The Kevin Show

by Mary Pilon

  In his characteristic, even-paced tone, Gordon explained that he felt he had wasted his time and hard-earned money to be part of Kevin’s indulgence, his mania that he didn’t seem able or willing to control.

  Years after Kevin’s first hospitalizations, Gordon still maintained that his son did only the bare minimum necessary to stay out of the hospital; he wasn’t making a commitment to his family. He also felt that the manic Kevin resembled a used car salesman in his pushiness and ability to persuade others to do things against their will. He felt manipulated by what he interpreted as Kevin’s continual attempts at sabotage.

  Susanne held a much different view. She felt that Gordon wasn’t interested in trying to understand what things were like for Kevin. He didn’t want to understand the rare form of suffering that their son had been struggling with for years. Her own attitudes toward medication, mental health treatment, and therapy had migrated much toward Amanda’s more holistic approach, including in her own medical practice. While she didn’t pretend to completely understand what was going on in Kevin’s head, she was at least curious to find out more. That was a conversation, it seemed, that Gordon, for whatever reason, wasn’t interested in having.

  KEVIN

  Kevin’s thoughts rolled on a separate track as his father kept talking. He wanted to ask him how he felt about not having any biological grandchildren from him, but he didn’t bring the subject up. “I didn’t need to hear [that] my ancestors feel disrespected, too,” he later said.

  Kevin had been trying to explain his mania to his father for years, but Gordon still regarded it as a simple matter of whether or not Kevin took his medication. He thought Kevin just didn’t have enough willpower and that it was Kevin’s choice to mess everything up, when in actuality, Kevin wanted to scream at the top of his lungs that he was trying, trying harder than any of them could ever imagine.

  When Kevin was growing up, he had thought that having intelligence entailed having a certain level of empathy. Now he was learning that the two didn’t necessarily go together, that one could be bright but not kind, as well as the other way around. And that mismatch could have a disastrous effect on others, even though many people, including his father, weren’t intending to do any harm. Kevin’s father seemed to know factoids about every item in a room—he was a walking library filled with nuggets of information that he could pull down from shelves. Or, like those people who can keep an accurate Scrabble score in their head during a game, as well as the point tallies of everyone else playing. But to Kevin, facts were just that—facts—devoid of a soul or sensorial experience.28

  Kevin had spent most of his adult life not really understanding what “normal” felt like. That is, if normal even existed—maybe it was a mere construct or myth. Often when he was on medication, he felt that something was missing, as if he wasn’t his real self.29 Yet he still had to wake up and be a dad every day.30 The narrative of being the victim, a helpless loon in a psych ward, is a powerful one, Kevin thought, but ultimately one that wasn’t helpful. No one ever talked about his diagnosis as an opportunity to learn or explore what it meant to be human—just as a problem.32

  Right there, Kevin later wrote, “hidden in the evasive name of the condition is the truth. There are two sides to the story. Maybe stopping the medicine is an attempt to cure something far more painful and scary than the fear of losing one’s job, friends, or even sanity.”31

  What if he wasn’t broken after all?

  AMANDA

  Amanda sat down at her laptop and began to write a letter to her father-in-law. For years, she had urged Kevin to try to reconcile his tension with Gordon. She had long felt frustrated with Gordon’s lack of understanding, or lack of wanting to understand, his son. Kevin’s mania. It wasn’t just going to go away, ever. Gordon, like Amanda, needed to learn how to live with that, how to work with it rather than against it. Amanda wrote that part of what wasn’t evident to Gordon was “that Kevin’s life-long struggle for self-love is what is keeping him alive—keeping him here as a father and a husband.” She clicked send.

  Gordon responded with an hour-long phone call to Amanda. Upon hanging up, she realized that the content of her letter hadn’t sunk in and that Gordon wasn’t likely to change his views. At least for a while, Kevin’s desire to maintain some space from his father seemed like a good idea. The therapist he and Amanda had recently started seeing in Auckland agreed. The two men weren’t likely to connect anytime soon, and the stress of interacting with Gordon could add yet another weight on a recovery that still felt fragile.

  After Legoland, she and Kevin developed a checklist, written from Kevin’s point of view, for the kind of behavior that signaled that he was heading toward The Show and away from reality:

  I want music in the house more than usual

  I sing more passionately, and better, than usual

  I am more chatty

  I am more interested in other people, and their lives

  I am more interested in different books, movies, exploring the web

  I am more creative and fun as a father

  I am more interested in sex

  I am more interested in my own appearance, clothes, the news

  I think people on the street look a little like famous people

  I trust everything is going to work out, and life is easy …

  They also developed a checklist for the kind of behavior that signaled he was firmly rooted in reality:

  I haven’t put on music for weeks

  I have to force myself to read the one book I have going

  I talk slowly and don’t barge in with an unsolicited conversation

  I am too emotionally lazy to be irritated by anything, even things which should irritate me

  I get plenty of sleep …

  In some ways, dealing with a “good day” was the tragedy of it, as Kevin and Amanda found themselves second-guessing whether it really was a truly positive moment in the ordinary sense or if Kevin was spinning up toward an episode. They both knew that the checklists were far from being a solution. In her more than twenty years of knowing Kevin, Amanda was the first to admit that there would never be a way to know for sure when he was heading toward an episode, or to find a “cure” or “quick fix.” At least identifying his patterns was a start.

  KEVIN

  Kevin, Amanda, and their children moved back to Auckland from the Bay Area. The skyrocketing Northern California real estate market had served them well in unloading their house there, and after years of being nomads, they sought to have a more permanent home.

  The world around them was changing as well. More and more, online campaigns such as the hashtags “#sicknotweak” and “#imnotashamed” were becoming shorthand for people “outing” themselves as having been diagnosed with a mental illness. Other people wrote blogs chronicling their battles in detail.33 In 2013, the same year that Kevin sailed on the Artemis and had his Legoland episode, the nonprofit Project Semicolon was launched, its name derived from the punctuation used “when an author could’ve ended a sentence but chose not to,” the group’s website read. “You are the author and the sentence is your life.”34 Many in the movement draw semicolons on their skin as reminders that life does go on. Kevin took it a step further and got a semicolon tattooed on the top of his wrist.

  Largely thanks to social media, some people with mental illnesses were feeling connected to each other in new ways, including Kevin, who started to use Facebook to call on help from friends and family, many far-flung from his years of international travel. Reading the posts of others who had gone through struggles like his own made Kevin think of Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion that when the mind, body, and soul are faced with severe trauma they look for ways to cope. He began trying to deconstruct what his initial trauma might have been and how The Show might have become the means by which he tried to handle it, slowly helping to shift his relationship with social media from one of it acting as a trigger to becoming an ally.

  The culture at lar
ge was becoming more interested in the nature of bipolar disorder as well. More nuanced depictions of people35 who had been diagnosed with it were appearing in critically and commercially successful shows and movies such as Homeland, Six Feet Under, and Silver Linings Playbook. Celebrities not only began to identify themselves as having been diagnosed, but were beginning to talk about it in more detail—among them the actress Carrie Fisher, who wrote about her bipolar disorder in several memoirs. While a stigma remained, the term was slowly but surely entering the mainstream Western lexicon and inspiring more people with diagnosed, or suspected, mental health issues to talk more openly about their experiences.

  As time stretched away from the crash, from Legoland, from the psychiatric hospital admission with the Google Glass, Kevin further dissected the questions of who the Director was and what purpose, if any, he was going to serve in his life going forward. Was it as Freudian as the Director being a manifestation of his father? Was the Director a supporter? An oppressor? A coach? A version of himself, an alter ego of sorts? Some combination of all those? Kevin felt that he needed a visual reminder of his “Truman Show” delusion, something that he could look at every day that would remind him of his own reality rather than that of The Show. With Amanda’s blessing, he designed a television set tattoo that would live on his inner arm. The antennae were asymmetrical, to make sure he could clearly see the L in the scene—to go with an O, V, and E. The O was the outline of the screen, the two legs of the V were attached to the bottom, and there were four Es.

  The Es framed the television set and were inspired by the shorthand that James Joyce had used when writing Finnegans Wake to keep himself oriented while weaving together several narrative threads and trying to come to terms with his daughter’s schizophrenia. In the book, Joyce played with the idea of fours36 over and over again: four seagulls, four old men, four waves, four provinces of Ireland, four seasons, four points on a compass. Kevin wanted the tattoo, with its four sides, to remind him that his life was best lived when he was in the middle, that moderation was the goal.37

  Importantly, too, the Es pointed outward and formed a border. If he ever felt a whiff of the Director or caught a peek into The Show, he was to stare at his tattoo, the television, to keep him focused, literally, on the right channel.38

  Increasingly, Kevin and Amanda try to broach Kevin’s “Truman Show” delusions with friends. The moniker gives them a built-in reference to the film, but Kevin often also explains his delusions by referencing the CCTV cameras in London or the increased presence of street cameras in New York City. “That’s how I feel when I’m in The Show,” he says. “All the time.”

  When Kevin and Amanda talk to their children about their father’s mental health, they often use the Pixar film Inside Out as a tool to help them in describing how sometimes their father’s train of thought goes “off the track.” In the film, a girl named Riley lives with five personifications of her emotions—Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Anger, and Joy—who live in her brain’s headquarters and influence her actions. Her memories are stored as multicolored gumballs, and there’s an ongoing battle to keep Sadness away from her brain’s console, a parallel plot to Kevin’s at times. The narrative is even more complicated when thinking about the compassion Kevin received from law enforcement. It’s a sharp contrast in an era of police shootings and headlines about Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and far too many other names that are in the news as their middle child, Leo, comes of age half-black. “Do we have to worry about Leo just walking around in a sweatshirt?” Amanda asked.

  Kevin Hall’s tattoo

  Like many people who have had manic episodes, Kevin says he wouldn’t trade his diagnosis in if given the chance, because he’s accessed parts of his brain that the vast majority of people can only imagine.39 Kevin has to constantly remind himself that as exciting as an episode can be, its consequences for his real-life supporting cast are too devastating to be worth it. His lows, too, can be contagious. Every day, Kevin wakes up and is tested.

  Since returning to New Zealand, Kevin still has had visits from the Director. In the fall of 2015, he had an episode that was Ulysses-themed in which he purchased a one-way ticket from Auckland to Dublin and made endless loops on the ground with the cables of his cell phone chargers. Amanda drove around all night trying to find him. He recalled Joyce’s quotes and took them to heart. “For myself, I always write about Dublin,” Joyce said, “Because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

  The universal sounded pretty good to Kevin as he boarded the plane. He wanted to be swept away and escape, feeling as though he was letting his family down again. That pain of having to choose between what he saw as his false self and “true self,” became unbearable. But when he heard Coldplay’s “Fix You” on his Spotify playlist and the line “Lights will guide you home,” he realized he had made a mistake. He ran out of the plane before it took off, reconnected with Amanda and his children in Auckland, and entered a hospital shortly thereafter.40

  In May of 2016, Kevin spent several days on suicide watch, a down period he attributes to the difficulties he experienced in trying to figure out his post-professional athlete identity. During this period, he and Amanda benefited from cognitive behavioral therapy, an evidence-based way of developing personal coping strategies and problem-solving techniques. It is a hyperpractical approach and a departure from the older Freudian style of hopping onto the couch and talking about sexual proclivities developed during childhood. Kevin did not sail until more than a year after the Artemis crash, and even then it was just him testing out his Moth with some friends, not a competition or preparation for one.41 Although he enjoyed the physical sensation of being out on the water, the experience didn’t make him miss racing at all.

  Today, Kevin still sails occasionally, but derives pleasure from writing, spending time with his family, and doing some sailing coaching. He’s excited about the prospect of helping guide someone else on their path through the sailing circuits and sharing his years of experience with those just starting out.

  Kevin has said on more than one occasion that being a stay-at-home dad is more difficult42 than being an Olympian. “When you train for the Olympics, it’s all about you,” Kevin wrote. “When you’re a stay-at-home dad, it’s never about you.” He says he could make sense of his bad days on the water, but his challenging days raising kids are far less logical. The only thing less predictable than the water, it seems, is the behavior of children. “When you say you’re an Olympian,” Kevin says, “people think you’re amazing. A badass, a model citizen, an inspiration, worthy. When you say you’re a stay-at-home dad people wonder what you did wrong to lose your job and whether you ever wore the pants at all.”43

  The Hall children have sailed some, including through a New Zealand school program that Kevin sometimes volunteers with. He enjoys spending time with his kids on the water but is anxious that he might begin pushing them too hard. He doesn’t want them to feel as though sailing is their only means of achievement—or to flame out early and lose their joy of the sport. “I loved it so much as a kid,” he says. “I just want to be supportive.”44 During a recent fun run on one of Auckland’s beaches, two of the Hall children were giggling toward the back of the pack. “We were thrilled,” Amanda said.

  When Kevin sits on his couch describing his current position in sailing, he speaks of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (who many scholars today believe may have had45 bipolar disorder), and his protagonist Ahab, forty years at sea. For Kevin, too, it has been forty years at sea and counting, and maybe he has proved what he wanted to in that time after all. Maybe his own quest, like Ahab’s, has been about something other than just the impassioned hunt for the whale, or an Olympic medal. Instead of questioning his passion for sailing, Kevin is now questioning the fanaticism itself. But unlike Ahab, he’s losing interest in making his life about executing a revenge plot against an internal or external en
emy of some sort. For both him and Ahab, the ship quite literally snapped, but Kevin is determined that his life beyond the water not be marked by melancholy or mania. “Thus sailing with sealed orders,” Melville wrote in White Jacket, “we ourselves are the repositories of the secret packet, whose mysterious contents we long to learn. There are no mysteries out of ourselves.”46

  Kevin and Amanda talk about what they’ve been through in and out of The Show, as she reminds him over and over again that she knew what she was getting into from the start. She chose it then and continues to choose it every day. She wants a world with Kevin in it, and in it as her partner.

  Kevin has started writing about his experiences in and out of The Show and is both committing his story to, and confronting it on, paper. “I want people to know you can be a little crazy and have a good, real life, too,” he says. He knows he’s not alone in the surreal becoming real, and the other way around. Life continues to surprise, and whether Kevin spends his days on the water, in front of the laptop screen, helping his children with homework, or doing something else altogether, he resists the temptation of the Director while trying to maintain that same feeling of connected bliss he felt on the water as a kid. The Director may never go away permanently, but can he at least please hang back for a while?

  Kevin is needed, and loved, back on the shore.

  AFTERWORD

  MARY

  It’s hard for me to say when my Great Aunt Lettie first started hearing the voices in her head.

  For years, my mother and several other friends and family members who had known Lettie when she was alive recounted to me tales of attending the séances held in her Oregon farmhouse basement. Lettie said that she could hear the voice of Roger, her son who had drowned at the age of ten in the Santiam River. From his death in the 1950s until her own in 1981, she said that she could hear Roger’s voice, even if no one else could.