PART I
GROWING UPAND GETTING WORSE
I’m not sure when I started living in a Haunted House. But I know it was when I was sixteen or seventeen that my ability to think—my sheer capacity to just sit and think—took on the aspect of a physical realm, a country more grand and haunting and tempting than where I was and what I was doing. It was when I was sixteen or seventeen that thinking started feeling like a place I wanted to be.
I was relieved when the present tense had nothing to demand or offer. At an airport, in a traffic jam, or simply while washing dishes or doing chores, and especially when other people were talking, I would simply walk into the great hall of my mind, into a larger country, and be perfectly content for a very long time just thinking. I thought I was a writer so I would turn sentences around in my head like a Rubik’s Cube with no solution. I’d stand over the shoulder of the characters I created in the story I was writing and find something more awful and meaningful for them to do. I would come up with interesting thoughts, ideas, opinions, jokes, and turns of phrase, and these opinions and jokes and turns of phrase were friends to me in a way I find it hard to explain, were, in a very real sense, company. How do you tell people that a thought, or a turn of phrase, or a riff, or a melody, or a joke is keeping you company? That it is a real, lovely, vivid, and interesting friend?
My thoughts were my friends, but they made it so I looked out on a different world. When I thought I was a writer, the world would approach me, wrapped in raiment light, as something to write about. When I thought I was really funny, then the world and the people on the street and people I loved, and just about every situation would approach me, wrapped in raiment light, as something to make fun of.
The world could not approach me as it was. The world could only approach me as what I wanted from it. And there was no way to release the world from being what I wanted.
That is the prison of the self: the world has already disfigured itself before you can rise to meet it. Before you open your eyes, the world has already been changed by what you understand.
My thoughts took custody of the world and offered it back to me as something just a little more grotesque, beautiful, meaningful than it actually was. If I went on a trip with people, and something strange or profound happened, I would talk about it until people remembered not what happened but the way I talked about it. And that was something I was proud of.
My thoughts were the closest thing I had to gospel and Pentecost—beautiful, striking, and landing on me like doves. I trusted them implicitly. They were sight, I thought, and not blindness.
And when my thoughts turned on me, they turned on me with all the power I’d given them over the years, to bless and to curse, to give life and to take it, to anoint and to devour.
I don’t know how it all happened. The people I loved most had noticed that—put in a stressful job, trying to finish seminary—my anxiety (which I simply thought was the unfortunate by-product of being intelligent) had got w
