See, that’s the real issue with obesity: emotional baggage. You might just say fat IS emotional baggage. Protection I assert. I assert because I was. Fat. I lost it all though. By the time I was in my mid 20s I was 5:11 and weighed 160 lobs. I was skinny. I ran five miles a day and ate conscientiously. Of course I was no happier than I was when I was thin, but I WAS THIN. I accomplished the goal that stared at me in the face (in the mirror) everyday of my life growing up. I lost weight. I also lost the erroneous impression that weight was the root of my problems. My problems were actually the root of my weight.

I discovered when I lost weight I was alone. Literally. I had moved away from my mom and was living alone in a city where I barely knew anyone. I worked sparingly and then went back to school and worked sparingly some more. I felt no particular attachment to anything and got by through accommodating myself to that which was there for me. In other words, I made friends and did what I could to survive. Normal stuff, right? Not really. I lived like a guerilla warrior on the periphery of life. I didn’t exist as someone with my education and background should. I lived dodgy and oddly. I lived alone. Thin but alone. Thin but still protected by emotional baggage.

I had gotten very used to the old, fat me who knew how to live with people. Once he was gone, I realized that I didn’t know how to live with people because as a fat person, I had never thought of myself as actually being there to live with them. I “played” myself while I was fat as opposed to actually being myself. I was not the person I saw in the mirror everyday so I accentuated and performed the part that was given to me. I was TOO funny or TOO mad. I was “off the charts” in many, many ways. I probably stabbed around borderline personality issues. But by the time I lost the weight, I was in a strange wide and deep valley made up of all the distance that already existed between me and the world. When I had to step up and be me, as it were, I ran off to a place where I could place myself in a quiet and solitary middle of emptiness.

I can never get the years of childhood back. Of course. No one can. I think in some ways I missed a maturation process that I find myself going through now. And though I hate the idea that there is a “process” that everyone has to go through, it does seem to have some relevance to my life. In many ways I’m twelve years old, often snarky and supercilious while seeking to connect and feeling amazingly vulnerable all the time. This is… Well, this has GOT to be a fledgling step in the process of emotional maturity. One that some people probably took earlier than I did because, well, I wasn’t there, remember?

I have more to say on this so more on weighty issues next time.

So I talk about stuff. Maybe about my mom or my wife or my job or lack of one. I’ve tried to do this or that. I’m hoping for this. I’m expecting that. This frustrates the heck out of me. I should do better here. Why didn’t I do that? When is life going to change? You just sit there and listen. You nod your head. Or not. You ask questions. You probe. Perhaps you do what I was taught when I trained for the Samaritans suicide hotline: you angle for the pain, go for what you sense is the root of the misery. Of course I may not help you with that. Believe me, experiencing the pain is not easy and not looked forward to, even if it is ultimately why I’m there.

And when I find the cause of the pain, I’m surprised. I’m not surprised at the identity of the cause or even that I didn’t think of it until now. It’s just that when it hits me it hits me fresh and freshness is by nature surprising. THIS is what was wrong. THIS is what’s been missing. I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of incremental steps away from this basic need for happiness, and I just now figured it out. Extraordinary! I’m relieved. Really, I am. Because I got control of it.

That’s it in a nutshell. Control. I don’t want to use “control” in some sort of yuppified phraseology, where I have to be in control of every aspect of my life, but rather as a step in maturity. Real, honest-to-goodness maturity, maturity that I staked out myself rather than what was mandated for me by the parent I didn’t trust or the wife I didn’t trust. Trust was the key for me. You knew I had to trust myself. And you helped me get there.

It’s not like that’s the end of it, but for today, nice job.

The work of going through therapy from the patient side is often one involving ego or some other word that may be better but which I can only think of “ego” to point to. See, there were times in therapy where I would come in and just be moody, angry and unresponsive. Really I just wanted someone to know how I was feeling, someone to care, even if it was someone paid to care, imprisoned if you will by that 50 minute session. I wasn’t in a mood to work on my problems but rather in a mood to remind myself and the therapist that I had them and they mattered. Or I mattered.

That’s a chief point for us patients. We want to matter. Oftentimes we don’t feel like we do. We feel diminished by one thing or another or several, and we want something or someone to give us power, give us a stake in things, give us a choice, or the capability of choice. Being petulant is part of the process sometimes.

I know for example that I had mom issues. That’s a bit of a simple way to put it but we’re on a deadline here. One of those issues was the safety I felt or needed to feel by being under her influence, letting her decisions dominate mine, which she did because that was our dynamic. Breaking free of that meant I sometimes needed that figure to be petulant or childish to, who would not dismiss me out of hand, who felt responsible for my predicament but would not suggest solutions that I didn’t want to hear. In loco parentis you might say but without the actual parenting part. The trick of course is in therapy as in your life you have to do the work as opposed to your mom doing it for you. As a patient you know that’s true, but you still know you need to be that child for awhile. You just do.

Look, we patients like you guys. We do. And the work you do matters even when we don’t show it or seem to be making progress. In fact, especially when we don’t seem to be making progress because that’s when the work is hardest for us, when we see no change, no improvement, nothing that justifies our faith in the work, but where we realize that the work is part of the process of simply being in control of our lives and accepting that life is ours to control. It’s scary. It’s always scary because oftentimes we’re coming from worlds where the people in control were not very good or comfortable at it. It’s square one for us and you make it even possible to be square two and on up.

Just wanted to say thanks you all for the work you do. It matters. It’s appreciated.

Have a Happy New Year.

What a world that is. To wit:

As I walk into that world in my mind I see my mom and dad who are gone now. Yet in my heart I feel them still here, still right by the phone or near enough to touch. I feel the world as near as the possibility of shooting baskets at the court in the park across the street. I feel the sun as fresh as any day there ever was. I feel new possibility with no particular reason why. And I feel my point of view focused on the moment at hand, this one moment when I see the world no further than my field of vision will go. I am in the moment and that’s just wonderful.

I walk down my street, the one I grew up in, and it is beautiful again. The old neighbors are in their houses. Their lives that I know so well are playing behind those walls. Like ants scurrying in their farm they add life to the undercurrent of the majestic canopy of trees that ascend over my head and have since my memory began. In my heart and soul the world has moved back to its roots. I am in that one and only place where the world is simply the world.

I look to my left. The alley in the middle of the street is there leading so secretly to the next block and, even more secretly to another smaller alley perpendicular to its midsection which will take me back to the street half a block behind me. What wonder! What pleasure to know this secret path that is reserved it seems simply for me here in my own little world. It is a blessing in this sun drenched, tree-filled place to have something carved from history that only those of us with knowledge can be privy to.

What privilege dost thou purport to need further in such a place? Be thee not awash in serendipitous plentitude in God’s own grotto of salient happiness and bliss? I spin with the rush of the breezes through the ample, burnished leaves. The divine speaks in these millions of tiny crashes and flames of sun. There is deafening silence where angels dare you into thoughts that are not thoughts but unreasoning oblivions. You rise into the indescribable. There is not a moment anywhere in the universe that could match this.

This is happiness.

I give thee moments of greatness as the simplest yet most perpetual source of joy in all creation. There is nothing that will ever match the touch of my mind with the mind of the eternal, with the gift of God’s voice, warm and hushed in this flash of revelry. Let all the world know what I have seen and heard. I have been as glad as glad can possibly be, exulted in my simple life by merely my willingness to see what is there to see. Thank you, Heaven, for this delirious moment.

Which means that it’s been 35 years, and it’s still not done.

When does an ambition become defined as an unhealthy obsession? And perhaps one that exists for its own sake?

When I was in college I was pre-Law (or pre-med, what’s the difference?), until I found just how difficult that choice was. It began with taking calculus my freshman year, which I did because my advisor admonished me that economics was necessary for law and calculus was necessary for economics.

Ugh.

It was brutal, horrible. Hard hard hard with a side of freaking, ridiculously hard. Truth to tell all my classes were hard (except tennis—that one I breezed through). Embarrassingly, I have to admit that even the easy classes were hard for me. And you know what? They shouldn’t have been. Leastways they probably wouldn’t have been if I didn’t have my “ambition” to fall back on.

See, my secret goal I believe was nurtured by the difficulty of slaving over “The Logic of Collective Action”, “The Communist Manifesto”, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Brain Perception and Behavior and Gibbon’s Rise and Fall… In other words, as I struggled with college, this “vision” of mine grew in importance, this other thing that made my lack of success in the classroom seem okay or less ego-destroying. Thus, I didn’t confront the real problem, or see it as a problem. I didn’t see I was having as a real issue with being a college student. I didn’t see reality. Instead I ran from it into a fantasy world where I was an inherent genius, lost in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Ambition is about something inside you that you simply must do, is it not? Yet how many of us do this thing we must do? How many of us make a “healthy” decision to do something less stressful? And why didn’t I?

How healthy is a dream? I ask this honestly, not meaning to be provocative. I have had a dream and followed it for what is now the vast majority of my life, and I have caused pain to both myself and loved ones. I’ve suffered and struggled and given over many of my neuroses to my children. Why did I do that? Why do I do that?

And would I have done that anyway? As a lawyer, doctor or Indian Chief?

When we’re young, we take on the problem in front of us. When we’re nine years old, or eleven or more likely fifteen or sixteen the problem is vastly different than what we see when we’re thirty-five, forty or fifty. When you’re a teenaged male, you see your problem essentially as “competition” from other men over the women out there, and the need you feel, I believe, is to find a thing that differentiates you from the herd and pushes you to the top of the wolf pack (pardon my mixed species metaphors). With such a narrow perspective on the real world, you inevitably make equally narrow choices and launch yourself on to narrow paths which allow little deviation.

George Bernard Shaw once said: “If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains,” which I interpret as you really ought to be practical as you get older. However Mr. Shaw also said: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man,”

Again, as I have consistently done here, I have to ask what is mental health? I think that mental health is about being able to live with the person you are and decisions you make. It is about fending off the inevitable travails of the moment and keeping an eye on whatever that prize is, even if the prize is the continual realization that you gave up that stupid notion you had when you were a kid. Right? Right? Someone out there with a degree give me an answer here.

See, when you get right down to it, as tough as it is and as guilty as I always always always feel, I’m still about changing the world, about being that “unreasonable man”. I’m about making absolutely sick and monstrous progress. Really. That is my problem and my family’s. It is my issue in spades—a spade flush really.

Now, if someone would just tell me if I’m freaking sane…

So what was going on? What was I really living with? What was I acting out on? I had many frustrations in my life back then, many difficult issues that I could not overcome but had to endure. Things that were not my fault. Tell me then: Did I use being a fan as a means of working those problems out? Did I use being a fan as a means of experiencing these problems, maybe fighting them in a way that I could not in reality?

And if I did, was that smart? I hear talk sometimes of the concept of “clarity”, meaning, you hear the truth about yourself and your limitations, and it waylays you for a moment, but ultimately you’re better off going forward. Should I have had an intervention telling me what was happening? Would it have mattered? At that time in my life could I have faced the truth about my limitations? Could I have faced the facts about what my position in society really was? What my family’s was? How we were regarded? Could I have left my fan’s paradise and seen stark reality?

I was afraid. I was always afraid that a shot of truth would be a shot in my head. It would kill me. Looking back I think that was not true, and I think maybe it would have been alright and a healthy thing for me to go through, but how many of us really face up to that? How many families talk in such terms to each other? Who would’ve intervened with me then? And, honestly, how did the problems in my family start in the first place? My problem didn’t spring from nothing.

When you have no power and your teams do, or you think they do, you very much need to live with and in their power. Really, you do. And nowadays when I hear so many people calling into sports talk shows, so aligned and connected with their teams as I was, I know where they are. I know what they are, and it makes me sad.

This is not to say I’m cured myself. I only know the problem. I can see it and try to act on it, as I’m doing now. But it will not just leave overnight. I have too much work to do filling in for the need fandom still fills. I have too much to do to make me feel empowered. And there’s a lot of need to fill. Probably more than most people.

Fandom truly is about being nobody, about being powerless, and there is nothing that can fix it other than time and changes in your life. I know this. Mental health is about years of good filling in for the years of bad. If you’re powerless, you have to be powerful.

Perhaps the drug analogy is truly the best. You medicate yourself with a power substitute and you hold on to it even after you really should no longer need it. You get used to it. You can’t just quit it. You have to go after that which you know is the real source of your power, whatever that is.

I’m trying now to be a fan of only myself.

Perhaps it’s like pornography. You can’t describe it, but you know when you see it. Perhaps it’s an attitude, a confidence or a sense of reality that someone has that somehow “feels” true. I really don’t know. I’m not trained. But even those trained aren’t always that healthy (are they?), which doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re trained to know. It just means you can’t always practice what you preach.

I think about myself and I wonder: Am I healthy? Should I be if I’m writing something that is meant to get people’s attention? Should I rather be provocative and daring? Perhaps overly risky? Perhaps neurotic like a Woody Allen so I can be funny? How professional is it to be healthy? Is Maureen Dowd healthy? Paul Krugman? She seems fixated. He seems angry. Yet they’re both successful, as is Woody Allen for that matter, and some people think he’s a pedophile.

I don’t get it. I really, really don’t. What makes mental health? Is anyone I know mentally healthy? I’ve never asked them. It’s not something that really “comes up” in a typical evening. I suppose several folks I’ve known (and me) have at the very least gone through skeins of being healthy, if they haven’t been so every second of their lives. Still though you look at the choices some of your friends make and you wonder. Of course they do the same with you. Well, so you wonder.

I bet any mental health professionals reading this are either smiling, frowning or somehow reacting with wisdom to my admittedly naïve questions. I would guess that they’ve debated these questions themselves, probably in some undergraduate class or in a coffee shop (or bar). I’ll bet they’ve gone far beyond my inner-bull session level of interest to some more all-encompassing and strong definitions of what is and is not mental health. I’m sure they’ve worked this stuff out and have a well-understood set of standards by which they can determine if a patient of theirs is “in the good zone” or not. They know the models that have been seen before. They know the borderline personalities, the manic-depressives, the classic neurotics (assuming they are “classic”). They have the facts and the theories at their fingertips. They did the work.

I don’t. And without them, without the facts, the question of what is mental health becomes eternal. And it matters. I want to know if I’m right. I want to know if what I’m doing is right. How can I know? How can I really, really know if I’m healthy? I wish there was some easy way to do a self-test to determine this. If someone can point one out to me, I’d be really grateful.

For now though, I’ll just go with the notion that I’m probably pretty healthy if I’m questioning whether or not I’m healthy. See, I read once that if you’re crazy you sleep like a baby. I sleep pretty well, but I worry about the fact that I do.

So, you know…

Ann Arbor, too. The downtown is stylish now. Not like in the old days. Stores are hip and restaurants, too. And I hate it. It’s nothing like what it was. Now sure part of this is crotchety old man syndrome. No doubt. But another part, the important part, has to do more and more with the mental health of adults or what passes for it.

We do not grow up. 60 is the new 40… 80 is the new 50… Recent stories highlight longevity studies that will make us live 150 years. 200. 1,500! I’m sorry. Those of us born and raised after World War II share an almost inexhaustible ability to not believe our kids deserve the same world we did. In other words, we are competing with them step by step and inch by inch to consume the world around us, and it is the most unfair competition imaginable.

What has happened? Well, I believe it has to do with the fact that mental health is not just about individuals, it’s about cultures and societies. I don’t know if it’s just me, but the mental health of the United States quite honestly only questionably exists. Why? Because there is no cultural norm connecting adults anymore. There is no culture really. There is only a variety of experience delivery strings concatenated into media, which we, in our interactions with one another, spew out as baldly as Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly or Judge Judy. Nobody converses. We simply remind each other what we’ve heard. Without a conversation there is no culture.

Now sure, the 1950s culture was restrictive and lacking. And dull. There were landmines all over that Alexandrian plain: Poverty, racism, sexism, political repression. No question things needed to be changed. And they were, bit by bit and inch by inch. We struggled through the 60s, made horrendous mistakes, many well intentioned. We staggered into the 70s tired and were slapped in the face with our own world dominance by OPEC, the monster we had in fact created. By the mid-70s, principle had generally left the conversation, having been debated so fiercely in the 60s. It curled up and went to sleep in its nicely heated room listening to Carly Simon remind it just how cruelly it had been abused growing up in Scarsdale.

We lost our sense that the privilege of even being middle class required a sense of purpose. Nobles oblige applied to everyone with even a chance at a good life. It wasn’t until the 70s somebody began to yell that this only applied to the very wealthy.

I think it was because mental health could no longer accommodate society. There was too much information, too much world, too much of everything. We “checked out” and the crazies, those who could easily keep a distorted and untenable world view, took over. Those who asserted in the face of every fact that their world view is true could more easily function within the national and international latticework.

Now, I fear mental health is not about integrating and interweaving with the inevitable physical losses and emotional gains that come with maturity. It is rather all a fake out of the grim reaper and his cohorts of baldness, erectile dysfunction, crow’s feet and cellulite. We don’t grow up. We grow over, under, above and away. Hell, just name a preposition, as long as it’s not “up”.

I don’t know what is healthy anymore. I can’t know. No one can. Health just isn’t healthy enough to comprehend.