1
On the Brink
“I’ll never forget this. I won’t be able to.” He lifted his cast-entombed left arm a few inches. “This will remind me. You see, the surgeons said there was a chunk of meat that was so chopped up it couldn’t be sewed back on. That means a healthy scar, I mean, a big ugly scar - one that will always remind me.” The causal tone of the words matched the sprawl of his body in the chair, the California-tanned face, the partially sun bleached hair. No sweat. I can take anything in stride. Such grace under pressure that no evidence of pressure ruffled the smooth, magazine-model surface. The awkward, immobilized arm provided the only visual clue that this bright, articulate 21-year-old college student belonged in a hospital rather than back in his fraternity house, and he managed to wear this damaged appendage with the whiff of pride others demonstrate for a Squaw Valley or Alpine Meadows shattered tibia.
I pictured the future scar - a twisted, purple insult on the otherwise unblemished exterior, then purple fading, scar shrinking, until in future years only an old, whitened cicatrix memento remained. “It’ll be my souvenir.” He grinned as if to reassure me not to take it too seriously.
The arm had been repeatedly slashed with a razor. He had lost several pints of blood. “It’s good I could only find a razor. If there’d been a gun, I would have blown my head off,” and then more solemnly, “And then I wouldn’t be here. It really freaked my friends ‘cause to them, to everybody, I’ve got everything going for me - good grades, pretty good athlete, lots of friends, officer of the fraternity.”
At first he tried to explain it away by drugs. “I thought it was just because of the coke because maybe there was something else mixed in with it. I never reacted that way to coke before.” He sat up in the chair, stared into the distance, then turned to me, “Not that I do a lot of drugs. I do drugs but it’s not a big part of my life. Just about everybody on campus does drugs sometime but just recreational.” He winced and jerked his left arm. “The pain pills are starting to wear off.”
No, there were no problems in his life, everything going well, just the way it looked on the surface to everybody else. “I felt a little pissed at the party. No big thing but this girl I date was being somewhat of a bitch. Nothing serious. She was just being unfriendly, kinda cold.”
“Wanting to break up?”
“No, nothing so serious but I do remember when I wanted to die that I was thinking about her coldness. Sort of like - the last straw.” Now the handsome face looked sad. “Boy, what an ending to a party. I really feel bad about what I put my brothers through - cleaning up all my blood, having to explain to people how I flipped out.”
“You made a mess.”
“Yeah. Of everything, of my life. All I want now is to go home, start over again, see my folks, my girl-friend back home.” He paused, cast an embarrassed look. “I’m really a rat about women, I guess. My real girl-friend is back home. We’d be engaged except going to schools a thousand miles apart, well, we agreed we shouldn’t be engaged and that it’d be okay to date others, but that’s what’s so wild. I really love my girl back home. The girl here in California is just someone to date, so why should I kill myself if she acts cold? It’s no big deal.”
“You said sort of like the last straw. Sometimes when a person feels empty and they reach for something that isn’t too important and they can’t even get that, then they feel totally defeated.”
“Yes. I did feel totally defeated and totally empty, and that’s crazy. I’m a success. Everybody says so.”
And so now we moved to the center of the matter: no more dismissing his behavior as making no sense or due to chemical intoxication. Instead now he began to touch on the crucial mystery: surface success covering inner emptiness. “But why should I feel that way? I’ve got everything. Most guys my age would give their right arm to have what I got - going to Berkeley, one of the best schools in the country, getting good grades, being popular and so on and so on.” He had emptied the hollow words of all pride. “It’s all fake. It’s all phony. It’s what people see and admire but it’s not me.”
And who is he? He didn’t know but he knew who he used to be - one of many children in a large Catholic family in a small Midwestern town. He described coming to California as, “Moving into the fast lane.” “Maybe that’s why all I can think of now is to go back home, to try to find myself again.”
There are many individual factors in Dan’s situation and those factors would be addressed in his treatment, but Dan’s basic position - a young man with surface success and inner emptiness relates more to his age, his stage in life, in Erik Erickson’s term - his current life task. As a therapist I had to be aware of both levels: the unique and also what Dan shares with many others who are poised on the brink of adulthood. For this book the uniquely individual is beyond our scope; the common themes of beginning adulthood are central to our purpose.
The start of adulthood means one has finished adolescence, and the essence of adolescence in our society consists of learning a variety of roles, different roles for different situations. The typical adolescent plays the “as if” game, something like, “I will play a role in this situation as if I were Matt Damon (or Gweneth Paltrow) acting a part.” Such a role provides gestures, mannerisms, a vocabulary, a set of cliches, and by playing the part as if he/she were an actor or as if he/she were an admired friend or acquaintance, the adolescent fakes his way through and with practice and time, there comes to be less fakery, less “as if” until the part is played so smoothly that it feels to be part of oneself. Typically the adolescent learns a role for being with friends different from the role with family, a still different role to be played with authority figures such as teachers and bosses, toward whom one must be somewhat deferential, a still different role toward those toward whom one feels superior, for example, young children. Each role has a different voice. I recall a situation when a fourteen-year-old boy spoke with me in the voice of a young, respectful child, interrupted himself to bark in a bold voice and in totally different jargon to a peer, then returned to address me in the more youthful, shier tone. Which voice represented the real fourteen-year-old? Both and neither.
And now we stumble on the first of many paradoxes we will encounter in this book: the more successful the role-playing, the more the outer world applauds and believes the performance, the greater the risk that the young person will lose track of a self beyond or other than the roles. “It’s what people see and admire but it’s not me.”
It may be becoming obvious why I am limiting this discussion to college students. In our society college students are perceived and perceive themselves as more successful than those who do not attend college, and I am writing about a problem more marked in those perceived as successful.
The less attractive, less bright, less athletic, less social adolescent often does a poorer, clumsier job of role-playing. He or she has a harder time leaving the “true self” behind and living a role (and how he or she laments it), but the very limitation of success in role-playing inoculates that youngster against becoming nothing more than a series of successful roles.
Jill is a college senior. She is good-looking, wears stylish clothes, possesses a thinness which causes people to ask her if she is anorexic. “I’ve never been popular and I never will be. I’ve never ever had more than one friend at a time. I just can’t be phony enough to be popular. What’s the point of being popular if you have to be phony? Either a person likes me the way I really am or they don’t, but I’m not going to pretend I’m somebody different because then they wouldn’t really be liking me. They only would be liking the person I was pretending to be.” Jill has had three different college roommates this year, had four different roommates last year. Hypersensitive and hypercritical, she never loses track of who she “really” is or of how that person differs from others. Others complain that she is hard to get along with.
Jill will never have Dan’s problem. She has never deigned to and never learned to play roles, and because of this, in one sense, she has never completed adolescence.
Who is more successful as a human being - self-righteous, meticulously honest Jill or popular, well-like, inwardly confused Dan? Answering in terms of growth and development, Jill has never risked losing her self by playing roles as has Dan. That is another way of again saying that Jill has not completed psychological adolescence. On the other hand, Dan has completed adolescence successfully. Then how in heaven’s name can he be so miserable?
The answer to that question, in part, requires a distinction between adolescence and being on the threshold, on the brink, of adulthood. Mastering a variety of roles tends to make an adolescent happy: “Here is yet another world scene on which I can enter and play out a part.” Adolescence is a time of tryouts, a time when playing the as-if game is desirable and rewarding. However, the real world of adulthood is not make-believe, is no trial run, is not just faking it. Adulthood is real. One is out in a real world where one must rely on one’s own real inner supplies. A collection of roles to be played more or less well in no way constitutes inner supplies for survival.
On the brink, the becoming adult suddenly is exposed. “It’s all fake. It’s all phony. It’s what people see and admire, but it’s not me.”
What is inside? What is under the surface? Different people have different answers. “I’m empty. There’s nobody there. Nobody home. I’m Peter Gynt. You keep peeling away the layers of the onion and inside in nothing at all.” That’s how bright, blond, Norwegian-descent Karen put it.
Dan had a different perception. “I don’t feel empty, not really empty when I stop to think about it, but the real me inside is a scared, little kid, running scared, unlovable, very childish and very different from anything anybody ever sees in me. They’d never recognize me, and they sure as Hell wouldn’t like me.”
Mike, who dropped out of college after two years, insists, “I know there’s another person in there but when I try to get in touch with it, there’re no words, just kind of vague feelings, just confusion. It’s weird. I don’t like to think about it or talk about it. It’s too weird. I mean, crazy weird.”
Sherri stubs out a cigarette, stares at me with a penetrating gaze,0 “I never feel real. Never, never. I’m always acting. Always. I don’t even know right now, really for sure, who is saying these words to you.”
Nineteen-year-old Jim with his sad, little-boy face and gentle brown eyes, confides, “I only come alive when I’m with my friends, especially my girl-friend. I freak when I’m alone. I really freak. And when I’m with my parents, I turn into this wimp who really isn’t me.”
Karen, Dan, Mike, Sherri and Jim are on the brink of adulthood, but none of them feels fully prepared to become an adult. Well, of course, hardly anyone feels totally supplied for adulthood, and that sense of inadequacy would not be a major problem were it not coupled with an urgency, a feeling that time is running out:
YOU ARE ABOUT TO LAND ON A BARREN, AIRLESS PLANET. DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH
OXYGEN AND FOOD TO SURVIVE? CHECK YOUR SUPPLIES. YOU ARE LANDING NOW.
The end of adolescence is a time for checking supplies, and very few feel sufficiently provisioned for the long, lonely journey ahead. The stock of well-rehearsed roles will allow one to pass through most of the forthcoming scenes without stumbling too badly, but those roles don’t make up for the emptiness or confusion or inadequacy inside.
“I know I’m bright and attractive and people like me, but that doesn’t take care of...”Of what? Here is where it becomes vague, confusing, hard to articulate.
What is felt are:
Alcohol and drugs provide a temporary blurring of feeling unprepared, a brief forgetting of the urgent need to face life. Joining a fanatical religious group or the Marines, thereby surrendering individuality somewhat more permanently, provides a more prolonged amnesia of individual unpreparedness.
Individuality, the identity of being a separate and separated individual person, that glorious achievement of two centuries of the continuing humanitarian revolution, one’s personal expression and amplification of the guaranteed, “Liberty and the pursuit of happiness” spelled out at the birth of our nation, is the gift and burden each of us bears. In other cultures and earlier stages of our own culture, individual human beings tend not to be as sharply distinguished and separated from the group, for example, the family. As long as one perceives oneself as primarily an extension or manifestation of the group, one need not feel completed as a separated person in
order to cope with the world. However, when adulthood is defined as having achieved a significant degree of individuality, of individual identity, then separation as the mark of individualism becomes the mark of being an adult. And thus to be on the brink of adulthood is to see oneself as on the brink of total, final, never-return -again separation, a kind of death in living.
But what does one do with such empty feelings, the feelings of being unprepared for life, the sense of I-better-not-stop-being-active-or-I’ll-just-sit-and-sob? Let’s try to answer that question in the next chapter.