Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

Would that be a possibility Miss Doyle?

I can see that she’s angry, but I am too.

Death is always a possibility, I say. Or rather, it’s always a certainty.

Or perhaps you mention death as a distraction from moving forward with our work?

I believe Houdini called that technique misdirection.

Did you ever consider your drug usage misdirection?

Lying is what you mean. You might as well be honest. I have told you the truth about my lies.

Actually, I meant misdirection. As in improperly channeling your desire to be happy, to feel that you were an insider, to be close with your father, into a detrimental habit.

It seems everyone would be happier if I lied.

So then you admit that you do, in fact, care about the feelings of your friends and family.

I suppose I did. I did then.

But now you don’t?

Why do you care so much about me caring? I’m thinking about Mark and my mother. They always wanted from me what I couldn’t give them: to care about what I didn’t care about. Makeup, Marxism, disenfranchisement, dessert.

Because I don’t know if you know how caring a person you actually are. It is easy to direct ourselves into one of either side of a binary. It’s easy to interpret yourself without sophistication. You are not simply one characteristic or another. You, like everyone, are complex, and you owe yourself a sophisticated reading of yourself.

I believe you know how I feel about being compared to everyone else.

That like everyone you are complex does not mean that your complexities are like those of everyone else. In fact they are complexities like those of no one else.

Now you’re just trying to butter my bagel, doc. I give her a little wink. It’s something Lucy would do, silly and wry, almost burlesque. I miss her, and the closest I can get to her here is approximating those tics.

A compliment in vain does nothing for us. I truly believe that, Miss Doyle.

And as a medical professional, do you believe too in the terrible reality required to make progress?

You’re talking about the amphetamines, I presume.

I’m talking about all the awful reasons I’m like no one else.

Rather than speak in sweeping statements, I’d like to go back to a particular point you mentioned last time. You said that you were troubled by your father’s ease in discussing your data analysis with Mark.

Our skating graphs.

You felt that somehow he’d devalued it.

Didn’t he?

I believe that’s a matter of interpretation.

This is the doctor’s gentle way of telling me I’m wrong.

It wasn’t that he mentioned them. It was how. For example, take the sentence “You’re mad.” If it is said without particular emphasis it’s an observation. If you say it “ You’re mad,” however, it becomes an incredulously disgruntled remark upon the lack of validity in the other person’s feelings, a comparison, a critique of the amplitude of one person’s madness in proportion to the speaker’s.

And is that how you feel? That I am critiquing your feelings or questioning their validity? You seem to distrust me, Miss Doyle.

I don’t trust anyone, I say, and as soon as I say it, I realize that I’d never really realized it until now. What is a feeling before you feel it?

That can be a very lonely way to live, the doctor says.

I am always here for myself.

Perhaps this is something you tell yourself to feel less lonely?

An accusation clothed in question.

Why or where the things I tell myself come from I don’t know, I say to her. But I would consider that inference faulty. Didn’t you tell me that we’d not get mired in generalities, that we should focus on specifics?

The doctor is anxious, flips through her notes. She’s afraid of losing me. I’m afraid of losing me. She rubs her finger across a page to read it.

In our last session, you mentioned your resistance to education, she says. And as such a schism appeared between you and your father, so what I want to know is how you were able to carry out your plan without the support you’d been seeking from your father.

I thought of the moves no one had thought possible until some genius came along and upgraded everyone’s sense of possibility. There was the contortionism of the Biellman spin. There was that rebuttal of physics in the ‘Tano Lutz. Really every basic maneuver I knew was some experiment passed through history, and I figured I could change the future with the brashness of ingenuity.

I admire your tenacity, Miss Doyle.

Really?

Really, she replies.

I guess I do my best.

It’s all you can ask of yourself.

Ask of yourself. We say things like ask of yourself, and yet, if you tell somebody the conversations you have with yourself, the back and forth that happens, they think you’re crazy for fighting with yourself.

Have you read any Rimbaud? the doctor asks. He wrote, Je est un autre , I am another. To think of yourself as a third party is not crazy, yet it can be problematic. She goes to the bookshelf and hands me a book, but she’s still talking. Were you fighting with yourself?

I was driving myself, I say.

The book is almost destroyed, so I know it has been loved. Pages are beginning to become unhinged from the binding. They are ochre at the edges. I see the doctor’s looping script remarking on several passages in the margins.

You didn’t, perhaps, have some regrets?

I regretted caring so much.

About skating?

About my father. About his contingencies. His care was predicated on me proving myself, and I didn’t. Even my mother knew this. That’s why she told him he had a daughter he only raised when he felt like it.

I understand your disappointment, Miss Doyle, but you can’t blame yourself for caring about your father. It’s natural.

Is it? Our family isn’t.

He has been your father for all of your life you can remember. Anyway, I’d like to rephrase. Nature is irrelevant to our conversation. The love you felt for your father was yours, which is one way of saying that it was okay.

Okay, I say. What I don’t say to her is that when I think about what it feels like to be disappointing to, it makes me not want to be disappointed in.

And perhaps you still haven’t allowed yourself to feel the disappointment in your father, and that makes it much more difficult to move forward.

Why is the I who would allow disappointment to take her down more an I than the one who would decide to be strong?

Miss Doyle, this isn’t a contest of strength and it’s not a contest of authentic selves either. What we’re working with is an emotional process that will return over and over until you allow it to run its course. And it’s okay to feel that your father was not always the man you wanted him to be.

Okay, I say again.

You don’t believe me?

I’m trying to believe you.

That’s an important step.

Well hell, I’d hate to be making uninimportant steps. Said with no sarcasm either, doc.

And what steps did you take to manage your disappointment in your father?

I did the only thing I knew how to do. I tried harder.

I dropped and gave myself twenty — up down up down tick tock tick — then turned onto my back for sit-ups. I curled, squatted, pressed, lunged, crunched until I couldn’t remember any other exercises. A modicum of muscle I was becoming — and oh so efficiently. I looked in my calisthenics notebook, adoring the brash down and diagonal of checkmarks.

Yet even when the purpose is beyond aesthetics, the problem with exercise is that it will never allow you to forget the facts of life. The minutes accrue on the side of accomplishment in negative correlation with the minutes left, like years lived in proportion to years left to live. You look down at the digitized counter, and the numbers cycle from time elapsed to time left in the workout. Sometime around mile twenty, I realized that where once there had been fourteen pills, now there were only six. My plan had taken into account so little of the future, and I realized that I’d have to sacrifice some hours of my progress to support it. I would need to return to AA, which meant I would need money.