Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(12)

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METANOIA


Metanoia.

Noun.

A profound transformation in one’s outlook.

USAGE: “You’ll need to rethink everything. Here you’ll need to resort to old-style metanoia, to radical rethinking and alteration.”

—Alois Brandstetter, The Abbey (Ariadne Press, 1998)



Finding out I lacked empathy was my metanoia.

I spent the next few weeks recalling one instance after another where I now recognized my lack of empathy.

I had been in London with one of my best friends, who happens to be a gay man. We went to see the movie Call Me by Your Name. Five minutes in, I leaned over, irritated, and asked, “Is this a gay love story?”

“Yes,” he hissed, incredulously. I hadn’t known what the movie was about going in, and I was taken by surprise.

“Oh, my God. You’re so selfish,” I whispered loudly, while I shoveled popcorn down my throat. The ludicrousness of my comment hit us both at the same time, and we started laughing so disruptively, we had to remove ourselves ten minutes into the movie.

     Gay people have had to sit through straight people’s stories since the beginning of time. Had I ever thought about that? Nope. Never occurred to me.

Lack of empathy was everywhere I went. This was an exciting development.



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I had been seeing Dan for just over a month—about two times a week—and I felt like I was making substantial progress in terms of not being reactive. I was now thinking about things before saying them, which prior to me seeing this doctor I had never even contemplated as a possible way to behave. I was in a particularly good mood that day when I walked into his office, excited to tell him that I was getting somewhere with my behavior, and that I actually enjoyed the three-minute meditation I had done that morning—that I might even be ready to bump it up to five minutes.

When I got to his office and sat down, Dan handed me an orange.

“I felt like you might want an orange today. I picked it from my tree.”

This was the moment I became undone.

In that moment, I fell apart at the proverbial seams.

Shoulders down, head bowed.

I sat and cried and shook and let my shoulders feel sorry for themselves and my heart ached and I moaned, loudly—like a wounded wolf. One with an injury that had scabbed over many times but had never properly healed. I had a deep infection.

     My crying was acute, hysterical. It was the kind of guttural pain that could land you in the hospital. I cried, and cried, and cried, all while peeling my orange, with Dan sitting there looking at me like he had expected this all along. He handed me a box of tissues, which I used to clean up the juice that was squirting everywhere because, apparently, peeling an orange was another simple task that I had somehow magically forgotten how to do, and had instead been stabbing it with my fingernails.

I wanted to charge past my tears, to stop myself from crying in front of him—or anyone, for that matter—but he left me with no other avenues. I had no choice but to give in and let it rip and let him watch me crumble. Foam-at-the-mouth, snot-out-of-the-nose kind of crying. Nothing I’d ever want another person to see me do. All while still trying to maintain some sort of dignity by continuing to eat my orange, which was a mess with the makeshift plate I had made out of the tissues, and when I felt more tears coming my way, I gave up the life raft. I put the tissues and the half-molested orange in my lap and looked at his trustworthy, smarter-than-me eyes and saw in them what I had been longing for all along—pity. After thirty years of bottling up the deepest injury of my life, I was ready for someone to feel sorry for me.



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We had met in a different room that day. Dan’s regular office was being used by someone else, so he warned me at our last appointment that we would have to meet in his other office, which we hadn’t done before. I remember thinking, What kind of a basket case does he think I am that he has to warn me about sitting in a different office?

     I don’t know if it was the change of scenery, or if it was because the light was different, or that we were sitting at a table rather than in our regular two chairs—or if it was that simple act of kindness of him giving me an orange he had picked from his tree that elicited such a primal reaction inside me.

When I was finally able to collect myself, I said, “There’s nothing I hate more than room temperature fruit, and I almost never eat carbs, but I’m going to eat this orange, and thank you for bringing it to me.”

“You’re welcome.”

Then I exhaled for about ten minutes straight—putting myself back together—and when I was finally able to breathe normally again, he asked me what I was feeling.

“Anger,” I sobbed. “I’m so angry, and I’m so tired.”

“I bet,” he said. “I bet you are.”

“I need to tell you about the day my brother died, and what happened to my family.”





My brother was the first man I ever slept with. The night I came home from the hospital, my mom said that Chet, who was thirteen at the time, asked if he could sleep with me, to which my mom…agreed? Over the years, he told the story of not being able to sleep that whole night for fear of rolling over and crushing me. The better question—I’ve always thought—was why either of my parents allowed a thirteen-year-old boy to sleep with a two-day-old baby. That should give you some insight into how interested my parents were in raising children or, for that matter, using protection. They had six children, and it’s a miracle any of us are still breathing.