CHAPTER 1


THE SCENE WAS GOING BEAUTIFULLY. The “homeless people” in line with me for bread and hot stew couldn’t have been better cast and costumed. Nice touch by the Director to have some of them smell the part, too. Made it real easy to stay in character. I sat down at an empty table with my brown plastic tray, its patterns worn smooth by years of use. Nodded my head very briefly in gratitude, and dug in. A volunteer sat down across from me and smiled gently.
“Is this your first time with us at Pine Street Inn Shelter? I’m Brett. We’re glad you’re here,” he said.
I took another gulp of stew, tore off a big hunk of bread, pretended to be too hungry to answer. Furtive glance up and slightly to the left, then face back down to within inches of my bowl. It had been at least two or three, well, hours since I ate some spicy wings, a cheeseburger, fries, onion rings, a vanilla milkshake, a coke, and a piece of mudpie. My credit card worked just fine at the upscale Boston sports grill. The only problem was, I didn’t feel like I belonged there anymore.
I was going to struggle to keep the stew down and hit my lines if I ate any more.
“Wow you must be hungry,” he said.
I grunted and flashed my eyes at him. ‘Ya think?
“That’s a really cool scarf. You warm enough? I can probably find you an old sweater or something,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said, putting my spoon down and almost looking him in the eye.
I slowly remove my scarf. A bell chimes. Everyone looks up for a split second. I begin a scarf performance‑art improv.
“Check it out! It doesn’t just represent linear time, like when I stretch it out flat like this—”
Brett, meet Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll had to leave. Summoned by bell. Last minute change to the script. Just hang with me, your cues will be obvious.
Timing my hand movements with my words and with standing up in a smooth ballet of poise and presence,“—it can also represent some sort of Samsara, like this,” I say, my eyes wider than Brad Pitt’s in 12 Monkeys as I fold one end of the scarf back to the other, hold the ends together with one hand, and gracefully lift the scarf into a circle.
I have Brett’s attention, although there are supposed to be four or five extras converging on the table around us by now. They’re all late.
“But that’s not really how the Universe works, not space, not time…” Don’t rush this…where the hell is the rest of the audience? Well, you can’t hang on this beat any longer.
“The way it works, the way we work, the way it was and ever will be, has no inside/outside…” I slide one end of the scarf slowly away from the other “No above/below…” pull the two ends apart and taut so there is an obvious top and bottom “No left and right…” hold it vertically “Or us and them…” diagonally now “Time, space, you, I, the past, the future, the sun and moon, kings and queens and dog and bitch, hills and valleys and God and snitch…” I am now twisting the right side over half a turn, and have laid the middle of the scarf on the table as I bring my two hands together, the scarf making a sideways eight: an infinity. I put my hands together with the twist, and remember to project to the galleries, deep from the diaphragm, “We…are all…One!”
I bow. Quickly bring Dr. Jekyll back on stage to mumble, “Er, that’s a Möbius strip, just for the record. For the archives. In case the camera didn’t catch the twist. It will mean more to the geeks. Peace.”
I sit back down and drop my pie hole into my stew and keep my head down, counting silently, as long as I can until I must rise for a breath. I get to twenty‑three‑mississippi and sit up, stew dripping from my nose.
Brett can’t help the laugh, but his eyes are wide with the concern of somebody sitting across from a proper madman.
“Let’s play a game,” I say to him, wiping the dark gloppity‑glop off my nose and chin onto the sleeve of my faded jean jacket.
“Uh, sure.” He looks around for support, quickly cocks his head toward me and raises his eyebrows. If there had been a little red button under the edge of the table, he would have pushed it a while ago.
“It’s called pick the real me. Ready?” I say.
“Not quite ready. Almost though. Maybe just tell me your name first?” Brett says.
“We’ll get to that. Now…” I pull my leather wallet out. Slam it down on the table, flick it open. Thumb the cards snick, snick—plastic sliding past plastic and leather to get free. I fan the laminated rectangles out in front of Brett. IDs, credit cards, backup credit cards, ATM cards, licenses for cars, for airplanes, membership cards for more than one yacht club. I tell him to pick one. He looks at it, shows it to me.
Kevin Hall, Brown University.
“So you’re Kevin?” Brett says.
“Nope, try another one,” I say.
“Visa, name on card Kevin Hall. Same name.”
“Not me. Try this one.” I push one up a little, like you do to help your adorable niece pick the right card playing Go Fish.
“Kevin Hall, member 1989 US Sailing Team,” Brett says. “Still not you?”
“None of them are me—” I throw everything but my bouncer‑fooling fake ID at him. “This is me! This one! It’s the only fake one! I’m a fraud! This is my proof.” And I flick it at him sideways, just missing Brett’s eye. It flutters to the floor. He bends down to pick it up.
“OK, uh…Anson. Do you want me to call you Anson?” Brett says.
“No, not an‑son, not a‑son, not in‑the‑sun, not over done. Call me Shaun. No Shem. Sorry, nevermind. Call me whatever you want. Just make it stop. Please, make it stop.” I slam my forehead onto the table and burst into tears, real tears. Anguished, imploring, running‑river tears.
Then I hop up, smile, bow quickly to Brett, to the left, to the right, grab my scarf, and run out of the shelter into the cold December night.




CHAPTER 2

BOSTON ’89 WAS MY FIRST EXPERIENCE with the imagined Director. I was twenty years old. My reality, viewed from the outside, had a population of exactly one. Inside my head, the whole world was in on it. They knew I was The One.
Twenty‑four years later, I hadn’t been hospitalized for fourteen years when I lost track of consensus reality during a family reunion. My kin managed to lure me out of Legoland and into an afternoon intervention. The cheap Days Inn bedspread scratching the back of my legs was the only thing I was sure was real. Actors pretending to be my wife, sister, and parents said things scripted to provoke me. Mean things. Sad things. Impossible things. They were not my family. My family, was They.

A year after Legoland, I flew from New Zealand to see Dad in LA for Thanksgiving. I asked if he wanted to talk about raising a son with mental illness. I asked what that day at Legoland was like for him. He didn’t sugarcoat:
“I felt disrespected. I couldn’t believe I had to waste a thousand dollars and a week of my life to be a part of that.”
I didn’t go on to ask about how he felt about the family line ending with me, as a result of my two separate bouts with cancer. I didn’t need to hear that my ancestors feel disrespected too.
If you had asked me whether I believed in myself when I was nineteen, I would have told you I didn’t understand the question. I would have told you I knew my place in the world. That I was exactly where I belonged. I might have told you that I was the best sailor in the world.
I started sailing when I was five years old. By the time I was twelve, I had read every book about sailboat racing in print, along with The Agony and the Ecstasy about Michelangelo, some Michener, and all of my parents’ Time Life Series books about artists. I read a few Time Life books about World War II for good measure. It was all about Winslow Homer, Leonardo da Vinci, and P‑51 Mustangs for me.
I was lovingly provided the support and resources necessary to excel at anything. I chose sailing. Mom drove me up and down California to compete on the weekends. I won my first world championship at age sixteen.
I got to do a lot of flying with Dad, earning my pilot’s license soon after becoming a sailing world champion. I was chosen for early admission to the Ivy League. I finished high school, left my pretty and popular girlfriend back in California, and headed east. Long blond hair. Confidence to spare. If the world wasn’t my oyster, it’s because I was on top of it.
Then, junior year at Brown, my mind betrayed me. Senior year my body did too. Then my mind, then again my mind. Then my body, then again body. Then mind, mind, mind…like that. For ten years straight.
I was one of the last people to have the words manic‑depressive written on my chart. And, among the first wave to be relabeled with bipolar disorder. As if euphemizing the name made it better. The mood swings got larger, more frequent, and far more dangerous well after the name for my natural disposition was castrated.
There are two ways to look at what happened to me in the fall of 1989. The safe, sanctioned explanation is to simply say my body attacked my brain, like this:
I got a fever of 104° F. My skin erupted in a violent rash all over my back, legs, and face. My brain swelled and pressed against the inside of my skull. My neurons short circuited. My brain caught fire. I went mad. It wasn’t MY fault, it was my body’s.
The damage done by those tempestuous weeks of fever and rash left my brain vulnerable. My previously dormant biological psychiatric illness never slept again. I was born manic‑depressive. It was only a matter of time. My fate was always to make a scene. The diagnosis was simply the last one on stage.
It’s a forgiving perspective, which explains everything. This is helpful.
How I am is not me. It’s my Illness. It has a name, symptoms, and cure.
The other way to look at my challenges used to be unthinkable to me. Now, I see it as part of a wider perspective on a very complicated picture.
I had two academic passions. Mathematics, and French literature. I know, a bit schizo right? Backing up, I had only applied to two colleges. Brown University, and the United States Naval Academy. Not exactly sister schools. I was accepted for admission by both. Navy was an efficient path to having the Government pay for my fuel to fly jets. The easiest way to boil down the decision is to say that I didn’t want to be told when to brush my teeth or cut my hair.
I really liked math. But I was used to being the best thinker in math class. Not anymore. Not at Brown. As the leaves turned to reds and golds the fall semester of my junior year, I enrolled in two upper‑level math classes. Differential Geometry and Topology conspired to shunt me away from my handful of exceptionally bright classmates into the dunce’s corner of Euclid fans.
I adored French literature. When I opened a French book, I fell ass over teakettle into imaginary worlds two steps removed from waking, Anglophone life. Seventeenth century, nineteenth, twentieth…didn’t matter. A dreamer is freer in a second language. (Samuel Beckett, though Irish, wrote much of his best stuff in French.)
A description of my two majors as “bipolar” isn’t silly. Math: practical, precise, proven to be helpful in a world of men and money. French Lit: navel‑gazing, or escapist. Or else super‑serious Absurdism.
Not long before I was to graduate from Brown, I got ambushed picking up a girlfriend in New York City for one of our early dates. The whole clan was there in her parents’ Upper East‑Side apartment to size up the new tribeless boyfriend. Some had driven in from halfway out on Long Island. As I stepped through the front door, my date’s aunt fired point‑blank: “What are you gonna do with a degree in math and French literatchuh?”
So here’s the second, more complicated way to look at my meltdown: I was disintegrating, right down to my core. I wanted to continue to pursue math, I loved it. But it was becoming clear that I sucked. I also wanted to pursue French Lit, I loved it, but Aunt Mary‑Bette was right to ask. What, exactly, would I do with a degree in French literature?
I used to cling to the absolution that came with putting all my struggles down to bad luck, to a body playing mean tricks on me, and to a trendy diagnosis. However, I now believe that my mind—or perhaps my Soul—made sure I didn’t miss the invitation to see that I might be barking in the middle of a forest of hollow trees.
Joseph Campbell talks about the seat of the soul being that place where the outer world and one’s inner world meet. My outer and inner worlds were colliding head‑on when I dragged myself to the infirmary with a violent rash. I had midterms the following week, and I was going to fail.
Instead of stepping down, resting, and reflecting, I did the opposite. The second I got off the IV drip, I doubled down on the stress, tripled up on the caffeine, and went for broke on the determination. Then, I cracked.
Did my stress divert all remaining powers from my sanity force field? Did madness pass into me from a fraternity party sneeze, or maybe the morning dew? Once inside my body, did the insurgents give me a fever, swell my brain, and cause me to lose track of what was real and what wasn’t? Maybe. That’s the chicken theory.
The egg theory is messy. It’s jagged. It has taken me twenty five years to swallow: the arrow points the other direction.
I was in trouble. I was smacked from peacock to feather‑duster when I realized that in the world of math I was barely a guppy in an ocean of white whales. There was no map for passing through magic French doors which led to a roof over my head and food on the table. At least, not a table set with the silver and privilege to which I had become accustomed.
In a world where “what do you do?” and “who are you?” seem to be interchangeable to potential future in‑laws, I couldn’t answer either question. I went insane fighting to keep the ideas of who I was and what I did separate. My mind was well on its way to splitting—which would have shown up soon enough—when my body flinched first with a fever and a rash. A few short weeks later, I played the madman and the fool, got arrested, then locked up to sit still and drool.
The Western, medical model had the cause outside the patient. So, give him pills, restore the neuro‑electrico‑biochemical balance, and get him back in the game. Job done. Case closed.
As soon as I stopped drooling, moved out of the locked ward, and caught my breath, I ran right back out on the field. Like nothing with spiritual or self‑identity implications had happened. I didn’t slow down. Not in class, not in training, not on the racecourse.
Well, my body tried its hand again at getting my Soul’s attention. This time, instead of crazy, it was cancer.

Losing one nut is, in a relative sense, not a big deal. That’s not how it felt at the time, and I don’t mean to be glib. But with a remaining testicle, the system still works. It’s actually easier to answer the question, “How’s it hangin’ ?” And hearing about how something must have “really taken balls” doesn’t clang the same way it clangs once you have none.
So to review:
Junior year: Crazy.
Senior year: Cancer.
Fast forward through the next ten years: Following year—crazy again. Next year—huge operation to remove the lymph nodes from my sternum to my groin and clean out the metastasized cancer. But the nodes were all negative, benign. Nothing there. Major medical mystery! Not exactly the way I wanted to be unique, fascinating, and deserving of great attention. The mystery solved itself a few weeks later when my remaining testicle hemorrhaged, announcing I was to become a crazy castrato at twenty‑three.
Over the next seven years, I rode along for seven more acute manic episodes. That makes it sound tidy. It was not tidy.
Police arrests, gurney restraints, nightmares while strapped to a plastic bed wet with my own urine, locked wards, Group therapy, Day/Night Room, and the eventually earned euphoria of the five minutes of freedom for a cigarette during “smoke break!”. I only smoked with my peeps in the nuthouse, but there were times that cigarette was all I lived for.
Ensuing depressions. Some suicidal.

Once the chronic bipolar disorder diagnosis won out over encephalitis, Lyme disease, or any other temporary physiological or neurological causes, father came to believe that all of my psychiatric challenges were avoidable. This has been hard on our relationship recently. To Dad, the times of uncertainty have always been a simple case of medication regimen noncompliance.
He was always there for me. He has always loved me. He has always wanted me to be healthy, happy, and prosperous. But his model of me proposes that manic episodes betray a simple lack of willpower. Essentially, the choice to fuck it all up.
He’s entitled to boil my life down to whether or not I took the purple pill. As an emergency room doctor I’m sure it seems that cut and dry. Symptom/cure. Gushing blood/tourniquet. Broken leg/cast. Just take your medicine, and if you haven’t, don’t call me.
But right there, hidden in the evasive name of the condition, is the truth. There are two sides to the story. Maybe stopping the medicine is an attempt to cure something deeper, and far more painful or scary than losing jobs, friends, or even sanity.
I have lots to show for the times I did exactly what the world asked of me. I took my MEDS. I drank the protein shakes, lifted the weights, incurred the debts, kept the jobs, paid off the credit cards, jumped through the hoops, and sailed around and around the buoys. I got the leather jacket—the one with the Olympic rings on the back. I’m an Olympian. “Never Former, Never Past” it says on my keychain. I’ve won races as the navigator in the America’s Cup finals. And I have a marvelous, loving family.
But when my friend died in a tragedy of splintering black carbon fiber and foaming salt spray two years ago and I helped pull his dead body out of the water, there it was again. Life is unbelievably fragile. I only have one chance—this life—to find out who I really am.
Maybe there are clues in my past. In the place my outer world and my inner worlds first collided head‑on. Maybe my soul knew itself already then, and my head has been getting in the way ever since.
My French honors thesis won an award, which came with a very practical $200 prize. American dollars. The ultimate vote of confidence.
“Les lettres d’amour de Marguerite Duras et Ludwig van Beethoven” ‑ The Love Letters of Duras and Beethoven proposed that Beethoven’s famous “Immortal Beloved” letter was never sent to a particular woman, because it was written to Love itself. The letter was a breakwater against his desperate isolation, and an optimistic transmission to a future self. The mystery surrounding her identity is the wrong question.
Beethoven’s famous letter begins “My angel, my all, my very self.” I believe those words could be taken at face value. My thesis ends “L’imortelle bien aimée, c’est donc l’amour.” The Immortal Beloved, therefore, is Love.
So there you are. Twenty‑two years old, three‑time All‑American sailor. Now, do you sign up for the immediate status and paycheck of turning pro, or do you walk the other way and hope the news that his son is going to be an Artist garners Dad’s support? Yeah, right.
* If you choose to be an artist, close the book.
* If you choose to be a pro sailor, turn the page.

I don’t actively begrudge my professional‑athlete self. Competitive sailing, the quest to become an Olympian, the striving with a team to win the America’s Cup, were quintessentially purposeful. They gave direction and meaning to a man who desperately needed those things to define himself and even to survive.
My midlife unraveling two years ago at Legoland comes down to a simple series of questions: Is Who I am the same as What I do? Is What I do the same as My job? And finally, If I hang up my jersey, if I dare to try my hand at something else, will I survive?
Searching for answers to those questions has been every bit as challenging and terrifying as a narrow escape from a lethal crash, as living with bipolar disorder, even as scary as facing cancer a second time.
I used to quip that the book I wanted to write some day should be called Cancer Was the Easy Part. Meaning, living with bipolar is much harder. What’s been really hard, is only now appreciating just how much all of the desperate strivings for external validations which I have leaned on all my life occluded me from Grace.

David Foster Wallace was a much better writer than I am competitive sailor. His last day on earth was September 12th, 2008. He was forty‑six years old when he hung himself from his patio rafter. In his garage nearby, he left the lights shining on a two page note and the unfinished novel The Pale King.
I am forty‑five years old, I was born September 11th, and I believe in ghosts. There are days when I’d find peace sooner if I followed him into that garage, wrote the note, and ended the drama. If you harbor the capacity for infinite sadness, once the dangling carrot of Achievement reveals itself to be a spiritual mirage….
Look, I’ll stop name dropping soon. Promise. Mostly, it’s that I’m insecure, and like Alanis Morissette sings about in “Would Not Come”, I still have this silly idea that cultured words would garner more respect.
I’m not asking you to accept my life. I’m begging myself to. If there is such thing as a vocation, if there is such thing as an Authentic Self, the fatal crash was my wake‑up call to search for it more courageously.