The Second Burning

S2 and I were having a conversation the other night about whether psychotherapy can sometimes cause an even greater sense of upheaval in a client's personal life than he or she had when walking in the door. Serious self-examination is never easy work, and when one is unprepared for what one finds within, it can be very disturbing.

But we were also talking about how to identify the line between valuable self-examination and flagrant navel-gazing. We both being fairly post-modern thinkers, we quickly conceded that such a line can never be defined in any useful way.

There's certainly a place, however, where it gets crossed. God knows I do it all the effin' time. I can't speak for S2 (but I'd wager that she has, an assumption founded only on my belief that anyone who engages in serious self-examination will meander across that line at some point). The important issue is whether you can make your way back, keep your life in some kind of reasonable perspective and learn to be *in* the life you have rather than standing somehow removed from it while you critique yourself.

I know this path quite well. I have trodden it so heavily at times that I've laid tire tracks on my own back. Some of this was necessary. I was so terribly divorced from my feelings of attraction to women and so fearful of attachment in general that the first illumination of my psyche was done in a very harsh light. It was scorching, in fact.

Because I am what several people have called "a prolific writer," I had a therapist once upon a time who engaged me in some serious self-examination via typewriter. One day, as I sat like a mute in her office, refusing to speak of what was on my mind, she asked me to go home and write. "Start at the beginning," she suggested, "and then just see what comes of it. Bring in what you wrote and give it to me."

Between March and October of 1993, she received more than 350 single-and-a-half spaced typewritten pages. With narrow margins all the way around (something I never noticed until S2 pointed it out to me the other night).

The occasion for S2 to see this monstrous work of mine, which I have these many years lugged around with me, was when I burned it the other night in a fire pit at her beach house. I had resolved several months ago to burn this book. I found the story contained within to be an unfair and depressive depiction of myself, considerably more the story my demented parents told me than the one I know to be true.

For years, I had ignored its continued existence, doing little more than putting a note on it that suggested no one ought to read it and that it should, upon my death, be destroyed. But earlier this year, prompted by a question Dr. M posed about my "coming out" experience, I returned to the manuscript and started reading it in search of the answer. It was in doing so that I decided I wanted to destroy it.

So over Spring Break that's what I did up at Lake Quinault. I burned the damn thing. It took more than an hour to manage the fire while I fed it the papers. That burning also included sections I wrote in 1997 about an experience I had with a friend who betrayed me so deeply that I returned to therapy over it. (Man, I was *pissed* about that. Those chapters were an outlet for the anger I had no other effective means of expressing.)

Anyway, I burned all of it.

Or so I thought. Because only a week or two after I burned the book and was feeling all cathartic about destroying the demons contained therein, I found in a filing cabinet a SECOND copy. I had forgotten that the therapist had made photocopies at each session and had returned her files to me when our therapy concluded. So here was the book all over again, not destroyed at all.

I felt vexed.

When I told some of my friends about this, they each independently remarked that perhaps there was some kind of "reason" for this. Even the anti-meaning atheist Dr. M, who witnessed the First Burning, said as much. S2 laughed at the irony and suggested I might need to try other methods of disposing the book. Perhaps it had some phoenix-like quality that would let it rise from the ashes of itself.

For four months, I had the book in my possession again. I kept a watchful eye on it to ensure it would not duplicate itself, but I otherwise let it be. I recognized that I had, in fact, been given a second chance, an opportunity to reconsider whether I should actually destroy what essentially was a substantial creative work. I found in that time one additional section of the book -- to accompany perhaps one or two others -- that I felt had stories significant enough to warrant surviving. But otherwise I maintained my desire to destroy it.

So that's what I did last night.

S2, who poked the fire with a driftwood stick while I tossed in chapter after chapter, called the process "The Second Burning of the First Book."

It was a curious experience. Because the First Burning had been laden with emotion, I anticipated the Second Burning would be ever so much easier. But both times, I was unable to escape the experience of destroying something I had created under emotionally dense circumstances. I had a lot of myself wrapped up in that book, in its descriptions of me, in its examination of my family of origin, in its collection of the often minute details of what was happing in my personal and professional life at the time that I wrote it.

At many points, it crossed that line between self-examination and outrageous navel gazing. It also frequently crossed the line between an honest critique of myself and downright abuse turned inward.

But oh were there a few good turns of phrase, a few precious details of my life many years ago. Perhaps in saving a few chapters for other reasons, I have saved a little bit of good writing in the process. Maybe it will prove useful one day for me to have them, but I otherwise felt like destroying the entire work.

Not once, but twice.

As the final chapters were being tossed into the fire, S2 remarked, "I hope you'll write a book someday. You have a story you need to write."

I'll wager she's right. Somewhere within is a story worth telling. But it wasn't the one I burned twice over.