking about thinking about ... What we were thinking about was always pretty irrelevant. I developed minor expertise in the representation of the hermaphrodite in psychiatric literature, the uncanny relationship between classical ballet and the absolutist state of Louis XIV and the woman as landscape in Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy." Now I was just warming up, I told myself. Someday I would find an important issue worthy of all my well-exercised mental muscles and then watch out hegemony!   While I was being treated to the many joys of a great liberal education, I was also learning some rather insidious lessons. I discovered I didn't have to read the entire assigned book. After all, the "ideas" were what was important. Better to read the criticism about the book. Better yet, read the criticism of the criticism and my teachers would not only be impressed but a little intimidated. By extension, I learned not only a way of reading but a way of living. The more removed I was from a primary act, the more valuable it was. Why scoop soup at the homeless shelter when you could say something interesting about how naive it was to think that feeding people really helped them when really what was needed was structural change.   My friends now fall into two categories: ex-Theory nerds (like me) making a living off their late-learned pragmatism, and those who still live and breathe by Theory's fragrant vapors political theorists, literary critics, historians, eternal graduate students. I love talking to them and often I covet the little thrones their ideas get to perch on. Yet when I come away from a conversation that has swooped from the racist implications of early French embalming techniques to the "revolutionary interventions" in the margins of "Tristram Shandy" and ended with the appalling hypocrisy of the right wing, I often feel a strange discomfort. Because these are some of the smartest, kindest and most energetic people I know, I cannot resist the question: Is this the best way for them to spend their lives? If they acknowledged that they were largely engaged in the amoral endeavor of pure intellectual play, that would be one thing, but each of these people considers their work deeply, emphatically political.   Is this theory-heavy, fact-free education teaching people to preach one way and live another? Are we learning that political opinion, however finely crafted, is a legitimate substitute for action? Sometimes it seems that the increased political emphasis on language the controversies over "chairpersons," "people of color" and "youth-at-risk" did more than create a friendly linguistic landscape, it gave liberals something to do, to argue about, to write about, while the right wing took over the country, precinct by precinct. After all, in a world where each lousy word can stir up a raging debate, why worry about the hard, dull work of food distribution or waste management?   I know how high and mighty this sounds, and the side of me that appreciates subtlety and disdains brow-beating is wincing. Political moralism has fallen from fashion, leaving us to cobble together myopic philosophies from warmed-over New Age thinkers like Deepak Chopra or archaic scriptures like the Bible. If it's any consolation, I include myself in the most offending group of educated progressives who squandered their political power over white wine and words like "instantiation." Moreover, I'm not saying we're all a bunch of awful, selfish people. We learned to read, we learned to think critically and at least pay lip service to certain values of justice, egalitarianism and questioning authority. But I do wonder if we're handicapped, publicly impaired somehow.   Like most of my siblings of Theory, from time to time I have tried to get off my duff and do something concrete: protest, precinct walk, do volunteer work whatever but I always get impatient. I wasn't meant to chant annoying rhymes. I am trained to relish complexity, to never simplify a thought. I am trained to appreciate "difference" (between skin tones and truths), but I don't know how to organize a political meeting, create a strategy or make a long-term commitment to a social organization. As Wallace Shawn wrote in "The Fever," "The incredible history of my feelings and my thoughts could fill up a dozen leather-bound books. But the story of my life my behavior, my actions that's a slim volume and I've never read it."   Lentricchia argues that by politicizing the experience of reading, we ended up degrading its beauty and pleasure. In the same fell swoop, we also robbed concrete political action of its meaning. The progressive pragmatists studied political theory; the progressive idealists studied literary theory; and the eccentric radicals became conceptual artists and sold their work to millionaires. In any case, everyone bought the idea that they were engaged in political work. Having a radical opinion was tantamount to revolution.   Back in college, I remember going to a party at the home of one of my professors, who was a famous Marxist. The split-level house was decorated with rare antiques from all over the world, exclusive labels filled the wine cellar, the banquet table overflowed with delicacies. Like an anointed inner circle of acolytes, we students sat around as our professors argued that Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was justified from the perspective of the underpaid Palestinian servants who worked in Kuwaiti homes. The following month, while I was house-sitting at the professor's house, his black gardener came to the door wanting to be paid. I discovered that my professor was paying the man minimum wage for less than a half day of self-employed work. That night as I plundered the refrigerator for the best cheeses that money could buy, I chided myself for not having doubled the man's wages. But that might have embarrassed him, no? It definitely would have embarrassed me. It would have been acting on a belief, and action makes me uncomfortable.   Recently I went to a conference on "Women's Art and Activism." I found precious little of either. Instead I found a lot of Theory garbed in its many costumes. There was a lesbian conceptual artist talking about her work, triangular boxes that "undermined the patriarchy of shapes"; a "revolutionary" poet lecturing on her experience of biculturalism; and an "anarchist" performance artist discussing "strategies for subversion." And what fabulous haircuts! The keynote speaker was Orlon, a French performance artist whose work consists of having her entire face rebuilt by plastic surgery. After a very French explanation as to why she needed a third face lift, she answered questions from the packed house. "I think you're just incredible," said one woman. "You say your aim is to reconquer your body as signifier. How do you feel about letting a doctor touch your signifier? And how do you see your revolutionary techniques emancipating women from the prisons of their bodies as sign?"   Had I stumbled into a satanic ritual, I couldn't have felt a more chilling sensation of alienation. Once I would have smiled at these liturgies and savored their impenetrable truths. Now I only wanted to run away and do what? Dig a ditch? Perform open heart surgery? Administrate a charity? Even after all these years, I was still expecting Theory to visit me like the Virgin Mary and give me more than a sign.