Chapter 19

He spent most of the afternoon thinking about the things he had repeated in his life, and wondered if he was learning things or if he was instead like an etch-a-sketch which kept getting erased every time someone shook it up a little. He was after all on the road, drinking heavily, and living with no sense that he had any kind of responsibility to other people. He thought about his patients back home and what they must be thinking right now, and hoped they would understand. He was in a place right now where he was not sure he should be in charge of anyone’s mental health, as his own hung precariously in the balance.

     On the other hand he realized that the moments of pain in his life had also been the most instructive, and he kept a glimmer of hope that this could also perhaps be one of these times. He was experiencing pain like he had never known before, but he also was surviving, one precarious day at a time. He was fairly certain he wanted to hang around for a little while longer despite all of the painful feelings he was working through.

     As he entered into Texas, he once again began to see the signs for the Big Texan, and he smiled and remembered the first time he had made this trip. He was 22 and it was when he first started entertaining the idea of being a writer. He searched his memory and remembered a short story he had written during that time period about a lost soul traveling around the country after having his heart broken. It was strangely prophetic, as a lot of things in his life had been, and he had always been a believer in looking for and evaluating signs. What had he learned since that first story?

     For one he had, at least for a season in his life, loved well. He remembered a kind of longing to feel something like that when he was a younger man, but he instead had spent the next decade drinking, chasing women, and generally avoiding any kind of commitments. He now realized this whole period of his life was an attempt to avoid pain, which he knew as a psychologist was almost the surest way of finding it. All of life came with some kind of price tag, and the bigger the reward, the bigger the jeopardy. Love was absolutely the most dangerous yet rewarding pursuit, and right now he couldn’t help but wonder if it was worth it. It was so fleeting.

     As he thought about all of these things he pulled over to look up a quote Victor Frankl on the subject, as he needed a little inspiration. The quote read, “Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." 

     Frankl had always been an inspiration to him, as his book “Man’s Search for Meaning” had been one of the first things he had read that had drawn him towards psychology. He thought about the power of choice and how it related to his own life right now and where it might be headed. People had counted on him, regardless of his own feelings about the world and his larger place in it. He had gotten many letters over the years from former patients who had written to him and told him these very things. Some of these letters were the only fuel that had kept him going in his darkest days.

     As he got closer to Amarillo, he thought about resilience and some of the ways he had accessed this over the course of his life. He had always advocated for the idea that a sense of humor was a person’s greatest asset in making emotional choices, and now he decided it was time for him to practice what he preached. He found himself pulling into the Big Texan to relive an old memory and once again see if he could take on a 72-ounce steak. He was sure it would at least be good for a smile, and right now that was exactly what he needed.