THE ART OF PSYCHOLOGY I was first introduced to psychology when I was around eleven. My mother, then a few years into a much needed divorce, had developed a wincing guilt over the circumstances of my childhood. I was birthed into a war-marriage that lasted eight grueling years. Newly unencumbered, my mother looked back and was mortified. Dr. Solomon was a kind, portly, mustachioed man who greeted me every week with a smile and a warm handshake. I looked forward to our visits. Even as a prepubescent, I had a desperate intellectuality to me, and I relished a captive audience. Over the course of a few sessions, I’d utterly charmed the man, as was my intent exactly. I took private pleasure in being a class above his hard-case patients. Those kids were troublemakers with explosive tempers. I was just opinionated. We never dug. I was convinced I had a mature perspective on my bad childhood, and since I wasn’t acting out at home or school, Dr. Solomon let me steer the conversation wherever I wanted it to go. After a couple years we parted ways without much ceremony. It was clear that Dr. Solomon didn’t think I really needed psychoanalysis, and neither did I. But I wasn’t fine. There was loathing in me that swelled through my teenage years and culminated in a depression. My mother brought me to a physician who promptly placed me on a low dose of anti-depressants. By this point I was familiar with Freudian theory, mostly in a literary context, but there was something antiquated about the tenets of psychology in the face of big pharma. After fifteen minutes of describing the “symptoms” of my depression, I was prescribed a tiny pill that had tangible, neurologically empirical results. I remember walking through my local strip-mall, newly dosed with murky, synthetic bliss. I was impressed by the effects. I returned to college feeling as though I’d crossed a unique sort of psychic bridge. The narrative of my inner life had seemed fairly linear up to that point, but the abrupt unnaturalness of this new state of being opened my eyes to a plasticity and dimensionality of the self that I’d never before known. Drunkenness was the closest parallel, but the divide between “drunk” and “sober” was never in question as there are long-standing cultural paradigms associated with their meanings. There is a shorthand for dismissing the drunken self. There is no such shorthand with anti-depressants. Though both states are technically the result of intoxication, the anti-depressant self is not separated from a clearly defined “sobriety” which is always just around the bend. In fact, going off anti-depressants, as I’ve done from time to time over the years, hasn’t at all brought me back to where I left off before taking them, but instead deposited me into yet more unfamiliar territory. If not for my initiation into the world of stand-up comedy at the tail end of my college years, I don’t know if I would have been moved to study or articulate any of this phenomenology of the self. I’d been a fiction writer from a young age, and I was adept at placing my own reality second to my fictional ones. Life was just the bullshit that happened between workshops and writing sessions. Sure, every now and again I would be seized by existential panic as the ramifications of my barely examined attitudes and behaviors accosted my psyche like a storm, but if I waited it out, my trusty nihilism always returned. I was a writer of fiction. Nothing else really mattered.