Letters to the Editor
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Armchair psychologists
Am I the only reader who felt there was something "off" with the LW? Certainly some posters here have hair-raising stories about their own clashes with NPDs and other troubled individuals, or highly disfunctional families. But I think this is coloring their ability to see in between the lines of this LWs letter.
We are, of course, only seeing one side of this relationship. But they have been married for ten years -- is it possible that ONLY now she is seeing his problems? Maybe she spent the early part of their marriage raising kids, with him at work -- and now he is apparently out of work (he's "trashed" his jobs) and she's the one with a thriving career. Maybe he's both jealous of her success, and feeling desperate to prove his manhood by getting a new successful job of his own. It seems that's why, perhaps, he's desperate enough to "steal" his own wife's ideas (what ideas? Curious she doesn't give a single example), and try to get hired at her place of employment.
How, exactly, can a SPOUSE steal your ideas? What sort of ideas -- did she invent a source of clean, renewable energy and he's stolen the patent? It sounds more like the source of the conflict isn't NPD, it's that the husband has barreled ahead and stolen her thunder in the founding of the "learning center for the homeless" -- this doesn't strike me as such a precious or unique idea that one individual can totally claim credit for it. Why is she so offended he wants to be the director of this (as of yet nonexistent) center? Doesn't she already have a FULL TIME JOB of her own, that is required to support their family?
Where do their kids -- if any -- fit into this? If so, how do they react to the supposed behavior problems? Does he "trash her reputation" to the children? I don't know, but I suspect there are no children -- most women would mention them at least in passing. If not, again how did she miss his behaviors all these years until now -- or is the directorship of the (as of yet nonexistent) learning center just so offensive and hurtful to her that she's exploded in this way, suddenly see what had been minor irritating behaviors and quirks as a kind of huge personality disorder?
It is typical of spouses who have fallen out of love, or just want out of a relationship, to suddenly come up with a huge laundry list of "problems" with the partner, some of which were never problems until Spouse A wants badly to leave. You know what I mean: Spouse B was a good provider....now you want to leave him, so he's a "workaholic". She was an enthusiastic lover, until you got bored...now she's a "sex addict". She was a terrific homemaker, cook, mom....now she's a smothering Martha Stewart-type obsessive.
It's a form of blaming and heaping criticism on the spouse, and it troubles me because the LW is not taking ANY responsibility for getting into this situation -- I guess she's perfect and he's a big loser (interestingly, after he's not employed and providing income, and she IS).
I'm not at all sure I understand how someone can "steal" your ideas, anyhow -- we probably are NOT talking about patent infringement here. If you are the "idea person", you almost certainly have a depth of knowledge about the project and an enthusiasm that can't be easily simulated -- furthermore, people who know you will know that you are ALWAYS generating ideas. People who are constantly coming up with ideas do this all the time -- people who steal ideas only ever have the one they stole. LW, if you were secure in yourself, you'd realize that people around will quickly figure out that it's YOU who is the source of all your brilliant ideas -- your ego doesn't have to be that insecure.
Ditto for the "trashing". The LW says her husband is "trashing her" with friends and at church (the whole role church is playing in this is confusing -- does she work for a church or religious organization?). What does this consist of? I mean, is your husband calling you a whore or something? A bitch? These are your friends and fellow congregants, they know you -- they won't be fooled easily by such exaggerated and out-of-character comments, and would probably think less of HIM for such talk, rather than think less of YOU. If what he says is so off base, and so troubling, then why have you not confronted him about this?
The LW strikes me as both neurotic and paranoid. I think posters are overlooking HER behaviors in their rush to condemn him for things he may not even be doing. A lot of this is perception -- is he "stealing her ideas" or trying to help her realize them? is he "infringing on her job" or sincerely thinking it would be a great idea if they worked together? (Personally, I'd be thrilled if I could work at the same company as my spouse!) Maybe he thinks she'd be very happy to see him in a good job, and it's her who is getting all paranoid and wonky about him working with her.
My point again: I don't think people really can "steal your ideas", and you can only be "trashed" with colleagues who don't like you in the first place. And if you have a spouse you suspect has really serious mental/emotional problems, YOUR FIRST STOP has to be a good mental health professional, to listen to BOTH SIDES, and offer an evaluation -- if it's really bad, maybe 2 or even 3 professionals, to be sure it's nothing physical. And NOT to an online advice columnist -- that's a truly lame action, and possibly even dangerous to accept such shallow, facile advice based on a one-sided letter.
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December 5, 1989 (Age 27-1/2) -- Dear Diary
[Continued from Part II] I took it to pay for college and to repay my parents for the psychiatrist’s bills I’d racked up a year earlier for wanting to throw myself down a mine shaft in Germany because I’d failed (somehow, it’s not clear to me) to master the country and 2-1/2 years earlier for wanting to kill myself because I’d failed to become Ski Racer in Killington, Vermont, and, though I’d resisted the waste of psychiatric expenses the first time, for failing to throw myself off the Space Needle 4-1/2 years earlier because I was no good at debate, chess, track, girls, lunch line rugby, pissing in the presence of other human beings (I’ll let you google “blushing bladder disability”), and who knows what else. I made it okay through the first week of sales cult training in Nashville, Tennessee (although I nearly killed half the Seattle recruits on the way there in a stupid synchronized hand-holding stunt on the freeway with another car), but after just two weeks in the field I cracked. My inability to breathe life into the wooden sales script, my inability to improvise, my shyness, my introversion, no place private to pee, getting into arguments with some of the would-be customers, getting shoved around by a couple of roughnecks at a dusty apartment in the center of town, the extraordinary poverty in the neighborhood where I started (the rationale being that when we reached the rich sections our sales technique would be honed), a woman answering the door who looked like she’d gotten beat up the night before, my dismal sales rate, getting stabbed in the heart by some chance-met waifish hard-running sweat-sheened technical type from the oil fields who seemed to like me (which I knew couldn’t be true, setting in motion the usual internal romantic death spiral), the superiority of the other sales people, the long hours, the bullshit evangelical fervor of the whole enterprise... These are perhaps some of the reasons why I failed. I remember nothing of how I got home, but three weeks later, after several trial ascents, I finally hopped out of my aforementioned cedar tree and into the intensive care unit, where I woke up with a new bill for $8,000 ($17,000 to $28,000 in today’s medically inflated dollars). I’ve long since paid off the psychiatrist’s bills, but am still only halfway through the ER bill. With the benefit of long hindsight, I’d say I took the Oklahoma sales job for the same reason that some gamblers keep doubling down straight into bankruptcy. I was the dumbass on junior high ski trips who you always saw tumbling ass over tea kettle on the diamond slopes rather than sticking to the square slopes where he belonged, who never saw the famous Monty Python duel between the Dark Lord and Nerdly Knight in which every time the former chops a limb off the latter and offers a truce, the latter refuses, until at last he’s nothing but a head on the forest floor shouting at the Dark Lord’s retreating back, “Is that all you’ve got, you coward? Come back and fight like a man!” And even if I had seen this sketch, I’m sure I would have taken it as an ode to bravery rather than a send-up of lunacy.
The two books on suicide that I like most, if the topic still interests you, are “The Savage God” by A. Alvarez and “Ordinary People” by Judith Guest. (I saw the movie of the latter first, and it, too, is wonderful.) You should be careful with both, however. The person who recommended “The Savage God” to me while I was in Germany, an enchanting combination of comic absurdity and philosophic smarts who didn’t seem depressed at all, killed himself two weeks later, with wine, pain pills, and a warm bath, stylishly taking notes all the way to the end. And when I saw “Ordinary People” -- before I tried to kill myself, I think -- naturally I identified with the main character, Timothy Hutton, who by movie’s end has heroically transcended his suicidal impulses. But there’s a second suicidal character in that movie who doesn’t make it, and I should have been paying more attention to her.
A third series of books that I would recommend, that have nothing to do with suicide and everything to do with the know-it-all blinkered vision of youth, are “The Adrian Mole Diaries” by Sue Townsend. They are possibly the funniest books I have ever read. They won’t cure you of depression and despair, and every person’s taste is different, but as a vacation from life’s dead seriousness, especially for someone who has suffered the torments of adolescent (and not-so-adolescent) intellectual ambition, they are hard to beat. Make sure you read the first book in the series first so that if you like it, you can enjoy the others in their proper order.
With regard to the economic advice you’ve been given, there seem to be three main camps: 1) “When the going gets tough, the tough get going, ” i.e. suck it up, there’s a recession coming. 2) “When the going gets tough, the smart fly south,” i.e. life’s too short to put up with this shit -- quit and find something better. 3) “When the going gets tough, the tough fight back,” i.e. march into Massah Cheney’s office and tell him to go fuck himself. I would prefer to always follow the advice of Camp 1, but because I am built like a Chevy rather than a Toyota, for the first 18 years of my working life (age 16 to 34) I effectively followed the advice of Camp 2, with this difference: [Continued in Part IV]