Day 28

I was a feminist student activist, former community organizer and young mother who was soon to graduate with a master's degree in sociology when I was offered a job as a Child and Family Therapist. I didn't have a clue what that meant.

Fortunately, there was a book to guide my transition into the professional world of mental health. It is called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short). As a "child and family therapist," I talked with kids (always under the guise of friendship) and observed them in their natural settings. Then I went to The Book and found a label for their behavior.

Sometimes they were Oppositional Defiant, other times Dystymic (which is an impressive way to say depressed). Occasionally I would get a kid with something really exotic, like Trichotillomania. Seriously, I worked with a kid who was a trichotillomaniac. He pulled out his own hair: the hair on his head, his eyelashes. Fortunately he hadn't yet reached puberty.

His poor little head resembled a garden that had been ravaged by angry rabbits. There were little tufts of soft, downy hair, surrounded by smooth canals of pink skin. I always thought that his head was a declaration. He was hurt and sad and angry about his parents' recent divorce and he didn't possess the words to communicate his needs. So he pulled out his hair and he got a prescription for Celexa.

It didn't take me long to realize that I was not a "therapist." I went on to become an "educator." It took me a long time to realize that they are all just labels; boxes we lock ourselves into. Even now I want to call myself a "writer." But what does that mean? Maybe I should get business cards that title me: Carbon Based Life Form. My tagline will read: The rest is a mystery...

We spend our lives trying to explain, understand, communicate, quantify and label our experience. Why is it so hard to simply embrace the mystery? As a writer, this is one of my goals. I want to let go of this need to explain every detail. Whereas some writers strive for thick, rich description, I want to learn to say just enough.

In music, they say that the spaces between the notes are even more important than the notes themselves. It is the silence, the emptiness, that brings the sounds to life. Maybe it's the same with writing. Those things left unwritten, the breaks in continuity, maybe that is the real story.