The Golden Condom (21 page)

MY MENTOR, MY SELF: MENTORS IN MATURITY

Mentors are not just for the young. They can be found at any age if you seek them, although what you need and what you get from them changes later in life. Since your own character is no longer unformed and your identity is more secure, you are no longer so naive, impressionable, or adoring. As a result, you are more conscious of personality quirks, more attuned to the dynamics between you, and freer to know and to speak your mind. Since these late editions of the mentor-protégé relationship are usually voluntary, you are not beholden to the mentor as an employer or a professor or as a professional role model. You don't have to be as careful because less is at stake. At last, there is no discrepancy of experience, only of expertise in a particular area.

I learned all manner of things from my panoply of mentors, but my current one gave me something unexpected, which turned out to be even more potent and profound than the skill—a new way of swimming—that I came to him to learn. He never consciously sought to teach it to me, and I never sought to learn it from him, and yet it sustained me through the most terrifying experience of my life and continues to unfold its riches. In addition to making a sleek and speedy swimmer out of me, he taught me the uses of adversity.

At age fifty-seven, I decided I wanted to relearn to swim and went looking for a coach. Orthopedic injuries had made it impossible for me to continue studying Middle Eastern dance, and I felt the need for some of that same expressiveness and whole-body involvement that swimming alone could safely provide. I'd loved the water all my life and had swum since childhood, but I wanted to delve deeper. I saw an ad for his technique—it said “Discover your inner fish”—and I was hooked.

Thus began a decade-long and still ongoing dialogue between my coach and me that metamorphosed from focusing on the technique of moving joyfully and expertly through the water (or, as he would say, “with the water”) to considering the psychological and philosophical implications of his innovative approach. He told me early on that I had the combination of strength and endurance that constituted “the makings of a long-distance swimmer”—an aptitude of which I was completely unaware, a skill I had certainly never aspired to acquire—but that I subsequently discovered suited both my body type and my emotional constitution. His approach, painstaking, patient, and passionate, transformed me into an athlete for the first time in my life, and I became what I called the “guinea fish” on which he tried out his constantly evolving ideas. I worked with him practically every week, and the lessons were a highlight of those weeks. The water became both my refuge and a source of intellectual stimulation.

At first, I felt intimidated by his prowess—was I good enough to study with such a teacher? But I need not have been, because I have never known a more accessible or generous expert in anything. The thing that particularly suited him to his vocation was that the sport he revolutionized never came easily to him; he wasn't a naturally gifted athlete. He hadn't even been good enough to make the sixth-grade team at his Catholic school. And yet he became, in middle age, a champion distance swimmer and an attuned and inspiring coach with an international reputation, whose mission was to illuminate the sensual and spiritual joys of being in the water by reimagining how human bodies, with their inconvenient appendages, move most efficiently in that alien element.

My coach's motto, based on his life experience as well as his unusually optimistic temperament, was “Injury Is Opportunity,” and he took it seriously both in and out of the pool. He himself was no stranger to pain and suffering, since he had sustained many injuries as an athlete and had to contend daily with a congenital tremor that caused his hands to shake uncontrollably at times. He didn't just profess this attitude; he embodied it, never complaining or feeling victimized by something that would have seriously frustrated or depressed most people. He swam through it with remarkable panache and approached his students' physical limitations and psychological struggles the same way he handled his own.

I had an unexpected opportunity to discover the uses of injury and to put my coach's philosophy into practice. One day eight years into our partnership, I showed up for a lesson with a number of unaccountable bruises in strange places. Within a week, I was admitted to the hospital with a rare form of dangerously acute leukemia whose only virtue was that it was curable. The cure entailed daily infusions of arsenic for a month as an inpatient, followed by another nine months of the same treatment as an outpatient. It was as awful as it sounds.

The night before I had to start the outpatient regimen, I had an extraordinary dream that defined the task before me. My coach and I were standing on the shore of a forbidding body of water. We could dimly see the other shore far off in the distance. This was clearly the course for a very long, treacherous open-water swim that I was about to undertake, finding my way and conserving my strength all alone, through darkness, undertow, jellyfish, and dread. It reminded me of the English Channel, the Everest of swimming, which my coach had swum as part of a relay team at age sixty, an exceptional feat. On both shores there were massive, rocky, precipitous hills, which I saw that I would have to navigate both going down to the water and coming back up from it—a reference to the treacherous physical and psychological experiences ahead. As much as I dreaded the treatment, I had not consciously realized that it would be as difficult to clamber back up to the normal world at the end of the ordeal as it was to submerge myself in that dangerous, uncharted “ocean” of pain and fear at the beginning; the two struggles were of a piece. The scene was a physical representation of, and a psychic preparation for, what lay before me.

But I was not alone. My coach turned to me and said in his calm, direct manner, “There is much to be learned from these daunting cliffs.”

I awoke deeply relieved, confident, with a mission—to be a student of my own experience, just as I was in my swim lessons—rather than a victim. I knew what I was facing, and that, arduous as the labor would be, it would offer me something priceless.

I clung to the dream image and to my coach's voice throughout my ordeal. For the next nine months, I returned repeatedly to this dream. My coach's pronouncement reminded me that I could, and I would, convert suffering into knowledge. He was telling me that this “race” was, blessedly, finite and that I had the will and the expertise not just to endure it but to win it.

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There's much to be learned from these daunting mentors, from the worst to the best of them. They immeasurably enrich your fund of knowledge of the world, of human nature, and of yourself.

 

8

TRAUMATIC FRIENDSHIP

FRIENDSHIP'S END

There is no term to describe the breakup of a passionate friendship, no ritual or legal proceeding to mark its end, the way divorce does for marriage, even though it often leaves just as large a hole in the psyche. Lost friends are as haunting as lost lovers and just as hard to replace. The more abrupt and inexplicable their behavior, the more troubling and insidious the toll. The fallout from betrayal by friends begins early on and can resonate for decades.

The longing to belong and to be prized by one's peers permeates childhood and adolescence and can be compelling and anxiety provoking at any time in life, as the common dread of cocktail parties in adulthood attests. This need—as old and as potent as erotic desire—is a fundamental part of being human; according to object relations theory,
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we become ourselves by being recognized and loved by others, originally by our parents; their role is later assumed (at least to some extent) by our contemporaries. Therefore, narcissistic injury, the humiliating recognition that you mean less to another than he or she means to you, looms large. It is a common feature of the primordial rifts with childhood “friends”—typically playmates with whom the connection is based as much on proximity as on compatibility—that are an inevitable part of learning to negotiate peer relationships. Occasionally, these accidental companions have the qualities we later seek in genuine soul mates, but usually more superficial commonalities (being in the same class, living on the same block, riding on the same bus) cause us to be thrown together with them, and at first they are the only contemporaries other than family members whom we know.

Some of these early rejections are simply acts of casual thoughtlessness that are not even intentional, as when the playmate to whom I offered to lend my favorite Nancy Drew mystery when we were both eight years old casually remarked that a copy was already circulating in her group of close friends. It's nothing personal; we are simply not on their radar, but we experience the slight of not being invited to the birthday party or picked for the baseball team as devastating because of our own vulnerability and the intensity of our hunger to be recognized and chosen by others we deem valuable companions as much for their social status as their personal charms.

Very few people navigate childhood, let alone adolescence and adulthood, without experiencing several such splits. It is striking that the sting of these early exclusions often lasts longer and embeds itself deeper than the tie to the actual person who does the excluding and that we tend to remember the circumstances long after we have ceased to have the slightest interest in the perpetrators; the only things I remember about the girl who spurned my offer is her name and my reaction. Along with the serious psychic wounds inevitably inflicted by parents and siblings, these rejections become the prelude to the deeper and darker ones that follow.

Crushes on friends (which often include crushes on what particular idealized people and groups represent) happen as early as we have friends, but the most tumultuous ones occur simultaneously with first loves, of which they are a variation. Many people date their initial experience with the ecstasies and torments of their intense nonsexual romances from around the same time they first fell in love and their early lovers fell out of love with them.

It is disturbingly easy to be catapulted back to the high school cafeteria, where, I vividly recall, there was a table of “popular” girls, among whose number I longed to be counted, whom I vainly attempted to emulate by dressing like they did and taking off my glasses as I waited in line, since none of them seemed to need corrective lenses. I could hardly see without mine, but I felt I looked better to those looking at me, and that was what counted. I admired one of these girls in particular from afar, who epitomized everything I wanted to be. She seemed so cool and confident (she was a pert cheerleader as well as a decent student, her hair was perfect, and her flirtation skills flawless) at a time when I considered myself too shy and serious, my hair hopelessly lank, and my manner never clever enough. Once or twice she and her retinue deigned to make room for me, and I was jubilant to be invited into their charmed circle. But I soon realized that though I was not actually spurned, a seat was never saved for me as it was for the anointed ones, and I never seemed to be sought after or missed. No confidences were whispered to me, which would have been a real sign of membership. Since I hadn't done anything egregious or obnoxious or alienating that I knew of, I concluded that I was excluded because of who I was, and that was the one thing I was helpless to change. This experience had such a potent impact on me that when I attended a high school reunion in my hometown at the age of forty-seven, I avoided that cafeteria like the plague. But I did make it my business to go to the library, to which I donated a copy of my latest book; that was my revenge and compensation.

For a thrilling instant, I felt I had vaulted one of life's most daunting gaps and safely landed in with the in crowd and its flawless leader. The memory of my moment of belonging and its evanescence is actually more viscerally alive and more unmooring than my concurrent recollection of the “popular” boy with the green eyes and the red convertible—he would have been considered a catch by anyone at that table in the cafeteria—the first one to kiss me and to take me out for New Year's Eve, who three months later stopped calling and pursued somebody else for no apparent reason. Both seemed heavenly gifts that were snatched away, leaving me helpless and bereft. Along with the deeply etched woes of family life, these are the twin precedents of every subsequent rejection, including my first serious betrayal by an intimate friend several years thereafter. The need to be accepted is no less compelling than the need to be embraced; they are siblings.

Contrary to what most people assume, hormones are not the prime—and certainly not the sole—motivator of relationships, even in adolescence. To be admired and desired are merged in all our important connections. Our choice of friends—especially the friends we idolize—is influenced by the same life events and family dynamics that lead us to particular lovers; how we deal with abandonment by these special ones comes from the same sources. The qualities we seek in bosom companions change with experience—for me at this time in my life, psychological mindedness, generosity, steadfastness, and a kindred sense of humor have trumped what passed for sophistication in 1963—but the desolation of losing them is strikingly similar at fifteen and sixty-five.

One of the most devastating aspects of being spurned by a beloved friend, whenever in life it happens and on whatever pretext, is the sense of unreality it induces; you think, can this actually be happening between
us
? To lose someone who is still physically present yet suddenly psychically absent or altered seems unbelievable. No one can be prepared for such a sudden, shattering rupture. Dramatic departures or screaming denouements are less common than the uncanny experience of the person simply slipping out of reach or causing you to disappear from her consciousness. A rejecting friend, like the Boojum in Lewis Carroll's nightmarish poem “The Hunting of the Snark,” makes you “softly and suddenly vanish away” when you approach her, and you fall into the void. Knowing you will never laugh together again, sharing confidences with reckless ease, causes its own brand of helpless longing. The explanation, if any is offered, can never fully explain, because the motivation to rebuff a former confidante comes from deeply unconscious sources, such as envy, jealousy, fear of merger with a disavowed aspect of the self, and revisiting unresolved conflicts with parents (usually mothers for women friends) or siblings.