For the text of my essay, click here. To buy the book, click here. If you own the book, read this:

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The original hardcover contained an error in this essay, which was corrected in later printings but then committed again in the paperback. If you own an early printing (previous to the fourth) of the hardcover or an early edition of the paperback (I¹m told it will be corrected there too), here is how you should correct the text.

Beginning on page 252, six paragraphs are in the wrong place. The botched passage begins "My brothers fled the home ..." and ends with the paragraph that begins "There is no drug for depersonalization ..." and ends " ... the course of authenticity."

Take a pen and mark where this passage begins and ends. Then write CUT.

Turn the page to 254, to the end of the first full paragraph which begins "I need to find these feelings ..." and ends "... this remained true after the divorce." In the space between this paragraph and the next, draw a line and write PASTE.

Here is how the whole passage should read, from the bottom of page 251 to the middle of 254.

Which is not by any means a straightforward task. Freud¹s idea of "repression" suggests that unconscious experience is like water pressed against a dam, that we need only remove the blockage and allow our memories to pour out. This is a dominant image of emotional healing in our culture. I think of it as the Hawkeye Pierce model of psychotherapy, after the last episode in MASH, in which Alan Alda¹s character has been confined in an asylum and is coaxed into retelling a traumatic episode. One by one, the authentic details emerge until he remembers the repressed memory of a small child¹s death. He cries. He is healed.

The psychoanalyst Donnel Stern, in his book Unformulated Experience, suggests another way of thinking about "repression." He uses the metaphor of the rock at the bottom of a lake, which requires great and sustained effort to recover. Perhaps our lives are many such rocks. Perhaps we have to raise the ones we can, imagine the rest and then, with these images and memories and emotions laid before us, find the patterns and shapes.

We are all natural storytellers. Even as we think we are just seeing a concrete image or hearing a distinct sound, we are in fact filling in gaps, putting material in context, constructing a narrative. That muted howl from the apartment next door‹is it a woman crying, or a child laughing, or the laugh track from a television set? We make such choices at every moment, usually without conscious thought. We tell stories about other people, and we tell one big story about ourselves.

But sometimes, for some people, the story is torn. The essential sense of who we are, of what the world means, becomes lost. All the bits of life¹s evidence that must be sifted, digested, or passed over, instead fly like shrapnel. This happened to me a long time ago. In high school, when I first saw my name over small stories and articles, those words "Josh Shenk"‹in ink against newsprint‹struck me with dumb shock. I was thrilled and horrified at a small glimpse of what it meant to be real. It may seem strange that someone haunted by the inadequacy of words would become a writer, but I¹ve often felt no other choice but to struggle and claw for what should be a simple birthright: to tell myself and others who I am.

Like everyone, I start with a handicap, which is that I don¹t know my own beginnings. Births and early infancy precede memory. Many later memories, which we should in theory have access to, are still as elusive as mist. So we become historians of our own lives, dependent on unreliable, reluctant sources. I can describe with precision the home I grew up in, its brown paint and simple brick, the gnarled limbs on the trees outside. But what did it feel like to live there? How did it form me?

I need to find these feelings, because the facts communicate so little. For instance, I was the youngest of three children and my parents divorced when I was seven. This is a story too common to be distinctive, but too important to be ignored‹the slow leakage of affection and kindness from my parents marriage, the grim entrance of resentment, confusion, and anger. The unspoken rules of the house forbade expressing these emotions, and this remained true after the divorce.

My brothers fled the home as best they could. I, the adoring younger brother, tried to follow them. But they had no interest in me, except as an occasional object of humiliation. . I suppose I reminded them of what they hated in themselves: the vulnerable, longing, suffering son of their parents.

When I tried to let out my own feelings‹tearing apart that room, for instance‹my family pretended they were invisible. I learned to not speak how I felt, soon stopped knowing, and slowly but certainly developed a way of being‹a sense of being split, an aching numbness, a cascade of critical voices‹that would keep things that way. Some psychiatrists have described this as "depersonalization." It is a diagnosis listed in the DSM-IV in the category of dissociative disorders, along with post-traumatic stress and what used to be called multiple-personality disorder. Depersonalization, the manual says, is characterized by persistent or recurring feelings of "detachment or estrangement from one¹s self Š a sensation of being an outside observer of one¹s mental process, one¹s body, or parts of one¹s body." "Often," the manual continues, "individuals with Depersonalization Disorder may have difficulty describing their symptoms."

No diagnosis can tell my story. Still, depersonalization has the advantage of nicely announcing what is missing. To treat this "disorder" requires nothing less than removing the "de" to find the person‹whatever is real beneath.

There is no drug for depersonalization, which leaves me adrift in an era where pharmaceuticals offer identity: If Ritalin or lithium or Xanax ease your symptoms, you can fit into the narrative of the corresponding disorder (attention deficit, bipolar, anxiety). If an anti-depressant helps, you can toss off the four letters preceding the hyphen and proudly affix to yourself the word that remains. I haven¹t been helped by medication. Many have. But I wonder if all of us are depleted by the way brand names, dosages, and combinations have eclipsed talk of agonies, fears, and dreams. Good stories must be reined in from chaos (the whole truth), which our imaginations are too feeble to comprehend. But good stories are never simple or precise. To shape and order our lives, without molding them into caricatures, is to hew a course between the poles of chaos and cliché‹the course of authenticity.

I still need to imagine my life, to find my story by living it, following moments of emotional clarity through life¹s maze. I look for help in therapy, in relationships, and faith in its broadest sense‹the faith of the gardener, the faith of the lover, the faith of the writer. The faith that I can experience what is real about the world, that I can hurt plainly, love ravenously, feel purely, and be strong enough to go on.