I have told so many lies in my life that I have lost any real claim to knowing which parts of myself were built and which parts simply grew. This is, as far as I can tell, the central problem of my life, and possibly the central problem of most lives, though most people are lucky enough never to have it demonstrated to them with the thoroughness it was demonstrated to me. I do not say this to excuse anything. I have come to believe that excuses and explanations are different animals entirely, and that a man can offer the second without asking for the first, and I intend, in what follows, to try.
Here is what I believe now, though I did not always believe it, and would not have believed you if you’d told me at twenty: whatever you spend your life running hardest from is very rarely the thing you say it is. It is very rarely even the thing you believe it is. It is almost always, if you have the stomach to trace it all the way back — and I did not, for a long time, have the stomach — connected to some early, specific absence. Not a wound in the dramatic sense. Not always a cruelty, though sometimes that too.
More often it is a smaller and stranger thing:
some part of you, as a child, that was never permitted an audience. A feeling that arrived and found no one home to receive it, so many times, in so many rooms, that you eventually stopped sending it anywhere at all, and built, instead, in the space where that feeling used to live, something else — a performance, a habit, a substance, a person entirely — engineered for a single purpose: to make sure the absence was never felt as what it actually was, the void that left you feeling incomplete, unable to move forward without the nagging awareness that something in you was still missing. That awareness does not go away simply because it goes unspoken. It waits. And it will keep pulling you back to the same unfinished problem for the rest of your life, variable only in its presentation— a different substance, a different lie, a different person to perform for — always arriving from the same exact place that absence was felt.
I was that child. I will not pretend, writing this now, that I can tell you exactly what was missing, because even now, with every advantage of distance and sobriety and the particular clarity that comes only after you have lost nearly everything a person can lose without dying, I still find the absence difficult to name precisely. I can tell you what filled it. I can tell you, in exhausting detail, every strategy I built to keep from ever having to feel its edges again — the lies, the pills, the specific, practiced stillness I could put over my own face on command, the years I spent becoming so fluent in reassurance that I could no longer always tell, myself, when I meant it. What filled the absence I can describe to you precisely, because I spent the better part of two decades perfecting it. The absence itself I only ever got close to, and only very late, and only by accident.
This is not, I should say plainly, a story about drugs, though there are a great many drugs in it. It is not a story about a religious childhood, though that is in it too, and matters more than I understood for a long time. It is a story about a specific kind of compensation — the elaborate, exhausting architecture a person builds, often without ever once deciding to build it, in order to avoid discovering what he actually feels, and what he actually is, and what was actually missing, all those years ago, in the rooms where he first learned it was safer not to ask.
I do not know if the compensation ever really stops. I know that mine did not stop on its own. I know that it took the collapse of almost everything I had constructed — every lie, every prescription, every person who believed a version of me I had built specifically for them to believe — before I was willing to walk back into the room where all of it started and ask, for the first time in my life, what I had actually been missing there, and why I had spent thirty years making sure I would never have to find out.
I am going to tell you that story from the beginning, because I no longer believe it can be told honestly from anywhere else. It begins, as these things usually do, somewhere so ordinary that no one watching at the time would have called it a beginning at all.
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