Schematic

I’m having one of those days. I’m working on this particular case and I just can’t focus on it. It has to do with solid waste disposal facilities and something called “host community benefits” and it’s actually a consolidation of four separate cases and there are reams of paper. The case is a greasy pig and it keeps slipping out of my concentration. I read one paragraph and the words mean nothing to me, and I wind up staring off into space.

What’s bothering me? I’m not exactly sure. It’s something existential. Right now my life feels like a greater-than sign (<) -- going off into the future aimlessly, no narrative lines converging, no goals, just drifting off into endless entropy. I feel like I have no center. But things don't fall apart as much as they just sit there loosely in an emulsion, nothing really connecting to anything else. I think I need to get away. Well, next weekend I’m doing just that; I’m going to spend that weekend in West Virginia with a close group of my friends from college. We’re renting a cottage or something at a resort. I think I’m going to rent a car, take off work early that Friday, and drive south and west. I can’t wait to get out of here for a while. Existential. My existence. That topic is kind of too big. It reminds me of something from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Arthur Dent can’t fathom the idea that the Earth has just been blown up, so instead he tries to wrap his brain around the concept by thinking smaller, telling himself, “There is no more McDonald’s. There is no longer such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger.” Or something like that.

I first wanted to go into therapy when I was in high school. I was fascinated by my inner workings. A mean person might call this self-absorption, but maybe that’s what it was; but it wasn’t narcissism, it was self-criticism. Basically, I wondered why I was so often anxious or unhappy. I wanted to open myself up and look at a diagram of myself, some sort of schematic drawing or blueprint, and pore over it with a psychiatrist-slash-architect who could tell me where things had gone wrong, and how I could be fixed — a few corroded pipes up here, a weak foundation down there, no problem, we’ll hire a crew and take care of it, you’ll be as good as new.

One of my high school English teachers, Charlie Miller, would give a particular assignment to his classes called an I-Search paper. It was essentially a free-form paper, and it could be of any length; you were basically supposed to write about your life, ask questions of yourself, produce a snapshot of Who You Are at that particular point in time. Presumably it could be used as a time capsule in future years, when you could go back to it and see how you’d changed. But he didn’t assign an I-Search paper to the class I had with him. That class was called “Visions of the Tragic Hero,” and we read The Brothers Karamazov and Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Oedipus Rex, but we didn’t get to do an I-Search paper. I regretted that, because I’d really wanted to do one. I do have a journal that contains lots of detailed entries from my high school years, but it’s not quite the same. I wanted to be able to sum up my life in some sort of grand diagnostic document.

I had a fascinating experience a few years ago. After college, I worked for a few months in the UVA Medical Records Department. One day I looked up the ID number for my own medical records, went back into the rows and rows of shelves, and took out my file. Inside the manila folder — along with one-page records of various visits to Student Health for the flu or a bad cold or whatnot — were a couple of pages of notes taken by a UVA psychiatrist from a meeting with me during my first couple of weeks of college. I think she was a psychiatrist, anyway. When I began college I was incredibly homesick and upset and hopeless and I couldn’t see myself continuing to live, so I ran through the gamut of meetings: my RA, my dean, and then my senior RA, who accompanied me to the emergency room of the UVA hospital one evening so I could meet with the aforementioned psychiatrist. After our meeting she referred me to a doctor in the mental health section of the UVA Student Health Department, and he in turn referred me to a therapist, because I asked him to.

Anyway, four years later, I stood there in the UVA Medical Records Department between a couple of shelves and looked over the psychiatrist’s notes from that long-ago evening meeting at the hospital. Reading through her scrawlings was a strange experience. What did another person think of me? How did I come across to her? What words had she chosen to describe me and my problems? I searched her notes for Answers, hoping I might find a hint of that grand schematic diagram I’d longed so much to see. It was all in vain. It was indeed interesting to read, but I didn’t find the answers I was looking for.

That’s all I want sometimes. The solution manual. They made one for the Rubik’s Cube, and that’s a pretty hard puzzle. I don’t see why they can’t make one for me too. I’m just as tough a nut to crack.