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RECAP: Two days before Christmas, 2023, I underwent a neuropsychological evaluation that uncovered neurodivergence in the form of acute ADHD, which caused me to fail at school from first grade until my freshman year at college, when I reached my majority, dropped out, and turned my back on the torture of a standardized education system that made little room for diverse intelligences, muddling my way through life as an autodidact, learning the only way I could: experientially. My abnormal linguistic abilities masked the disorder and fooled everyone, foremost of all me.
The diagnosis has been a constructive disruption of how my mind has always perceived the way it works: I’m no longer a willfully eccentric neurotypical, uncompromising in my narrow focus of career choice as a creative professional, but a typical divergent thinker who has never had a choice of career outside of the creative professions, and who must manage normal reactions shared by many of my fellow neurodivergents to a world not built for minds like ours.
TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS 1 AM
For two years around the turn of this century, I mostly worked as director Marcus Nispel’s amanuensis, writing pitch treatments for commercials based on his extemporized thoughts about storyboards on conference calls with ad agencies, and developing feature film projects splashing around on his bucket list, the sort of films that I signed up to make when I was 18.
At the time, Marcus had been the highest-earning director in the world for three years in a row. Every so often he took actions that made him notorious as being “difficult” to work with — the opposite of my experience these past twenty-four years, entirely trial and execution by rumor — and the subject of scorn and ridicule among his chronically jealous peers whom he regularly outbid and out-client-schmoozed.
Most famous of his antics was publishing ‘The Marcus Manifesto’ for his regular crew, which Stephen Soderbergh printed out and distributed throughout Hollywood. It was pure schadenfreude on the part of a director who had his own mental health issues that had pushed him into emotional collapse a few years after he won the Palme d’Or at the age of 26, which Soderbergh got out of his system via an autobiographical movie, the unwatchable Schizopolis.
To outsiders, the manifesto presented Marcus as a capricious, borderline-insane diva. It infamously laid out directives from Herr Direktor such as when he walked on set, nobody was to look at him, and a jar of jellybeans with all the yellows taken out had to be placed just so to the right of his chair.
By calling what was, in reality, a set of workplace protocols for a production team that worked for him full-time a “manifesto,” Marcus was alluding to the flawed characterization that surrounded all Germans as being humorless martinets. It was typical of his quirky humor, his way of trying to soften the urgent imposition of on-set rules following a near-fatal mishap when a piece of equipment crashed from above, narrowly missing background actors who were wandering around, not properly corralled within an area of the set called ‘extras holding.’
The holding area is exactly what it sounds like, a part of all film sets expressly mandated by standard industry safety protocols that are intended to avoid an incident like the one that occurred on Marcus’ set.
Our shared circle of friends and colleagues tittered now and then about the manifesto and his other eccentricities; industry gossip is a crucial part of Hollywood culture like it is in no other industry sector besides politics, both despite and because of how destructive its inaccuracies can be — celebrity prestige is valuable currency that is borrowed against through association. The more of an insider you prove yourself in conversation, the more the other celebrity-adjacent colleagues you’re speaking to will value you.
Marcus most pronounced visual eccentricity was his style of dressing: as a passionate devotee of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) of ninety-six Rolls Royces and group-sex-as-meditation fame, he dressed in loose, Indian-silhouette garments dyed Buddhist maroon or Hindu saffron, with a long wood-bead mala necklace with a medallion holding his guru’s portrait around his neck, per the cult’s custom.
Pursuing an esoteric Eastern path, or even a “spiritual window shopper’s” bespoke personal practice borrowing from many different traditions, was hardly unusual anywhere in California, much less Hollywood. But by the early 90s, Osho and his organization were stripped of legitimacy by galactic scandals and conspiracy theories, considered a joke; to support him so flagrantly was the sort of disruptive act of defiance I admired in Marcus, something I might do were I not already a dervish in a traditional Persian Sufi order.
I’d also lived in India for too long to consider Osho a joke, a healthy portion of it in the household of Indian Rajneeshis whom I adored. I saw Marcus’ chosen path from an immersive experience that gave me a cultural perspective and respect that few Americans shared.
Marcus’ other eccentricities included not knowing how to drive a car or use a cell phone, and never handling money, despite a fixation with accumulating it like no other creative professional I’ve ever met, coupled with a terror of losing it that likely exceeded that of his grandparents, who lived through the economic hardships Germany experienced after the Great Crash of '29 compounded by crippling reparations paid to the Allied Powers after World War I, which fueled the rise of Nazism and the subsequent fathomless national humiliation for pre-Millennial Germans.
A mutual friend explained, “He says it’s because he has difficulty with math and seeing numbers, so can’t read the signs and the odometer, but it’s bullshit: he just wants to be driven around like Rajneesh was, with an assistant placing calls for him. And, I’m sorry, but having Dyan calculate their share and pay the check in restaurants is deliberately humiliating.”
I found Marcus’ legendary quirks fascinating; as an outsider’s outsider who marched to the beat of his own twenty-piece band of thundering kettle drums and clashing cymbals, I was nobody to throw aspersions.
From my perspective as an unshakable believer in the concept behind Howard Gardner’s under-developed and overly simplistic Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Marcus possessed a genius-level mind split unevenly between three of the eight intelligences. In order of dominance:
the visual-spatial intelligence of a top-tier fine artist — he can draw, paint and sculpt like the best of them;
a powerful linguistic-verbal “gift of the gab” gliding over fluid oral storytelling and extemporizing techniques that would’ve made most people who weren’t aware of the elevated level of his visual-spatial skills assume his linguistic intelligence was dominant;
the kind of formidable interpersonal intelligence capable of seducing the most jaded of creative directors and subsequently booking gigs like no other commercial director before or after.
My brain has a similar split between:
a linguistic-verbal intelligence that until six weeks ago had rendered an otherwise glaring learning disability invisible from everyone’s view like a Star Trek cloaking device, my self-view included;
a self-reflective intrapersonal intelligence so profoundly detailed that it’s exhausting and annoying to my fellow extreme extroverts but interesting to those introverts who can follow a decent amount of my tangential ramblings;
enough visual-spatial intelligence that I’m able to illuminate my essays with illustrations I’ve designed and executed myself, such as the feature image of this piece.
Meta to my point: You’re literally reading my mind. With the exception of the Call Me By Your Name exposé, which bestselling memoirist Emma Walton-Hamilton corralled and streamlined but didn’t strip of my writer’s voice, everything I’ve written for this Substack has been published without redactions based on the opinions of producers and editors. It’s as pure, unapologetic, and authentic a reflection of how my mind works and its particular melange of intelligence types as my written voice can get.
“Reading your work is pleasurable, goes down so smoothly, like sipping a glass of fine red wine,” Dr. Borkheim said a few months after I launched this newsletter, the palm of his left hand open as if cradling an invisible tablet, his miming a glass wine tilting toward his face.
I believe that what gives my writer’s voice the impression of being smooth and effortless is that I’m by and large unselfconscious about style; I don’t fret over literary quality or seek to impress readers with how capable and talented I am. Among the many benefits of writing this is I’m able to extract the tangential jungle of thoughts tripping over each other along misconnected neural pathways and give them clarity and structure in sentences and paragraphs.
Much as I find the process of writing to be as smooth and pleasurable as my therapist’s cabernet, I’ve never had any ambitions of becoming a writer. I declared my vocation of becoming a film director when I was 18, during my first and final year at Wesleyan, and have pursued it with ADHD-powered hyperfocus ever since.
I taught myself screenwriting at photographer Pamela Hanson’s suggestion over the five years following my stint as her assistant in Paris, after she fired me for forgetting the film in my hotel room one day on location in Sierra Leone, having already dubbed me “Fog” a few months previously — with filmmaking my vocation, I was losing focus on fashion photography. I called her “Snappy,” from the children following us around, calling out to be photographed, “Missus! Missus! Snappy?”
I booked my first screenwriting gig when I was 24, having already been fired from the supermarket glossy where I was features editor — that held my attention even less than photography — with Muzaffar Ali in Bollywood, where they built scripts around songs, and filmi-lekhaks delivered lines to performers a few hours before shooting, the ink still drying. The characters’ names were irrelevant: “heroes and heroines” of a certain stature worked on too many films at once to remember; they were called “taxi productions” because of the constant zooming back and forth from different soundstages, often on the same day.
As the only American screenwriter in Bollywood for many years, my structured scripts that more or less conformed to standard Hollywood formatting were a much-appreciated novelty that nobody adopted.
Marcus explained his outsider brain when were chatting late into the night after a script meeting at his splendid, unusual house in Malibu, split between an upper house on a cliff and a grand shingled beach cottage below, built on concrete pylons over the Pacific. Both halves were joined by a two-passenger funicular cable car.
He’d been aware of his divergence since it was outed in math class when he was twelve, if I remember correctly. Just as I masked my learning disability with linguistic-verbal skills, he’d faked his way through math classes by drawing whatever was on the blackboard, and by flying under the radar by never participating, doing his best to be invisible.
“Then the teacher asked me to solve something basic on the blackboard. I couldn’t do it. So he started quizzing me, going more and more basic until it turned out I didn’t even know that two plus two equals four.”
He was administered what I’m assuming was a neuropsychological evaluation similar to the one I did in December, “And it showed that I was an infant when it came to math, but off the charts in my cognitive abilities.”
At the time I didn’t see it because of the enormous gap in income and industry standing — I assumed he much was older than me; married straight people with children often seem more mature to gays — but over the past ten years I’ve come to see myself as yin to Marcus’ yang.
“He’s straight and rich, I’m gay and poor,” is my flippant way of reductively framing a complex dynamic.
It’s more than that: we’re the same height, born a month apart, both bearded, although he shaved his off recently for a new relationship. The complexity emerges when we’re having a conversation, the mind-melding of our tangential thinking is as if we’re speed-skating, weaving in and out of each other perfectly smoothly — we don’t drop a single thread of thought.
Whereas my dentist said the other day, “You know, I love listening to you, but I only understand half of what you’re saying.” It’s not because she’s drilling away in my mouth and I can’t speak properly; she pauses to give me a break and asks specific cultural-philosophical questions. She’s not the only one.
Much as I hate to ascribe blame to identity issues, there is probably some validity to the fact I haven’t been nearly as successful as Marcus because of my sexuality — until recently, Hollywood execs were flagrantly homophobic. For many years I thought it was due to something Marcus observed one day after I asked him to set up a meeting with his agent at CAA for representation, “Forget about it. They want mainstream. You’re not mainstream; you’re a maverick’s maverick, the ultimate outsider.”
While I can see Marcus’s point back in 2000, it shouldn’t apply today. Diversity means a lot more than casting nonwhite actors in traditionally white roles. Mainstream isn’t what Millennials and GenZ want; the challenge is that Hollywood is governed by neurotypical executives in charge of making creative decisions.
A few years ago my creative partner Rain Li booked us a detective thriller with a production company in Beijing. Rain is the improbably strong female lead in real life, a total ninja warrior queen. She said, “Darling, we’re making a crime movie. The detective is based on a real person, China’s first female forensic pathologist.”
I immediately expressed doubts about my suitability as a scriptwriter because I’d never worked in that genre before. “Don’t worry, darling,” she said. “You’re great at solving puzzles.”
What Rain meant was I was conflating weaving clues and misdirections into a crime-thriller plot, with all of the tricks of that particular genre, with solving how to make narrative elements fit together in any number of plausible ways.
If there are a thousand ways to skin a cat, I’ve long prided myself in my ability to find the thousand and first way to tell a story. The ability to come up with so many creative possibilities is the definition of divergent thinking.
That night after the script meeting, with the Pacific heaving and churning hypnotically beneath the living room, Marcus and I skated in and out of each other’s thoughts, talking about Sufism, movies, books, my experiences in India, Osho, the concept of love from the view of esoteric traditions.
At a certain point, he looked up at the large analog clock on the wall in the open kitchen. “Shit,” he said. “It’s already 1 AM.”
The clock read “2.”
A RARELY USEFUL SUPERPOWER
In ‘Boy, Interrupted,’ I described how when I got home from the neuropsych eval in December my mind began rapid-cutting memories like the opening seconds of a Marvel movie, redacting the received impression that I was an evil, lazy, spoiled, ungrateful child who did badly in school to spite his parents after all they’d done for him, replacing it once and for all with the child who was punished relentlessly for having a learning disability, without cognitive-dissonance-creating doubt.
This wasn’t something I could control. Just as I would’ve done anything not to be gay, if I could have stopped the abuse by doing well in school, I would have. The scale of the injustice — the unending demonization of an innocent child that continues to this day in another form toward a man in late middle age — increased exponentially.
I don’t know why I reached out to my younger niece, Uma, before anyone else. A senior in high school, a Gen Z Monica Bellucci but kinda doesn’t care, she’s as introverted as I’m extroverted, and often doesn’t reply to my texts for days, if at all.
I probably chose her because she’s taking AP Psychology, partly inspired by how effectively psychotherapy has helped her “muncle,” a portmanteau of “manny” and “uncle” that refers to the time I lived at my sister’s for ten months during the Great Recession after I lost everything, and co-parented her and Savannah; their father, and Indian national, had been turned back at the border for traveling on an expired business visa when he should’ve had a provisional Green Card and sent back to India for six months while things were straightened out.
I wanted her to know for the hundredth time how much I supported her vocation; perhaps she’d declared a vocation early as I did with filmmaking. Christmas is also a time for children and family, and I was now overwhelmed by an emotion I rarely felt: loneliness. Deep loneliness, sadness and compassion for the boy interrupted who lives on vividly in my memories sharpened and preserved by a lifetime of telling the same stories the same way repeatedly.
ME: “I hope you're still interested in psychology. It's a truly noble pursuit, the only way Americans can engage in the "pursuit of happiness…” I just wanted to share the preliminary results of my neuropsychological evaluation today to determine the nature of my learning disorder as a kid, why I struggle to hold down normal jobs, etc.”
UMA: “Yes I am still very much interested. Oh, I thought it was because you are too smart!”
The myth of my being so brilliant that school bored me is that deeply ingrained in family lore: I didn’t fail at school, school failed me. I’d believed it my entire life, until I had the neuropsych eval a couple of hours earlier when the truth about my academic and professional failures subverted that parents’-boast version of reality forever.
Her insertion of family doctrine caused my fingers to take over. I blurted a long, passionate text explaining what had happened, and how much more monstrous my parents’ treatment of me was now that the real truth was certified. Uma didn’t respond — I immediately regretted having burdened her with emotions that I knew would ebb after a good night’s sleep, or four, as it turned out.
Within a minute, her sister texted me with a diversionary comment intended to take over the conversation. I was mildly embarrassed imagining the scene, Uma yelling from her room, “Savannah! Muncle’s having a meltdown! Can you talk to him, please?”
When I texted Uma the next day to apologize for swamping her with my emotions, she revealed that she’s also taking Adderall for ADHD. “I don't know how other kids do school without it, how their brains just naturally focus them.”
As I found out in the days to come reading about ADHD, what I’d done is trigger overwhelm — used in the case of neurodivergency as a noun — for poor Uma. She is frustrated more than her sister about my estrangement from the family, which just passed the four-year mark; I’m guessing that the further it recedes from resolution, the more overwhelm she experiences about it.
She believes ADHD runs in the family and that my mother has the worst case of it. I’m not sure if Mum is ADHD-spectrum, but my often-incorrect armchair psychologist’s diagnosis is that both she and her husband are neurodivergent. There are also many different kinds, not just ADHD and Autism. While I can see similarities between my mind and Uma’s, I can’t see it between mine and Mum’s.
Uma highlights the origin of the quest to understand ADHD: education. The education system created in the Victorian era, which in my impressionistic mind resembles a patched-together Steampunk Howl’s Moving Castle lumbering across children’s lives, elevating those neurotypical kids who most conform to an ideal measured by standardized tests and metrics, and making the rest miserable and unable to compete in what comes next: The professional world, which is simply a seamless extension of that broken, dysfunctional education system.
It is in that model, that greatest expectation of all social expectations, that true systemic injustice lies. It’s as unfair for super-privileged neurodivergent Whites like me as it is for everyone else: I cannot hold down a job, not for long enough to have anyone’s idea of a career. I’m too much of an “outsider’s outsider” to fold into the Hollywood mainstream.
A few weeks ago, New York Times columnist Pamela Paul finally broke the scandal of the thousands of detransitioning young people who were peer pressured at the most vulnerable time in their lives into believing pseudoscientific gender-queer nonsense. The top-rated comment to what was proper investigative journalism jammed into the Opinion section because of the current climate of CSJ madness compared the doling out of puberty blockers to the random prescribing of Adderall to “unruly boys in the 90s.” My reply to that was so scathing I’m not sure the Times approved it.
If the faulty lounges at my grammar school, St. George’s, and at St. Stephen’s for my first two years of high school were to assign me a Dungeons & Dragons character name, it would be something like Teacher’s Bane the Clownborn. I wasn’t merely disruptive, I interfered with the education of good neurotypical boys and girls by taking over many classes having not read the homework and extemporizing for the entire period, skinning as many narrative cats as came my way.
Furthermore, the only thing Adderall does for me is reduce the time it takes me to leave my tiny one-bedroom from 45 minutes to 30. It’s nothing like puberty blockers, whose long-term effects are simply too little researched to be so widely accepted for the treatment of kids, ignoring the “top surgery” that thousands of girls are having reversed with implants.
I’m only beginning to dive into what neurodivergence is; I am no expert, never will be. What I do know is that ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder’ is misnomered and needs to be changed.
First of all, it’s loaded with negatives that are biased to the point of discrimination against people who aren’t neurotypical. Nobody who has watched me in a hyper-focused state — which a colleague once called “exacting” because of the details I spew until they’re all covered, and then cover with more details just to be sure — would say that I have a deficit of attention.
Just because your boring class or curriculum that I’m forced to excel at — which in most cases I either can’t understand by reading texts and attending lectures or in fewer instances don’t see the point of when I have no intention of becoming a scientist or mathematician — doesn’t engage me and sends me into mental paralysis when you assign me homework or try to test me on it, doesn’t mean I have a deficit of anything.
It means the education system has a deficit of diversity, equity, and inclusion embedded within the curriculum itself — given all we’ve known about neurodivergency for decades, it’s lazy and biased. Sure, we can get a special education if we’re rich. But why should we carry the Shortbus stigma along with everything else?
It needs to be completely overhauled. Throw the rigid expectations of the professional world in the social remodel, too. And I’ll bet you, abracadabra, all those social injustices will diminish to a thin residue within a generation as a result.
ADHD is also not a ‘disorder.’ It’s a divergence, a different kind of intelligence. The ‘order’ that we are ‘dis’ of is what’s disordered and collapsing in slow motion, except neurotypicals can’t see it — they’re too locked in the social fictions they’ve created that support it.
The way I see it, and it’s a belief that only gets deeper day by day as my own mind becomes more self-aware of its nature, whatever ADHD should accurately be called is in a yin-yang relationship with high-functioning autism-spectrum people — we should consider going back to Aspergers with that, too — whereby ADHD is the creative-linguistic side, and autism is the logical-mechanical. I propose we call the former neurodivergent-A and the latter neurodivergent-B. As for the other endlessly shifting “disorders” under the neurodivergent umbrella, let them take C,D, E…
And maybe let us describe who we are, rather than neurotypicals burdening our lives further as we struggle from childhood to navigate a world structured and built by them for themselves exclusively, by defining us as what we aren’t.
If people saw the world from my view — as expressed in tangential prose throughout this newsletter — neurotypicals believe some pretty dumb, wacky, dangerous claptrap.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg’s assertion that her autism was her “superpower” charmed and impressed me. I’ve long thought that my ability to see through most deceptions, as well as how people I interacted with might behave in the future, as being part of my decades of training as a dramatist.
Shakespeare’s “All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely Players” has been my reality since Sufism guided me to orthodox atheism around the time Marcus and I were talking long into the night. My controversial unproduced script, Hatter, is my first expression of that perspective; it takes place in an old theater that has been converted into Hatter’s reality-shifting residence.
Ever an evolving viewpoint, my divergent, orthodox-atheistic mind perceives social and systemic doctrines that are taken as essential and immutable as being little more than necessary parameters erected to contain society, similar to the Critical Social Justice guardrails currently placed around major AI systems. That, combined with the dramatist’s discipline of certain characters who can only act in a limited number of ways owing to their specific personality traits, shows me the most likely outcome of any given situation that happens to draw my hyperfocus, what I call my “eye of Sauron.”
It’s a flawed prescience that is nonetheless accurate more often than not, perhaps a primitive beta version of Hari Seldon’s psychohistory in the Foundation series.
The notion that I might have some sort of “superpower” like Greta’s has always made the guardrails in my mind hum with “Dude, you’re delusional,” and I’m thankful for that. Still, I thought I might ask Uma if she suspected she might have something of the sort.
ME: “What I'm looking forward to is our new relationship and bond over having similar brains. There is a superpower locked in there… It has to do with seeing that the world is just as Shakespeare said, "a stage." The characters, dynamics and variables in the real world follow narrative arcs that are fairly limited. If you're like me, when your neural pathways have finally set in your mid-20s, you might be able to see the most likely outcome of most situations, especially those in which you are playing a role.”
A few days later, I remembered when, during the ten months I was her manny-uncle and weathering yet another needlessly painful romance that was draining my focus, Uma would question me about it and offer uncannily insightful advice.
When I asked her how she knew so much about the dynamics of adult relationships, she replied, “I’m just telling you what you want to hear.” That made her insight into the adult mind all the more uncanny.
I chalked it down to the abnormal preciousness of New York City children, which I’ve hypothesized is due to exposure to heightened levels of aural and visual stimuli from the moment they pop out of the womb combined with the genes of parents who are smart and audacious enough to thrive in the most competitive, energy-demanding city on the planet.
ME: “Sudden realization: Now I get why you were so precocious giving me relationship advice when you were 4. Bet you do have the superpower. It's probably a bit cloudy right now during your teen years.”
UMA: “Aw, haha! Thank you. It has definitely been cloudy at times, but I have learned a lot! Most of my friends come to me for relationship advice because they say that I am "wise" about it, but half of the stuff I say is from Grey's Anatomy!”
ME: “Hahaha. Grey's Anatomy is perfectly legit…. What's revealing is that you learn through narrative and observing human performance. You instantly make the correlation between the show and real life. So there, you have it! We should get you a superhero cape.”
With the exception of navigating occasional crises, usually ones involving opposing narratives like legal issues or interpersonal strife, it’s a pretty useless superpower. The obstacles that neurodivergence creates in my life render it futile in terms of my ability to survive and navigate a neurotypical world. The task and mental paralysis, the overwhelm of too many stressors that my mind doesn’t want to engage with are by far the greatest challenges I face day to day.
I’ve been explaining my mental lapses and freezing as, “I’m Dory the blue fish from Finding Nemo,” since the film was released in 2003. Dory’s short-term memory is clearly a nod to the inaccurate cliché of the goldfish’s three-second memory; studies have shown they have memories that last up to a month. Still, in my case, the dizzy goldfish is an apt symbol of how I live.
My one-bedroom apartment is a box divided into four boxes interconnected by five doors, meaning each room has two doors shared with adjacent rooms. When I get stuck between whatever I’m writing or I’m pondering, and slogging through basic tasks like leaving the house, which I might’ve thoughtlessly paired with folding the laundry, taking meds, and posting to social media, I’ll move between rooms in a random flow that resembles figure eights, picking up certain thoughts and tasks in one room, dropping them like Dory the blue fish in the next.
It’s a micro representation of how I’ve navigated life thus far as someone who assumed he was neurotypical, just vested with such deep character flaws that I constantly sabotaged my own life as “my own worst enemy.”
I didn’t just fail in school, I also lost everything that wasn’t part of my body, eventually: watches, retainers, pens, bookbags, clothing, you name it. My condition wasn’t merely frustrating for my parents, it was expensive. As I grew older, my mother became convinced that I pawned things for extra cash.
I’m still adapting to the new reality of how my mind works; with every lapse and figure eight I make around my apartment, I’m aware that it’s an unfixable part of me that I’ll have to figure out how to sandbag more effectively.
I see now that my divergence coupled with the adversity it has generated in those around me has kept me in uninterrupted lifelong survival mode as I try to navigate a world that not only makes few accommodations for minds like mine, it sets assumptions about what I’m capable of doing and the bias that it’s my decision not to do the correct thing.
The closest metaphor I’ve come up with is that I’m confined to a wheelchair when it comes to certain actions, wheeled out to the starting line of a running track and told, “You can run this if you want — it’s your decision not to.”
It isn’t.
It has helped recently that I’m able to apologize for being ADHD-spectrum neurodivergent before I undertake something that might trigger mental paralysis.
I was interviewed for an important podcast the other day about the Call Me By Your Name exposé. I had to tell the entire story along with the aftermath of its publication; it’s as complex as a narrative can get for any raconteur. I gave the interviewer a beat sheet of the narrative beforehand, explained that I would likely drop the plot from time to time, and asked that she be patient and nudge me back.
It helped enormously.
Had I known the nature of my mind when Marcus did, from age 12, I wouldn’t have bungled all those pitch meetings and public speaking events throughout my career, and so much more it doesn’t bear thinking about.
Those are senseless regrets. I have the last third of my life to live, now with enough self-knowledge that hopefully it won’t be as much of a struggle to get by as it has been for well over half a century.
Thanks for reading. Please don’t forget to hit the heart button — every boost counts.
The ‘Boy, Interrupted’ series concludes with part four, ‘Spelunking the Creative Mind.’
AGAIN, WITH GUSTO:
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