My name is Gabriel. I grew up in as close to an ancestral village as any white person I know. It was a tiny town in rural New Hampshire where I had a second mother, a best friend I've known since he was a handful of days old, and a forest out the door of my house that, at five years old, I could wander into at will. When I was seven years old the economy sputtered into recession, my dad lost his job, and I was taken by my family from this formidably wild & intimate place and moved to the parochial domesticated suburbs of St. Louis Missouri. This was the defining experience of my childhood. The trauma scene.
My body experienced this removal as an abduction by my own family, and responded as though I was being drowned. It sucked all of the oxygen out of me. When I was taken out of this place, and my community, I had nightmares for months that were so intense my parents had to hold me down because I was thrashing so hard they were afraid I would wound myself.
Have you ever loved something so much that you could not imagine it could be taken away from you? This was the story of my childhood. I woke up one day in November of 1982 an outsider, an exile, in a place I could not find the living earth under my feet, any whisper of her proper magic. My feral playmates replaced by pale domesticated hominid cousins with muted yearnings and regimented schedules. In a place where nothing felt any longer alive, and looking inward I could no longer feel or find myself.
As a result of this experience of being uprooted, my body shut down in a manner that was so deep and primal that I could not even remember it happened for eleven years. Not until I was eighteen years old and a freshman at Yale University, where I was studying neuroscience, and met a girl. This happened at the tail end of winter. She was from New Mexico, and studying theatre: a beautiful wild-hearted girl. The first night we spent together was at the home of a neon glass artist, strangely enough, tucked into the inky silence of a snow-drifted New England forest. In that bedroom pulsed, hand-made, the humming stalk of a neon flower that painted the room, and our faces, with rose and mint-colored light. My heart re-awakened that night, under the enchantment of being seen. I came home to myself, far and fast enough to drive her, in a borrowed station wagon, several weeks later, back to Walpole New Hampshire, the town from which I had been taken, and plug back into the story of my childhood.
I see it now, the arc of this, from thirty years forward of it, and I can appreciate that she was the doorway that sparked me back into re-igniting the fire of my own hearth. Yet that same night, the first, before our lips met, she said, “Someday I am going to wake up, and do a little dance, and then I’m going to leave.” And she was true to her word.
When this happened I fell into a severe depression. We say that we fall in love, but I contest the orthogonality of this. I rose in love, elevated in it, and when she left– then I fell. It was like being swept into a river and taken under. I couldn’t think. Words swarmed in my head like smoke-addled bees, and I couldn’t derive meaning from them. I uttered not a single word in any of my classes. Three months into this, after I had dropped out and returned to my parent's home in St.Louis, where I did nothing but gain weight and stare at a wall, I began to realize that something had happened to cut me off from my own heart. I had lived in it as a child, then it had been taken away. With the girl I had found it, touched it again, and then lost it. And so began, thirty years ago, my journey of healing.
This journey was not pretty. I dabbled with drugs, self-harm. I painted self-portraits in which the space of my chest was a void, an emptiness through which the dark night showed. I got caught up with people who didn’t have my best interests at heart, to put it mildly, and I hurt people who did not deserve this either. In 2012 I had a breakdown that landed me in psychiatric hospitalization for ten days, and from which the attending physicians told my wife and parents I would never recover. And yet, strangely and non-accidentally, I did.
Over the past thirty years I have charted a course as inwardly epic as the Homeric Odyssey, and with the same goal. I was determined to get back home, to reclaim my Original Self. This alone was my north star. With yearning as my compass, I followed trails as far as they could take me if I determined that were in the direction of home.
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