I floored it. About two miles down the road, figuring I was out of danger, I popped open another beer. The adrenaline rush subsided, and a smile spread across my face. That was close! Then lights flashed red and blue behind me. Panicking, I spilled my beer while trying to stash it under my backpack.

I pulled over, resigned to the fact that I would be going to jail. Instead I thought I was charmed and could get away with anything. Two weeks later I awoke on a hard concrete bench in a cell with five other farting, coughing men. I was led before a judge, who read the charges against me: I remember instances on the playing fields in school when my eyes would shudder and my visual field would become a series of frames for a few seconds, like a slide show.

‘My Parents Still Won’t Accept That I’m Gay!’

Then there was the way I constantly caught my left toe on shag carpets or grassy surfaces, and my occasional difficulty swallowing. In my late twenties, for about a month, I could produce the sensation of hot liquid running down the back of my leg if I dropped my chin to my chest. It went away but returned over and over throughout my thirties and forties.

But every time I became worried enough to see a doctor, my symptoms would disappear. Then one cold, snowy night I was awakened by a knife blade of pain just behind my left ear. I writhed in agony and could hear myself screaming in the dark. What followed is a blur in my memory: When I awoke the next morning, my left hand was rigidly curled into my wrist, my wrist into my elbow, and my arm contracted across my chest.

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My chest, arm, and face were totally numb. When I walked, I veered off to the left no matter how hard I tried to stay straight.

I crashed into furniture and doorways. My brain was sparkling with electricity. Lights and loud sounds made me nauseous and dizzy. I felt as if I were dying. It took three weeks and another excruciating attack before an ER doctor did a spinal tap. But after my diagnosis we all knew. I now have a very special and personal relationship with my deceased grandmother.

Beyond Blue Support Service

I feel connected, beyond time and place, to this woman I never met. It was my wedding day, and I was marrying my college boyfriend, the hottest guy on campus. Since we were thousands of miles from our families and had no close friends nearby, we decided to have a simple ceremony: It was a cold, foggy day in San Francisco. En route to the chapel I shivered in my plain white dress with spaghetti straps.

Excited and nervous, I fiddled with the camera on my lap and noticed there was only one shot left. He exploded with rage: How could I be so disorganized? Why did I always have to make a fuss over things?

When we arrived at the chapel, my stomach was in knots, and my face felt flushed. A small voice inside me said, Run! He held the chapel door open, his face a mask of stone. I stalked in past him. Once outside, I held back the tears until we were inside the car. He never apologized.

I never even took the one shot I had left in the camera.

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Retired military, he was always stoic, a rock. As her daughter — and a newly licensed psychologist — I thought it was just my neurotic mom being more neurotic than usual. A few months later my parents made the trek to California to visit me and their two-year-old grandson, and I saw what my dad was talking about. Mom had no tolerance for typical toddler behavior and cried at the drop of a hat. For all her neuroses, my mom had always been good-natured and jovial. This was different. A few months after that visit, she suffered a heart attack and went into a coma.

Doctors found a tumor that had been growing for years in her brain. She underwent surgery and radiation, but Mom was never the same. Dad cared for her as long as he could. It broke his heart when he had to place her in a nursing home before she died. A few years after her death, I visited my dad to throw him an eightieth birthday party. He looked impossibly old, bent from arthritis in his spine and easily fatigued. I apologized and assured him everything was all right. An only child, I was bereft as I traveled home for the last time to attend the funeral.

When Your Family Doesn’t Approve of Your Partner

He was buried next to my mother, with full military honors. I was driving my red Fiat with the bad clutch down the Pacific Coast Highway, as I often did, but on that winter Sunday evening in everything felt different. I was twenty-two years old, and for the first time in my life I was going by myself to a gay bar. I parked and went inside. It was a casual neighborhood joint.

I stood next to a post for a while, trying to be invisible, then sat down on an empty stool and ordered a Long Island iced tea. I drank it quickly, aware of the men all around me. Even though I was sitting, I held on to my glass tightly as if for balance. When my drink was empty, I ordered another one. At some point I fell into a conversation with a man sitting next to me. He was short, with a light brown mustache and friendly eyes. He told me he was a police officer. When he suggested that I follow him in my car to his apartment in Santa Monica, I said yes.

I had never gotten behind the wheel with so much liquor in me before, but I was determined to see this through. Out of the chaotic swirl of intoxicated thoughts I heard a whisper: I am not driving safely. I should stop. I should pull over. Instead my foot pressed down on the gas pedal, and I raced through the tunnel of trees to my destination.

A quarter century has passed since that night.

When Your Family Doesn't Approve of Your Partner | cis.e-safety.com.ua

Recently I have been grieving for gay teens who have killed themselves after being relentlessly teased and bullied at school. I have thought back to my own childhood and wondered what it was that kept me alive when I experienced similar treatment. Though the idea of suicide never occurred to me, I know now that there is more than one way to erase yourself. Is that what I was trying to do late that Sunday night in Santa Monica when I was twenty-two years old? The next day I awoke with an epic hangover, fears of viral infection, and a determination never to do anything so self-destructive again.

Something inside me had snapped, but I reassembled the broken pieces and carried on. Today when I remember that night, I feel sorrow for that suffering twenty-two-year-old, gratitude that no lasting harm came of his poor judgment, and wonder at what sometimes causes us to throw ourselves into the darkness, as if our greatest desire were to crash.

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