“Yes,” I say.
“Good,” he says with a nonchalant smile, and walks out the door.
THE HARDEST PART about sobriety is realizing that when you open that black box inside of you, the secrets and addictions don’t stop their revelations after the first one.
I am a drug and alcohol addict. I am a sex addict. I am a food addict. And the most difficult one: I am a rage addict, too.
“Do you really not care if you lose me?” I scream at Pat one day. This is based on, honestly, no reason at all besides a small disagreement that has now spiraled ridiculously out of control. “You disgust me! You’re disgusting!”
“Why are you saying all of this, Mandy?” he asks. “Because I’m not getting upset? I figure you’re just saying all of this to get a reaction.”
“Well . . . I am,” I say, surprised at him calling bullshit on my bullshit.
“Well, okay then,” he says.
I sit there, stunned. I’ve never met someone who knows how to deal with me like Pat does and cut through my defenses. And then he surprises me again, as he always does. Instead of wanting to continue to fight, he has just one request.
“When was the last time you saw your therapist?” he asks.
“I don’t have time,” I say, looking away. “I saw her after we fought that one time. I did, I swear.”
“If you don’t have time for that, then we likely won’t have a relationship either,” he says. “This is that important.”
Therapy is, as anyone who takes it seriously knows, not like, say, getting your high school diploma. It’s not a “Congratulations, you’ve graduated” kind of situation. You have to keep going. A lifetime of conditioning doesn’t just magically disappear.
When I see my therapist again and tell her some of the cruel things I’ve been hurtling at Pat, she suggests it’s time for me to consider group therapy.
“Will that make me less defensive?” I ask.
“That’s the idea,” she says.
After a few group sessions, we are asked to do psychodrama and role-playing just like when I went to the Caron Institute in Pennsylvania. In one of the most intense sessions, I am told to role-play my ex-husband while I speak to a chair who is “me.” I really get into it. I am cruel. I am scathing. I am relentless. I summon up the worst things my ex ever said to me, and I scream at the chair.
“You’re pathetic,” I say, pretending to be my ex-husband and spitting the words at “myself” like venom. “You’re pathetic!”
I am crying near the end. Because I can hear myself . . . in the way I talk to Pat.
“You disgust me! You’re disgusting!”
How many times have I said cruel things—including to my ex-husband—that I may not even remember because I was in a rage blackout? I need to turn everything around. I cannot continue this cycle of victimization.
“I owe you an apology,” I tell Pat afterward. “I can see now that a lot of the things I said to you were hurtful and cruel. I don’t want to do that. I want to support you.”
“Thank you for really trying with me,” Pat says. “It means a lot to me.”
This, apparently, is how people have a conversation. One person says one thing that isn’t a platitude; the other person engages.
“Have I ever told you about my whole black-box theory of relationships?” I ask him.
“Is it anything like the old George Carlin joke?” he asks. “ ‘Why don’t they just make the plane out of the black box?’ ”
I laugh. I am familiar with it, of course. I explain to him the concept: how we have all these internal recordings and programming from throughout our lives that influence future relationships.
“It’s so hard to examine all of it,” I tell him. “Did you know that I wrote a letter to my future self back in 2012 when I did that really intensive group therapy thing? I can’t even bring myself to read it, that’s how scared I get about looking at what’s inside of me.”
I point him to where I keep it hidden away, tucked inside a silver envelope, in a childish blue Frozen treasure box above my bed. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything bad that I could have even written in there—after all, I was sober and approaching some semblance of mental healthiness in 2012. But I still don’t want to disappoint Future Me.
“You have nothing to be scared of,” Pat says. “Did you know that when I first saw you in New York, you were walking through some comedy club, and I asked someone, ‘Who is that?’ Because I had to know. It was 2007. You were amazing to me even then. You made such an impression on me. You were like this tall beautiful wash of blond hair. I thought you were totally out of my league. You were so striking and confident. At the time, I figured there was no chance.”
I’m floored in more ways than one.
“Wow,” I say. “I would have been dating Blaine back then. How funny that I didn’t feel that way about myself at all. I just thought of myself as this unwifeable disaster who couldn’t do anything right.”
“Wait,” Pat says, looking at me. “Unwifeable? No. That’s not you at all. Unapproachable. That’s what you are.”
PAT IS FROM Tennessee. I am from California. Our backgrounds are as different as can be, but we are both children of dysfunction, which has made us hyper-attuned to everything around us. As we grow closer, Pat reveals to me the pain he feels watching his eighty-five-year-old mother’s deteriorating condition as she lives out her final days in the grips of Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t agree with the decision to send her to a nursing home, but ultimately it is his father’s call, not his own.
We make the long trip together down South first by plane and then by car. As we walk up to the modest care facility, the two of us are
