A goalie who can’t see? A goalie purposely refusing proper gear so that he can suffer pain? Insanity.
Yet it all made sense to me at the time.
I was halfhearted on the ice, letting down everyone in the hockey program. I wanted so badly to succeed, to find myself and my place among my peers. But the moment I was back with the hockey team, all of my past with Graham came rushing back.
I didn’t care, and it showed. But of course I did care, and it crushed me on the inside.
On the outside, however, I wasn’t going to let anyone know that I hurt one bit, because I had already run from the scholar-athlete who had shown up first year. A part of me hadn’t really wanted to go back to Princeton, and in a passive-aggressive manner I participated but really didn’t.
IT WAS LATE afternoon in our dorm room, one of those double wide units on the third floor of Holder with angled ceilings, dormers, leaded windows that opened to slate tiles on the roofs and offered views far across campus, dark wood on the lower walls. I was there by myself. The phone rang. And it rang. And it kept ringing. I didn’t move to pick it up.
I knew who it was. Already cut from the varsity roster, I was supposed to be at Baker Rink to get on the bus and leave for a JV game. But I wasn’t in the mood to play hockey, for I was having a dark, a very dark day lost in my thoughts about it, about him.
The phone kept ringing. I didn’t move.
The phone rang some more. I still didn’t move.
Ring after ring after ring after ring. It kept ringing. I didn’t move. This was war.
Finally, I’d had enough. I was ready to give in. I got up and answered it.
“It’s me.”
There was no response. A few seconds later, the phone clicked dead on the hang up at the other end.
My hockey “career” at Princeton had just been terminated. No amount of begging the next day in the inevitable attempt to try to succeed after having ensured failure could change anything. I had just killed the scholar-athlete within me.
But I do have some good Princeton hockey memories. In spite of what I was dealing with, not every day was all doom and gloom. The waves of pain and self-loathing came and went. In between, there were great moments, fun moments, normal moments, times when I could just be who I really was. And there was laughter—always laughter, whether manufactured to hide the pain or real, genuine laughter.
Coach Higgins gave me an opportunity. I was unable to deliver. I’m sorry I let him down. He was a good man with a good heart. His job depended on us delivering for him, on me delivering for him. I failed him.
And, of course, I failed me. I never played a varsity hockey game, I never earned that orange “P,” and it haunts me still. He won.
THE WILSON SCHOOL of International Affairs at Princeton offered a departmental program to which sophomores could apply and, if selected by an admissions committee, enter and make International Affairs their major. All other departments at Princeton (and now the Wilson School itself) were open. You could major in whatever you wanted to provided you had taken the required preliminary courses for entrance.
Because the Wilson School was selective, it attracted huge interest. Because it was a program I was interested in, and because its main prerequisites were an interest in the field of study and very high grades from first year and midterm second year, it seemed only natural to me and everybody who knew me that I would apply. After all, in second year I had taken an extra calculus class on a pass-fail basis (we could take several extra courses this way, where the actual grade we received wouldn’t show up on our transcripts other than to note whether we had passed or failed, allowing us to give less than full attention to an extra class at no risk to grade point averages) and scored 100 percent on the midterm. A dean told me I was one of the few to ever move a course from pass-fail to graded, which I did after that midterm.
But beyond interest and transcripts, you also had to submit letters of recommendation, including one from a professor. I immediately knew who I’d get to do that.
My transcript was fine. My professor’s recommendation? Well, I never asked for one. I just slipped a note with the required form under his office door the night before applications were due asking him to see what he might be able to do for me in the circumstances.
Self-sabotage.
When the admissions were announced, I told everybody that I had been wait-listed, but that wasn’t true. I wasn’t remotely prepared to tell anybody that I hadn’t really applied in the first place, because that self-sabotage was tied to this story, and this story was something I wasn’t sharing with anybody.
ONCE HOCKEY WAS gone, things became dramatically worse. If I aced one exam, I would make sure to not do my best on the next. I’d trash a string of easily attained A’s by not doing all of the required course work in another course. Princeton’s atmosphere of success brought out my worst feelings of being lost, excluded, misunderstood, and undeserving. I would eventually self-implode time and again, unable to come to grips with how somebody as pitiful as I was could even have the right to live, let alone thrive. I was on automatic pilot, recklessly sabotaging myself both academically and physically.
Because of my athletic failure, my early academic success meant nothing to me. I had never been just a scholar or just an athlete—I had always been a scholar-athlete. In my mind, it was easy to excel only at school or only at athletics—anybody could do that. The important thing was to excel at both at the same time. Once hockey was gone, any good grades I had already achieved were meaningless, I was a failure. And that was good, because that was how the world was supposed to see me.
During those dark periods, when I questioned the meaning of everything, I would skip lectures, miss seminars (where class participation was of paramount importance), and fail to hand in assignments. In our upper years, we were assigned faculty members to supervise independent research, which was an opportunity to work closely with some of the greatest minds in our fields of study. Thinking I wasn’t worthy of being there in the first place, I figured I’d just be wasting their time, so I skipped appointments. My grades suffered.
And yet I loved being at Princeton. I had so many magical experiences. I was in so many ways succeeding in the face of so many obstacles.
Years of black-tie dinners, sometimes with dates from other colleges who came to visit. Traveling to watch the football team at Harvard (I so loved “Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball!”). Seminars that I could drop in on any night of the week to hear somebody speak on a topic I’d never thought would interest me. Dinners at the homes of my professors. Studying until late in the night and then walking back to the dorm with my roommates and sharing a laugh about the day. Working as a short-order cook at the cafeteria and serving eggs to Brooke Shields. Making friends for life with my roommates. Going my own way when things got just a little too tough. Long runs along Carnegie Lake with the girl who had a crush on me. Back rubs, the safe sex of the time.
Christmas at Princeton was special for many reasons. First, a beautiful campus became even more beautiful when it was covered with snow. Second, the academic schedule was set up so that first-term exams were held after Christmas, meaning that while we had classes in December, we weren’t in exam frenzy. Instead, we had winter parties, winter formals, arch sings with a cappella singing groups performing under the Gothic arches of the various halls, the sound resonating under the stone canopies. And there was nothing more romantic for a Christmas date than getting the keys to Baker Rink from the manager of the varsity team and taking your crush for a late-night skate around an unlit Baker Rink, a magical place on its own, after your dinner. Marc Daniel, manager of the varsity team and keeper of the key, remains a good, lifelong friend. I can never thank him enough for lending me the key to the rink on several occasions. Still, nothing could match the magic of that first freshman year Christmas skate, if only because when we all showed up the next day to get ready to go to Yale, nobody but Marc could figure out why the othe
rwise pristine ice was marked up close to the boards all the way around the ice surface.
Whenever things got too difficult for me I would go for a walk by myself. I would lose myself in the beauty of Princeton. I would stare at the spires and gargoyles on the buildings and listen to the ghosts. I would search for meaning in my life, for something or somebody to help.
But I couldn’t tell anybody. I couldn’t admit to anyone else that I had been weak, that I had been defeated by my abuser, that I was not the person they saw from the outside. I had made new friends at university, but those friendships were with the person people thought they were seeing, not the real me, and I couldn’t tell them who I really was for fear of losing their friendship. And then, when things were very dark, I just assumed that everyone knew anyway and that they were all laughing at me behind my back.
In spite of all of this, I learned a great deal. I still had the drive that had kept me alive, and I still got excellent grades in the courses where I hadn’t purposely sabotaged myself. I immersed myself in campus life, attending lectures after hours, exploring intellectual pursuits in areas outside my field of study, engaging in long conversations with professors and classmates. I enjoyed the ability to pursue learning in a wide variety of subjects, from economics to history to literature to math and physics. I loved learning, studying, reading, discussing. I loved everything that Princeton had to offer. If only I could have stayed out of my own way and escaped the feeling that I was a fraud and that I had sold myself to get there.
Every once in a while I would have moments of clarity, brutally terrifying moments, almost out-of-body experiences, when I would vividly see what I was doing to myself and understand without any doubt that I was actively trashing my own dreams. Those moments of clarity were my insight into the depths of my own inner hell, they made me see that I could not escape myself and my own reign of terror. When they happened, I would have to work very hard to try to remind myself that I still belonged at Princeton in spite of whatever stupid, self-destructive thing I had just done, and I would renew my vow to attempt to hold it all together.
But even better than a solitary late-night walk through the campus was a trip into New York, a place where a lost soul could really get lost. The university has its own train station that runs a shuttle to the main line into New York. It takes about an hour, and in that time you can go from the most idyllic rural campus life to the middle of an absolute gong show in the darkest parts of Manhattan. I have always liked to travel and experience new things, perhaps because in a new place you have no past and there is always the potential for a new beginning.
I embraced traveling into New York, and I did it more often than most who knew me realized. In New York I would blow off steam, just walking the streets and soaking up the smells that are very much a part of the city. In my later years at Princeton, I had a girlfriend who lived in New York and so I spent even more time there. I loved the juxtaposition of Princeton and the Lower East Side—Princeton, a protected piece of perfection, up against utter chaos and the worst that the city had to offer only an hour’s train ride away. “Alphabet City” is code for a lot, and New York in the early ’80s was a very different place from what it is now, less sanitized, less Disney-esque, more, well, raw and welcoming for those who want to run from their emotions, to hide from their feelings, to numb themselves against the world around them.
I loved New York. I still do.
I don’t miss Alphabet City one bit.
THAT VARSITY LETTER, proof that I could triumph over him? That dream was gone. As for academics, overall I did well, but not nearly as well as I could have and not nearly as well as I had proven that I could do. It was classic self-destructive behavior, the actions of someone crying out for help.
I had always thought that if I could keep fighting, keep myself occupied, keep pushing it down, keep running from the abuse and from Graham that I would eventually win. But I was never able to beat Graham. He had won. And in my moments of clarity, I knew it. My second set of roommates, friends who remain very close to me even after all these years, only saw a glimpse of what was going on—until the night they saw me for who I was when I was forced to confront myself in yet another moment of clarity.
Graduation is coming soon. My four years at Princeton are coming to an end. What have I achieved? What have I lost? What have I thrown away? What will I become now? What have I been ever since I first met him? I’m a complete and utter failure. I have no future. This was never real. There is no future.
It’s over.
I couldn’t hide my substance abuse that particular night. My roommates had never known what went on behind closed doors, but there I was, right in front of them, needing to let them into my world, if only for a moment, to show them just who I really was, what I was capable of. It wasn’t their world, it wasn’t their thing. That night, sitting around the living room in our multi-level dorm room right in front of them, I started and I just kept on going and going. I saw the exchanged glances, the surprise, the concern, the confusion. But I was done hiding, because in that moment of clarity I knew who I was, what I had become, and that I had lost, that Graham had defeated me, and that I was not going to ever succeed or flourish, so nothing really mattered.
That night never ended for me. Long after everyone else had gone to bed, I was still caught up in the aftermath of my moment of clarity. There is nothing as sad as a spectacular sunrise and the mellifluous chirping of birds when you crave darkness and silence. I was hoping against hope that this would finally be the day when the sun didn’t also rise, and while it was pretty to think so, when it did come up it brought with it only my darkness within.
I put on some shorts and running shoes and went down the stairs and out the dorm. I started at a quicker pace than usual, my body feeling no pain. The campus gave way to gentle green hills and estates, sprinkler systems clicking as they moistened perfectly manicured lawns amidst the long shadows of very early morning. I picked up the pace further and started to feel a twinge in my diaphragm, that familiar pleasant pain of exertion. I told myself to go harder, make myself really hurt today, and when I did hurt, I pushed harder still. I wasn’t out for a run anymore, I was out to hurt myself. And if I couldn’t will the sun to not rise, then maybe, just maybe, I could finally run away from myself, from him, from everything, from life itself, and it would all just end.
Albert Einstein did some of his best work at the Institute of Advanced Studies, a large, academic complex defined by Fuld Hall, a building with colonial columns set in the middle of a vast field with an imposing circular driveway in front. It’s also the place I finally understood it was never going to end. I stopped running, I lay down on the cool, moist turf, and I went to sleep, until I was awakened several hours later by some gardeners.
IN THE END, I graduated with an A.B. (that’s not a typo, it’s the way the degree is styled at Princeton, an “arts baccalaureate”) in Economics. I guess success and failure are always relative. My grades, though not what they should’ve been, were good enough to get me into Canada’s most prestigious and selective law school. But I will always look at my undergraduate experience as a failure. Why? Because there are two scoreboards in life: the scoreboard that the rest of the world sees and judges you by, and the scoreboard inside your head. And no matter how things may look like from the outside, no matter how successful you may seem to be, if you haven’t done the best that you can do, there is no hiding from the scoreboard in your head, the most important scoreboard of all.
Even today, even as I understand the forces that were at play, to me the end result was still failure, for it is actions that speak loudest. I had proven my ability to excel at Princeton, I knew I had that ability to succeed in me, but I simply could not follow through to the end.
My parents came to my graduation and met all of my roommates, all of my friends. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. I had forgotten the culture shock I had experienced on first arriving at Princeton, and I realized through
watching them what it must have been like for me to have come from my home to a place like that.
After I had packed everything up in the rented car that would take us to the airport and then home, I went back to the simply amazing dorm in Little Hall, up to our room, to say goodbye to the rest, who were still collecting their things and hadn’t yet left. And with tears in my eyes after our hugs and goodbyes, I walked down the hallway toward the exit and looked one last time into my bedroom. There, on my now empty desk, was my diploma. I had almost left without it. I had almost walked away without taking with me the reason I had gone there in the first place. It was almost, almost, as if I hadn’t been there at all.
I couldn’t tell you where that diploma is now. Several years ago, in an attempt to put the past behind me and move on, I threw out, ripped up, or destroyed so many things from my past, and my diploma was lost somewhere in that vortex.
AT FIRST GLANCE, a Rubik’s Cube appears to be a nothing but an incredibly complex and unsolvable mystery. But pick it up and get to know it a bit better and it starts to reveal itself as a set of discernible patters. Apply the wrong patterns and you’re left with a jumbled mess. Figure the patterns out and you can actually solve the puzzle.
I was a jumbled mess. Yet patterns were becoming clearly discernible.
SIX
THIS IS THE LAW
IN SEPTEMBER 1986, I entered the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. I may have been a failure with no sense of self-worth, but I sure knew how to fail with style.
I didn’t enter law school in any search for justice coming out of the abuse. I wasn’t reacting to what had happened to me out of any desire to better understand a justice system that might eventually prosecute my abuser. And I was not driven to learn about the law as it applies to sexual predators in any devotion to the pursuit of justice for those who have been preyed upon by sexual predators. No, I chose to go to law school because when I was younger, before I had met Graham, I had wanted to be a lawyer. By going to law school I was attempting to reclaim the goals of my life before him.
I Am Nobody Page 11