TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

CLIENT: How are you?

THERAPIST: Hey, good.

CLIENT: I was a little in doubt whether we were meeting today, because of the holiday.

THERAPIST: Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm here.

CLIENT: I'm very conscious about how I'm dressed, because I always criticize my dad for wearing jeans and running shoes, and of course he always wears a sweatshirt. So basically, I am dressed exactly like my dad, except he wears Nikes and I wear the Brooks.

THERAPIST: The Brooks, okay, yeah.

CLIENT: He probably sits like this; he does actually.

THERAPIST: We can't help but become our fathers, you know? [0:01:02.0]

CLIENT: That's it. So, today, I don't know it's yesterday and this morning I was thinking okay, I know I'm not depressed, right? I know what the feels like and this isn't it. But, I was watching this movie with Bill Murray, and he has to take an elephant across the country, and it's this real feel good movie from the nineties, and he's going some of the distance with his father's friend, who is also a carny, and the guy's driving along and they say... So, this is of course the carny life, being on the road, and he goes, "You know what? Your dad always used to say, if you aren't on the road you're in a rut." [0:02:06.5]

THERAPIST: Mm, mm.

CLIENT: Anyway. So, I don't know what road I'm on, or if any, and so maybe there's a rut. So, I've been doing tons and tons of math, because I'm tutoring Dana, and so she's in the depths of upper math right now, and so... And of course the worst feeling in the world is to show up and not know what you're doing. It doesn't get more, ah, I don't know, more sort of memorization based. [0:03:06.9]

THERAPIST: Okay.

CLIENT: With all the identities. There's a whole page, sheet of these, so some 40 identities, which you know, the more you use them, the more you sort of just have them memorized, but that's not really suitable, right? So, trying to prove them to myself. So, you know, last week, this weekend, this morning, just doing lots and lots of this stuff, and happily, I'm very happily doing it, but now I'm sort of at that point of I had this sort of moment of, I don't know, reflection, yesterday. It's interesting that I'm studying trigonometry, because in high school, you know, you use identities of this and that, to reduce things, and you're given some crazy, crazy thing, and you have to convert all the trigonometric functions either to cosigns and signs, and then you know, it's just pages of algebra. And of course the algebraic singles is going to throw you off. In high school, you learn it and it's like six weeks of your life, that's it, right? [0:04:53.7]

So, having that recollection, I'm thinking and I've had this thought before but it was a little more acute, pardon the pun. Dealing with the idea, I suppose, of why am I doing all this, you know just genuine curiosity, but I think there's also this aspect of thinking, I didn't learn it well enough back then. And it's almost like I want to go back in time and sort of like, if I could somehow master lots and lots and lots of this material, it is a sort of symbolic way of starting over.

THERAPIST: Hmm.

CLIENT: Which is weird. It's sort of like a dream of, you know, you wake up in a panic and it's like you didn't finish high school, or there's a class you forgot about, and the exam is Rogerorrow and you realize it's too late to drop, which is another aspect of this dream of being in a panic, right? And so this is a sort of steady way of doing something similar, I suppose, or counteracting it, I don't know. [0:06:23.9]

THERAPIST: Yeah, yeah.

CLIENT: You're just being immersed in something which is ostensibly high school material and yet, you can get by in lots of calculus, without knowing most of this, so the level of trigonometry in a pre-calculus course is heavy duty. And so then I feel dumb, thinking huh, how it is that "harder" things are easier and this stuff seems... It's its own little mystery that is fun, so that's sort of advanced pseudo, (inaudible) fun. But it just becomes some little game, and so it's a little self-defined world of curves. And I never remember being interested with them, you know, I was just doing calculus, but you're just playing the game of okay, here are all the identities and how can I use them and for what, there's something socially logical about it. It's just homework for homework's sake. Can you learn any of this, can you get good algebra, can you do this. [0:08:02.6]

Barbara has the car today, so I took the train, which is a rare thing for me, because having the train, I would have dressed more normally, but I thought, okay, I'm going out in the cold weather and I'm going to be sitting on a train, so I'll just go as is, and no need for me to dress up. So I'm sitting on the train and so then I thought, okay I'm going to switch gears, right? So, I'm sitting, I'll do my linear algebra on the train, so very happily. I don't know whether happily or not, but I wasn't feeling baffled by it, and I just sort of worked the kind of problems I knew exactly how to do and you just have to be very careful, which is the trigonometry book, just be careful. And so I'm sitting there and sitting there and I'm checking the answers on my calculator, and then I got on the Red Line and there was a guy across from me and he's sitting there doing tons and tons of math, and so sort of he looked up at me and I looked at him, and there was this, you know, I thought I don't know, that's maybe the Red Line. [0:09:26.4]

THERAPIST: Brothers in arms.

CLIENT: That's right, brothers in arms. I was expecting him to get off at my T but he didn't, so we both got there.

THERAPIST: I'm curious about that feeling about you feeling behind, and what that what you felt, and what was that like for you, that you were struggling all the time.

CLIENT: Yeah, well it's this is the thing. So, Jimmy and I tended to do equally well, but it mattered like Jimmy... So it was me, Roger and Jimmy, and then of course there were the girls, Jenny, who I feel bad for in retrospect, because I realize she was probably the one who was picked on. She always got good grades but always had a strange fashion sense and she had enormous breasts, and she was a real stick in the mud. And so, and she always wore really tight clothes and yet she was also sort of unfriendly, like puritanical almost. So anyway, it was also a small school, right, so all the classes were tiny. Our teacher, she taught math and she taught theater. Anyway, it's like being in place but also associating another side of her. She was a lot of fun but big. She was overweight, so we teased, you know not her directly, certainly, but she probably picked up on it. And so again, retrospect, thinking God, kids are horrible. And she always had this mental math thing, being a class, so she's put these problems up and then you're just going to go as fast as you can go to do these problems, which was fun. It was just extra credit. So, I know I'm getting off the track, but I will get back to the Roger thing.

THERAPIST: No, that's fine. [0:11:50.9]

CLIENT: But it's sort of memorization, the quickness, the alacrity as well, in math, and then just inserting this memorization way of being in high school, you know, and whether it's church history or whether it was Old Testament or New Testament, you know we had theological lessons every year, so every class, we had to memorize stuff, so it's a big deal. So, always before that class, we would just stand outside the class and we'd try to remember all this, you know, this set of Bible verses or this passage from John Calvin, or a creed. Then you go in and the first one into class, you got a piece of paper and just, we're done. You know, so I guess that's high school. In high school, you're sort of a sponge for things, right? But in math, yeah, so it Roger clearly was better at it than the rest of us, and so he would help us. Or, you know, just let us sort of copy identical problems. So, there was a bit of guilt about that. But you know, just a difference in family, right? So his dad was an instructor of top gun, and so there was this sort of there was... You know, they had a real big house and all Roger wanted to do was play soccer, he was really good at playing soccer, and he and his dad didn't get along, but maybe in some way because they were both sort of these... I don't know, I guess to be a pilot, there's certain a certain competitiveness, I mean if you're a top gun especially, right? [0:14:32.5]

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: And, very calm, but also extraordinarily competent.

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

CLIENT: I mean, so you know, he's the son of this person who is, you know, clearly, you have to be mathematical if you're going to be a fighter pilot, and quick, because the stakes are high. So it's not sufficient to copy someone's homework, because if your life's on the line, you really have to know it. So I remember going over and Roger's dad, you know, they were like both, you know, wiry and fit, and his dad was just off on the couch, just watching TV, and seemed to be sort of brooding in some way. Anyway, and then my family, whatever my family is, perceived, well not that, right? So it seemed like Roger had a different life and yeah, Roger was edgy, Roger was funny, but Roger was... yeah. Had a certain focus but liked horsing around in his Volkswagen Rabbit, liked playing soccer. We'd go flag hunting together, Roger, Jimmy, and I. So in Oregon, I believe this is I don't know if this is on the east coast, but in Oregon, housing tracts are always going up, in Southern Oregon, right? So there were always these new housing tracts, and so when a housing tract goes up, in order to advertise it, they have these big, beautiful flags that go around the periphery of the like adobe wall that surrounds this new community, so people know it's new, and they can go and find the realtor. So these flags were really nice and so at night, you'd go and you'd climb the wall and you'd have this little system of trying to get the flags, so you know, you can go in there and steal flags. And so Roger was very pleased about his great collection of flags, and I didn't really care too much about flags but I liked the adventure. [0:17:03.2]

THERAPIST: Ah-huh.

CLIENT: So it was late at night, going out and trying to get flags. Anyway, so the experience of being in class and you know, I guess he's sort of that quintessential person who I often sort of refer to, who just sort of hears it, gets it, thinks about it, does the homework, done. Of course me, here, get half of it, think huh that's interesting, and then get distracted by something I don't get, and I get stuck, which is I think a totally normal experience certainly. Anyway.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: But we're taking, you know, six other courses in the high school experience, I suppose. You know, it's like well, how much do you actually want to spend really, really trying to figure it out, and basically, you just want to get the homework done because it's due tomorrow and it's high school, so you just do it quicker, in study hall. [0:18:19.1]

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

CLIENT: Yeah, so Jimmy and I, we would try to sort it all out, but then we'd have to go to Roger actually, like, to make sure we got it all right. I needed help on hard ones. Anyway.

THERAPIST: Yeah, so you noticed this difference between -

CLIENT: I did. Also, I didn't I wasn't aspiring to be a mathy person, right? I know I wasn't into math and yet Jimmy wanted to be an engineer.

THERAPIST: Ah-huh.

CLIENT: So, he went off to tech college.

THERAPIST: Right, yeah.

CLIENT: So it's not like it's not like we did the same, you know, he did well in school. It didn't matter to Jimmy, I mean really, in terms of he wanted to think of math as his thing, and that's why he didn't conceive of it as my thing. [0:19:19.7]

THERAPIST: But it came easier to Roger and to Jimmy too, yeah.

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: How was it for the both of you, knowing that Roger just (snaps fingers) got it?

CLIENT: Yeah, I don't know, I don't know. I remember with Jimmy... Yeah, I guess maybe I don't know. I don't know, other than just generally, you know Jimmy's parents are very strict and conservative, and sort of after school, right, I mean we might play Frisbee golf. Jimmy ran cross country, I didn't do cross country, so if he wasn't doing cross country, we'd go play Frisbee golf, because his house was on a golf course, and then go back and eat Hormel chili and Cheez-Its, and then like talk about life, and then actually start doing homework, which was usually math. And so having fun really discussing it, but then, you know, it's like we've got other stuff to do, right? So then we've got to write a paper or memorize our thing for theology. Meanwhile, his sister, who's younger, was in her bedroom playing flute, so all of this is accompanied by flute. [0:21:00.3]

My mom always felt sorry for Jimmy, because and I did too, because his parents never got him a 64-pack of crayons, right? So, I think they thought the 24 was sufficient. Meanwhile, of course, my parents (laughs), especially my mom, was in a mild rage, I mean at the very least, you know you have a 64-pack at school, I see people with it at home, and she would put all the previous 64-packs from previous years, in a giant, big box. Anyway, they had powdered milk, and they were well off, but they didn't have actual milk in the fridge, they just made powdered milk, which always baffled me. So, if Jimmy wanted milk, he'd like mix it up, and you just started at him like, "What the hell?" Anyway. I hope I'm not touching any buttons. I hope you didn't have powdered milk and only a 24-pack of crayons. [0:22:30.0]

Meanwhile, Roger, I don't think I mean like, like I feel like he was always... had this aura about to some degree like just not caring, like crayons, he goes what crayons?

THERAPIST: Hmm.

CLIENT: You know, just almost in a way, dismissive of school but really smart.

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

CLIENT: Or smart enough for it to be seemingly easy.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: Of course Jimmy and I really, really seemed to try. And Roger too, it's not like he didn't work, but his main thing was, you know, playing soccer, so he was always on the city leagues, always racing around. [0:23:33.0]

THERAPIST: It kind of makes me think that in terms of kind of in terms of your sense of things back then is that Roger had the equivalent of a 64-pack of crayons for intellect, and he didn't really care too much one way or the other.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: But you guys knew the difference. And in a way, I sometimes feel that when you kind of make when you make a comparison between yourself and somebody like a Roger, it does feel like you got kind of almost like this feeling of feeling you got less, but that sort of some sense of getting like almost almost as if you've been short-changed or something, compared to the guys that got (snaps fingers), you know that Roger, it comes easily to. [0:24:33.3]

CLIENT: Yeah, well...

[PAUSE: 0:24:42.4 to 0:25:19.3]

CLIENT: I'm flashing to and I'm sort of thinking well, in terms of if I just sort of think, you know, realistically about this, and try to be rational about it, it's like well, everyone has to work, everyone's got their own sort of thing they're dealing with, and I feel like the thing that Roger was dealing with was not inability intellectually, but it was his dislike of his family. So it was emotional things he was dealing with. He wanted to get out. And, so I'm thinking of that, and then also I'm thinking about, you know, before going to Calvin, being educated Christian and having my friend, Abner Thomas, who... you know, it's like every class has one. Every class has somebody who is just really, really good at something and it seems effortless. Abner was a lot of fun and yet, he was one of these kids who, as soon as so, instantly, as soon as the 2E came out, was you know, learning basic, and he was all over it, programming, programming, programming. But, he was always just sort of this rough and tumble sort of guy, and then that came out, which allowed you to program your Lyle, so instantly he was all over Lyle. And so then he came up with this thing, he and his friend, and then I was involved with it, where he was able to figure out I'm not sure how we did this but I found it amazing and really interesting. Figure out the dial tone that would make a payphone spit back quarters. So again, this sort of thing, and then there's like the early days of modems, and so yes, okay, we can go to this payphone. And we'd just go and we'd just collect a bunch of quarters, which was the coolest thing in the world, right? So that's Abner, and he was just sort of like aaahhh! You know and big, he was a tall, muscular guy, right, who loved playing soccer as well. Interesting, that soccer and math in my life, go together with these people. [0:28:07.7]

So, there was Abner, then there was Roger, and so yeah, I don't know. So I guess being impressed by them, by someone who has this sort of like, in my mind, this sort of interesting sort of genius where, just wanting to do this one particular thing, in Abner's case. For Roger, having this infinite passion for that, but wanting to play soccer but having the smarts to just sort of do, you know, the other stuff. And so for me, feeling like hmm, I don't know how to program in Lyle, because I'm only 10, but Abner does and he's like this... he's like you know, this little computer savant, not little but you know, he's just Roger was like wow, Abner is amazing. [0:29:15.3]

THERAPIST: Ah-huh, ah-huh.

CLIENT: It's like how do you learn that stuff? And then, so I guess it's weird, I feel like I'm going back, I mean thinking about you know, being in like the sixth or seventh grade, right? So Abner, who was always cracking jokes and biting his nails, like just has this nervous energy, biting his nails. And the guy sitting next to me just was always wanting to read about the Kennedys. He was always reading these books on the Kennedys. And me, just sort of wanting to, you know, be a good student and looking forward to recess so I can play football and baseball, you know, or basketball, whatever the season was. Then the girl who went through this phase of wanting to go see the nurse and then coming back. She would hyperventilate and then open the door and pass out in the class, and her mother was a stained glass artist, and she was cute. [0:30:36.1]

I don't know, so I guess I sat next to Kevin, who always wanted to read, like he was just barely paying attention to what was going on in class, because he was wanting to read his book. Kevin was just or not Kevin, but Abner was just like ah, a lot of energy and was just sort of impatient being in class, because it was probably going a little slow for him. That girl was always going to pass out for some reason. So it was different then, right? So at that age, it's okay to be pretty good at everything right, and be pretty good to get, you know, all As. And liking writing and believing in school, right? And always really wanting to be the best, so for art contests and for science projects and for presentations and for speeches, always wanting to win the prize. There was always these things, you know, you'd get ribbons. It always mattered to me that I got, you know, the most ribbons. And that's usually the case. [0:32:19.7]

THERAPIST: You did?

CLIENT: But I also knew that it mattered to me, whereas Abner and Kevin, I don't think really cared too much.

THERAPIST: Ah-huh, yeah.

CLIENT: You know?

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: There's the series, right? I'm not sure how I was at seven but yeah, sixth and seventh grade, I guess especially seventh, like, you know, really wanting everything to be the best and being this perfectionist I suppose. Every Saturday, and Barbara finds this hard to believe, when I always tell her I'm a recovering perfectionist, because she's always lamenting the state of my back room that's not as neat as she would like it to be, and saying, I was a perfectionist. And I said every Saturday, I would take everything off the shelves, all of my books, that includes two sets of encyclopedias, all on the bed. I would dust the entire room, top to bottom. I would dust all the books, I'd put all the books back, I'd put all of my Star Wars stuff back, which was a complete set of LEGOs, everything's back, back, back, everything is organized. Then, you know, change the sheets, the bed is currently made, and then finally vacuum, done. That was like this two-hour Saturday night ritual. [0:33:59.3]

THERAPIST: Wow, huh.

CLIENT: So, I'm dialing into things I suppose, like if there was a project, I was going to be the best. And like, seemingly ludicrous intensity, I didn't give credit to peers who seemed not to have the same drive, to just do something that well. It was just, I always had a sense that it was like well, just doing well enough. It's easier today. Anyway, so like I know every kid in Oregon, and so I was doing my report on Oregon, which I guess is a natural thing, right? Every kid has to write about their state in some way. So for, you know, a seventh grader, writing this really massive thing and learning how to do footnotes, which was normal. This was pre-computer, right? So it's like doing footnotes was not as easy as it is today. You have to actually like space things out and like figure it out for these footnotes. [0:35:51.1]

Then we had to make this, I guess it was a diorama of sorts, but something indicating the rustic past of Oregon. This was separate from the report that I did the previous year, and so researching the hell out of it, sort of about these old Spanish huts, and I'd go to a modeling store and getting a tree and getting shrubs, and all this sort of stuff, and it's like thank God my parents actually indulged this, because I'm sure this is very expensive to do. I mean that and that and that and that, and so I go into the craft store, and of course my mom was totally into it, so it was a lot of her and me doing it together. So I'm making this thing and all of a sudden it's like I'm taken in, and it's like, all right, everyone is sort of looking and they're totally impressed. [0:36:53.7]

THERAPIST: Ah-huh, ah-huh.

CLIENT: That's when we got this next, we're in high school, we had the insect collection, so we could learn how to do classifications or that was the main goal, right? So, for some reason, I thought well here's something I can totally turn myself into, and for some reason it's going to mean something. And I was never a person who was into bugs necessarily but all of a sudden, I became obsessed, right? And so my dad taking me to this biolab for getting all these professional mounting boards and all these professional pins, and these professional mounting cases which were not at all cheap. And then he would take me to the college and me going to that department and figuring out and looking at how they did their bugs. It was like, you know, this is like maybe a sophomore in high school. And so I was doing this thing and getting all kinds of stuff and really becoming obsessed and having my butterfly net. I'm sure I was psyched. And then my childhood friend, who was doing the same project, who was not nearly as engaged in it as I was, but then because we were doing it together, all of a sudden she was really into it. So then, and I think, it's like how kind is she, what a nice person. She would often because she realized it meant more to me, sometimes she would get stuff and just give it to me. So then she found this amazing Tiger Swallowtail, so it became the centerpiece of my bug collection, this big, beautiful Swallowtail. And so she saw it, she grabbed my net, she captured it and she gave it to me. [0:39:07.2]

THERAPIST: Mm, mm.

CLIENT: Huh. In third grade, or I guess it was probably around third grade, I don't know why, it just was kind of my mom's response when finding out about this. So I guess it's probably the time in life when you like want to do karate and stuff like that. So, the next door neighbor and I were off to we got these giant pillows and we were just beating the hell out of each other, hitting the pillows and reading our karate books and like studying the moves, and so then it's like I go through that sort of ninja phase, where ropes were good and knots, and being in the Boy Scouts, that knots were good. So, she and her cousin, and I, would tie each other up and try to get out of it. And so then, (laughs) this was the thing. So, we had a maple tree in the front yard and so there I am, she is lying down, and I'm just tying her up, tying her up, and I tied her to the tree, and my mom comes out, "Maybe you kids want to play in the backyard." It's like all the neighbor kids, all these kids are thinking why am I tying her up, not realizing at all. I just thought oh, I'm tying her up. (laughs) Yeah, so then, I don't know, it's I'm not sure at that point, how much I felt competitive, right? [0:41:25.1]

THERAPIST: Yeah, no it seems more like it was boy, it sounds like, I was thinking like kind of a vision of what you wanted to achieve, what you wanted. Kind of like a bit of a visionary in a way. Yeah, there was that kind of ambition in you, but not sparked out of an interest to outdo anybody per se, as much as it was to kind of I was thinking it had much more of an ideal of what you wanted to achieve or something, whether it's, you know, the bug collection, the diorama, whatever. Even your Star Wars collection, you wanted a piece or something like that, it was very important. And I was thinking though, that the struggles in math in some way were it made for kind of left you with kind of an uneasy feeling, around like kind of an ideal you had for yourself academically. Almost like, you know in a way, it's like you couldn't kind of like you couldn't get every Star Wars figure. Well, you also had, I imagine the experience of like yeah, I'm not hitting that mark I want to hit in math, and that it being a really hard experience, a hard experience to kind of digest.

[PAUSE: 0:43:14.8 to 0:44:04.3]

CLIENT: It just feels weird contemplating that time, because I feel like it's so long ago, and I feel like what's the relevance of that now, like why am I contemplating that? Why am I feeling... that? And it's like there's something [pristine?] about it.

THERAPIST: What is it?

CLIENT: There's something pristine, sort of just from this recollection of something far away. Like I'm thinking about just being in my room. I had this massive desk. It was the desk that my poppa had in his office, so it was this sort of giant executive desk, like it had everything but a nameplate. I guess I could have had one made. [0:45:28.9]

THERAPIST: Hmm.

CLIENT: And so really, and always having it, right? I mean, having it in third grade, and sort of in a way, you're growing into it in a way, you know having these big drawers and just a big, nice desk. And so always lots of room to spread out and do my stuff, so to do my work, I guess, right? But then, like sort of having, you know, the two sets of encyclopedias, and Bibles and lots of other books, and then this tall dresser, and then a long dresser. Anyway, so on top of those were the various TIE fighters, Darth Vaders and then Luke Skywalkers, and then the giant death star column that had the compressing walls of the dome, that Hans Solo had flown to with Princess Leah. And of course the land cruiser, and then, you know, just having an aesthetic. I felt like... I don't know, I had everything. I guess it mattered to my parents that I had it.

THERAPIST: Hmm, hmm. Yeah. [0:47:46.9]

CLIENT: So it mattered to them that I had LEGOs, it mattered to them that I had books, it mattered to them that I had Star Wars, collected Star Wars.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: I don't know, so in a way, it felt like my room was a mausoleum of sorts. I'm sure I have pictures of it, oh no, I don't. I cannot remember what kind of blinds I had. I guess they were Levolors. A green carpet, a green shag carpet. [0:48:54.4]

THERAPIST: A mausoleum, huh.

CLIENT: Well, in the sense that I could just go there and shut the door, and it felt like a museum, and it also felt well I guess it's there, right, that you really... as a kid, alone in the room, contemplating death.

THERAPIST: Huh.

CLIENT: And eternity, and then when that's too much, you go and you sort of seek a distraction, or you turn on the radio.

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

CLIENT: Or you turn on other I remember I was never that into music as a kid, so I mean I certainly was not at all I was whatever the opposite of precocious is, like a little delay in terms of wanting to be no music, because the radio was sufficient. But then, having a record player, and then finding all these old albums, and then playing the Beatles and Chicago, "Saturday in the Park." There was something wistful, right, about that, "a man playing guitar." So, yeah, just listening. I don't know, then I guess things sort of sped up, because then, you know, the kid that lived a few streets down and we went to the same church, and he was totally into U2, so we'd play LEGOs and listen to U2, and I was baffled by it, because he thought U2 was the greatest thing in the world. And for me, sort of I didn't have an ear for it because it was all new, and so I was playing LEGOs with him telling me how great, you know, and all about U2. I don't know what I told him exactly, but I'm sure that I felt like I would rather listen to Chicago or John Denver. Anyway, but we'd just sit there and play LEGOs, just you know, because that was the thing. [0:51:52.5]

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

CLIENT: And the other kid, who also went to our school, he lived down the street, and he had this rosy boa, so we'd go to this house to hold the snake. I know I'm on the record for not liking snakes, right, but somehow it was perfectly fine. But then one kid would catch snakes, so I didn't like that, because the boa constrictor was just very mild mannered and that was perfectly fine, but then he would just start catching snakes in the yard, because they lived out in the middle of nowhere, and they would jump and snap and so forth, and I didn't like that at all. And he was famous for killing a pig with a bow and arrow, so I don't know, he showed signs of being a serial killer. He would make crucifixes and put lizards on them and shoot them with a staple gun. [0:53:31.3]

THERAPIST: Hmm, hmm.

CLIENT: Anyway. And my mom hated his mom because his mom told my mom that asthma was entirely psychosomatic.

THERAPIST: Really?

CLIENT: Yeah. So, if I ever wanted to play with him, my mom would just sort of drop me off, but she never, ever wanted to engage with his mom. So this world I'm describing feels very real, that I feel it, right? As opposed to thinking about double angle formulas for trigonometry and reducing formulas and all the other identities, which that's the thing, right? So it begins in high school and I'm very aware of that now.

THERAPIST: Yeah, yeah. [0:54:49.2]

CLIENT: Because I am totally in my head, because now I am inhabiting that stuff so I can teach Dana. So she's in high school, right? So I look at her and it takes effort, like I want to somehow remind myself, think okay, it's a different generation but still, if you're 17, taking pre-calculus... I don't know. I mean, there's a certain way of being if you're a junior in high school.

THERAPIST: We need to stop in a minute or two, but what about you're sort of saying, like the high school feels not as real?

CLIENT: No, no. Yeah, I mean yes, I am confronting that, yeah. I mean, no it doesn't seem real, in the sense that because all of a sudden, it feels more like these things that you just have to know, and it's unclear why, whereas when you're younger, there are these projects and you have more free time and you have a lot of friends. In high school, you have a lot of friends and I was popular, so on the surface I feel like okay, well, I had, at least in principle, a good time, in the sense that I was well liked, if that counts for something. I guess it's better than the opposite. It felt like it was just hard. [0:57:17.5]

THERAPIST: Hmm.

CLIENT: Like you actually had to work. I don't know, so just yeah, a feeling of pressure, of this ludicrous grading scale that you know, as a kid, every Saturday, everything needing to be perfect, but then being in school where the grading scale was based on perfection, was based on this Calvinist notion, where getting an A was a hundred percent.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: It also meant it was 95, and we don't have to be... It's like, you know, if you make 75, you fail. So everyone huh. So, I think it has to do with (inaudible). [0:58:22.1]

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: Is that essentially always anywhere else?

THERAPIST: Yeah, yeah.

CLIENT: And so that feeling of just like... Well, I've described it numerous times and it's not a new subject, but that school versus driving by the public school, which was a quarter mile down the road, and being afraid of it to some degree. You had Goths and punkers and dropouts and skateboarders. I skateboarded but they were skateboarders.

THERAPIST: Yeah. Big public school.

CLIENT: I feel like there, you could sort of find your niche, whereas at my school, I mean it felt monochromatic.

THERAPIST: Mm, mm-hmm.

CLIENT: Everyone is white, everyone's middle class, which I guess is a suburban, where high schools are. Yeah, it wasn't like like I look at Katie, like Katie never seems flustered out of school. She's done now, I mean she graduated. I never saw her working that hard and granted, she's really smart, so I mean she has that. I mean she's crazy smart but still, it's like I don't know, maybe she's sort of Roger in some way. [1:00:09.5]

THERAPIST: Hmm.

CLIENT: Just sort of like she's very minimal, don't care, totally care. And I know we've got to stop, but you know, this was a couple years ago. She had to write this paper to get into honors English, and she didn't want to be in honors English, because that didn't work. So she had to write this essay and it was a good essay, but I go through and I have my pen out, and I was just going to start editing it, so she just made you know, because I though, oh it's a rough draft, you know, she'll go and she'll fix it and it was perfect. She goes, "No, no, don't do that." I said, "Well, don't you think you've got to fix this?" She goes, "No, no, it's good enough." And my mom looked at me and she knew the pain I was feeling over that, because my mom... that's Katie. It's like you and I believe that everything has to be perfect, and everything can only be better, and the first thing you write is the first of many drafts. [1:01:11.5]

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: And that's what you and I believe, but Katie's not like us. (chuckles) She does it once and that's where it is, and it's usually pretty good but not as good as it could be, and so Katie is not like a perfectionist. Anyway, so, to want to do really well and then sometimes not.

THERAPIST: Yeah, yeah.

CLIENT: I guess it's a theme, right?

THERAPIST: Yeah, yeah.

CLIENT: Not doing well enough on the SAT, taking it again when school's over, not doing well enough on the MCAST.

THERAPIST: Yeah. [1:02:11.5]

CLIENT: So then there's a feeling, like why am I even maybe I should just dress like this.

THERAPIST: Well, kind of like, I guess that's well I guess in some way, like I was thinking about what's the point of having a collection if you can't complete it. You know, like in some way, that same feeling of you weren't able to get that like the perfectionism, it's less about hitting it, getting you know, reaching the mark, as it is, it seems to me in some way, not hitting the mark is the much bigger deal. It leads to a lot of kind of like questions and uncertainties and what you do have, what have you got, what have you got? And I was just thinking that in some way, my impression of you in high school was that one aspect that was difficult is that you were contending with really, feelings of struggling, of not doing as well as relatively speaking, academically, than you were in the past, and not having a clear way to make up that ground, not having a clear way of like it didn't matter if you worked harder and harder and harder. That you were alone with it, in some way. I'm also aware of that being roughly the time when your mom was focusing her energy more towards kind of the social work, kind of, isn't that right? [1:03:56.6]

CLIENT: Well, dealing with all these kids, right. She worked at the Department of Human Services, where these kids were abandoned and abused.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: And had these just horrifying stories of neglect and abuse. So, yeah, I feel like my mom was giving all of her time to those kids, who deserved it, compared to me, because we live in a big house and I go to private school. What's my problem?

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: And I have a brand new car, and my dad, he's got a brand new truck, I go to a private school, I live in a big house, everything's fine.

THERAPIST: Yeah. But in some way a tragedy was going on within yourself around that age, about the academics that was really quite powerful to you, very, very powerful. I mean, I'm just thinking about how much struggling really, really affected you, it really affected you. And you were kind of my sense is that you were trying to navigate that, and you were having to navigate that on your own. And maybe even it being hard to kind of bring it up, maybe even hard to talk through that place with... [1:05:28.7]

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: Well, anyway.

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