Writing and Emotion, Ages 15-45, continued

From 1981 to 1988 (18-25) I was in the throes of private college and graduate education (on scholarship). I won't try to bore you with a complete account, but I will touch on some of the life-changing reading I did and some of the life-changes that were occurring along with that reading.

First, there was the enormous increase in demand for reading and writing. For the first time I was intimidated not only by other people but by the books I was made to absorb in as little time as possible. Secondly, there was drinking. I discovered that people liked me more, drunk. So I did not do well my first two years in college, averaging a 2.5 GPA. Thirdly, there was exposure to some of the great "pagan" philosophers who predated and influenced Christianity, a fact I had had no idea of. After reading Mark Twain on the violence and inconsistency of the Bible I became an 18 year old atheist. Fourthly, I found that on the one hand there were so-called smart people who knew and debated and debated the tiniest points of fine distinction among theories, and then there were the relatively laid-back, often well-off students who I eventually figured out were at Stanford to replicate their parents' lives. I was not one of either group. I spent much class time dozing off.

Emotionally speaking this was a time of more crisis. I blacked out during drinking, threatened suicide once or twice, impressed at least one woman enough with my "illness" that she recommended psychotherapy, which I rejected because the therapist put down my small-town origins. I could not say even hello to other people for months at a time. I was one of the two least responsive people in my freshman dorm, and by the time I was a sophomore, people would commonly ask me if I were drugged even though I was simply withdrawn into my own daydreams.

At the same time I was becoming a better writer. Freshman English was an important course for me since I learned so much about organizing my thoughts, making arguments and doing it with proper diction and grammar. I read Strunk and White. Other students also influenced me with their better high school educations. My writing became much more polished and also polarizing. My writing class was divided into two groups to read each other's essays. One of the groups said my writing was extremely poor, and the other said it was the best in the class. The instructor herself told me I was in the top ten percent. Now I achieved some of these affects by coming up with very strong theses and then defending them to the hilt in the strongest language. At the same time my skills were increasing, my thoughts were becoming more rigid, which would eventually lead to some extreme consequences in my life.

Sexually speaking, I met my first out gay people. In the early 80s at Stanford, gay people were mostly marginalized, and I was afraid of that. My Resident Assistant early in my freshman year was gay, and he tried to get me to think about myself differently, but I was too scared to begin. I was beginning to get occasional passes made at me from men and I received comments like, "you shouild be a dancer" in gym class. Instead of coming out, I began to masturbate everywhere, in class, in the library, just standing in public. I would surreptitiously shave my body and then take showers when no one else was awake so that no one would know about my terrible "transvestism." I was obviously in extreme stress, and totally isolated in this world where 86 percent of the students declared themselves happy, but I did nothing about it.

My second two years began my contact with Marxism and socialism. My grades went up. So did my mental grandiosity. These years really ran into the two years of graduate school in New York at the New School. So much happened, but the upshot was that on the one hand I had these increasingly grand and absolutist political and intellectual preoccupations, and on the other hand I had my hidden, repressed desires and "activities."

I began in my reading to learn about "methods" of reading that would obsess and confuse me, particularly Sartre's Problems with Method. I began to hear about the deconstructionists who were trying to criticize dualistic thinking in philosophy and literature, at least. I became less and less able to simply communicate my thoughts in a clear way, and more and more obsessed with perfection. I sublimated my anxieties and my sexual and gender ambiguities into my writing, justifying, I believe, to myself at any rate, my not coming to terms with myself.

Moving to New York, of course, would eventually tip the bucket over in many more ways than one. Next to wanting to learn whether "Marx was right," was my wanting to "dress up in public." I spent an interesting night in Times Square in heavy makeup and a miniskirt which I had paid for by stealing money from a trick the night before (my first time) hearing the comments from the crowd that I was "disgusting," that I was a "man," etc., etc. I had actually thought that no one wouild notice. I thought I must surely be psychotic because my idea of myself was so divergent from others'. The next day I went to my (closeted?) gay professor's class on history and historiography and tried to slip back into the woodwork.

(Just writing about this makes me angry.)

In the next post I will write about coming out, becoming political and the last few years of stasis and danger (doing drugs and selling my body for no apparent reason) and what kinds of writing I have done along with those times of change for me.