“For years she’d avoided getting psychological help out of fear that she’d be diagnosed as crazy. It began with something that happened in graduate school. It traumatized me. I’m scared to think about it even now. Versions of the same thing have been happening ever since. I keep running away, but that’s no solution. I need a different way to live with who I am.
“She explained that she knew things in ways that were real—she was defensive as she said it: ‘real’—but they were real in ways her colleagues called impossible. Could they right? Was I open to the idea that people might know things in ways that seems impossible and crazy?
I know things and it mystifies me how I know them. Sometimes it terrifies me. It starts with getting a good read on things. I’m intuitive. But lots of people are intuitive. It didn’t get really scary until I was in graduate school. I was in my third year of Ph.D. work. I had a good fellowship. My professors thought well of me.
I had an idea for dissertation that built on the work of one professor, someone I liked a lot, very smart but gruff. He was teaching a seminar. One day he’d given us a problem to work out—very complicated. I took it down like everyone else. Then I said the answer. Just said it—the right answer. To four decimal places. It just came to me. It seemed natural to say it. It was a disaster. The professor swore I must have stolen his notes.
After that, he wouldn’t work with me anymore. The other students stopped trusting me. It got so bad I had to find another university where I could do my dissertation research. I’ve been moving ever since. I get afraid people might start attacking me for things they think I shouldn’t know. Now I move before things blow up.
What happens is I will suddenly know something. Like, I’ll know when the experiment won’t work. Or I’ll know some data analysis is faulty. The more I let on what I know, the more obvious it gets that I don’t have any basis for knowing. It’s just an idea that comes to me. But I know—I can’t tell you how powerful the sensation is. Maybe you know what it’s like. It’s spooky. It scares me. I want to be normal.
“I gradually became convinced,” Mayer writes, that “Grace did have unusual and remarkable intuitive capacities. But the depth and extent of her virulent fear impressed me at least as much. As a psychoanalyst, I’m used to seeing fear. But Grace’s fear was unusual. She didn’t just fear for her mental stability. She feared for the stability of the world around her—the existence of a world she could count on, reliably constrained by boundaries of space, time, and individual identity.
Grace traced her intuition back to her childhood experience of protecting herself and her younger sister from her drunken father.
During the late afternoons, I’d start listening for him. It was a funny kind of listening. It was like listening with my whole body, not in my ears. I don’t know how to describe it except to say I was tuned in, vigilant with every part of me. Suddenly I know—know he was 15 minutes away and driving home drunk. Then I’d hustle my sister and me into the closet. I couldn’t afford to wait and hear him at the door. He’d crash in and grab whoever was in sight, then hit. He grabbed my mother a lot—she just stood there. So I had to be the one to protect my sister and me—I had to learn how. Somehow I just started knowing when he was headed home and when he’d be dangerous. I knew. It was like this spooky knowing with my professor; but it was different because I had to know, I had no choice.
My dad didn’t drink all the time. So there was no predicting. I had to stay tuned in every day, be ready and never trust any pattern. We’d go for weeks and be safe. But I couldn’t get lulled into thinking that’s how it would stay because suddenly he’d drink again and we’d have to hide. I’d have to know way before he pulled up at the house. As soon as I knew, I’d start getting ready—turn off the lights in the bedroom, get water for my sister, bring in her blanket, and settle us with pillows to make it cozy. How did I know when he was on his way and drunk? As a child I accepted it, I thought I just knew because I had to. But now that isn’t good enough. I keep wondering, am I crazy? If I’m crazy, how come I kept being right? It scares me to death.
No comments:
Post a Comment