I have cast about wildly looking for the reason I became psychotic in 1974, drawing together extended combinations of events, not reaching any one such drawing of much more certainty than another.
It may however be simple.
Just before I began the full-blown psychotic marathon of three days or so, within a few days of it, I was assigned to work on a model for the housing section of the Abu Dhabi architectural team at The Architects Collaborative in Cambridge, MA. Soren Rono, the head of the housing section, gave me the assignment, a definite opportunity for me to show my talents.
I was given a space in which to work. It was the office supplies room, a roughly five foot by seven foot square space with a foot and a half diameter column in the middle of it. A door was in place on supports, against the wall of the space. That was my work table. There were no windows.
This was not enough space to do serious work in.
But my mission was to do what I was asked to do, especially when it was architecture-related work such as this was. I did not permit myself to consider my comfort. Another person might have complained. I was not a complainer.
This was not in this case a good character trait. It led to me sitting at the table wallowing in the details of the work and reaching a point where all I could do was sit and stare at the materials at hand. Soren popped his head in the door, and not recognizing that the space was too small assessed the situation as a failure on my part. He gave me a sympathetic but disappointed look and said he would take over, not verbally expressing his assessment of what I was doing. He did not have to move into the space there. He had his own layout that was plenty big in another room in the office, the housing section room with several other architects, and some windows. Each architect in the firm had at least two working tables each about three feet by six feet.
This is the reason I went psychotic. I lost my grip on reality, my tenacity to be effective in all circumstances. I lost my sense of self-defense. All this because I couldn't draw a line where I saw trespass occurring on my rights. I hope I am able to incorporate this understanding of my basic wits into my life now and start speaking up for my needs. Mission and my comfort need to be reconciled before I reach the point of disaster in my means of living.
This is an issue that first surfaced in my freshman year at Yale when I conceived of my mission being to work independently from all other groups in some city's ghetto. I reflected that it would require a large discomfort. I didn't consider it all with responsibility that would make it a done deal. The next year I simply dropped the whole thing when I took a girlfriend and wasn't able to incorporate my mission into the idea of having a life partner. I never confided in anyone the degree of severity of life I was anticipating, making for a night-mare of unvocalized personal motives, one of which was not complaining when my mission, whatever it morphed into, led to my personal discomfort.
This is obviously not the end of all this.
Showing posts with label The Architects Collaborative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Architects Collaborative. Show all posts
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Monday, February 22, 2010
The decision of the department of astronomy at Yale to admit me to their Ph.D. program starting in 1980 was a validation of my decision-making in something of a general way.
As such, it forces critics to look at outside reasons for my mental collapse in 1974. I was disregarded then by Ralph Montgomery and Bob Turner, who both held the position of Associate in the firm The Architects Collaborative where I was working as an apprentice, as a serious candidate for promotion as a seeker of the position of architect. Whether it was because I engaged in banter as a peer in the office, and in so doing left myself open to private judgments which may have been uncomplimentary because of the feeling of architects that as an apprentice I ought to not radiate my humanity so much because to them it was looked upon as superiority because they were not able to do it themselves to such a degree, that speculation is certainly relevant to any assessment of the events then as being either explanatory, or not, of the collapse. When the course of my employment had gone so far as to cement in everyone's eyes just what kind of an architect I looked to becoming, it was then time to watch what was made of it, and it so happens that just about nothing was made of it. In particular, no private gestures were made. Professions work by such gestures. Without them nothing evolves. And receiving none myself, it became tacitly obvious to me I was not going anywhere in that firm on the merits of my personal radiance. However, it was my feeling then, as it is now, that my humanity was uncommonly good and occupied a higher class of considerations than mere craft. Seeing no private gestures, I could come to only one conclusion--the firm that I had attributed good judgment to, as among the best in the profession from my vantage point, was unresponsive to my better nature, something I had come to appreciate as readily getting a positive response from friends at Yale as an undergraduate, people who had no need to see it as acting superior because they had no deficits themselves in terms of human radiance, each in his own way.
Because the firm did not warm to me professionally, and it was apparent that its judgment was equivalent to that of the whole profession, my entire dedication to the profession was dealt a serious blow. I could not sustain the exploration of all avenues of personal development as an architect. But it was a logical negative factor, being an across the board effect of equal volume everywhere, devaluing all my accumulated efforts, rather than a sharp effect on any single stand I had taken. No alternative reaction to what I actually did do was possible, and any fishing for such alternatives must begin with a rejection of one or other of my most innate qualities and long-established patterns of behavior.
Now you could say, "well, he didn't get promoted and became depressed." But this leaves out the fact that I was deeply involved in office life, and had a stake in everyone's own lives. I didn't know how important it was to look for private gestures. I thought my public stance would naturally lead me up the ladder of public promotion. It was my youth and lack of appreciation for minute interactions because I had never had a fulfilling romance, one that would slow me down and speed me up where those had natural rewards, respectively. All my romantic efforts to that date had been wild guesses, because my family life trailed behind my personal life, for better or worse, and this left me in a major struggle to find satisfaction in love. So when I felt great, I radiated it. At Yale, it was apparent where I was coming from because they had some idea of the kind of problems faced by people who outdistance their families. In architecture, it's more of a public world, and there are rough seas. People rely on private gestures because the public ones are so dangerous. I lived dangerous that way, living as a public person, because I sensed somehow I had a problem of rarity, one that only a rare confidante could comment to in any way, and in the mean time, life beckoned so I had to put my business out in public and play those risks as the only way to present myself fully. Well, bam, it went awry and I became mentally ill. But eventually I did meet the rare confidante. And pursuing that meeting, I was admitted to Yale's Ph.D. program in astronomy, a proof of good decision-making. But as a way to meet the rare confidante it was still dubious. I chose to go off medication, in order to confront the problems of love over developing the tools of craft. I travel this world not as a functional intelligence, but as a lack of a lover, until I find one. Hopefully Crystal Newell is the one. Yale's acceptance proved I had the makings of craft. In my position, really known only by me, this was a signal to look for love in a certain way, different from how I had looked before then. It was something I had needed ever since grade school, and all the romantic deprivation I had suffered then and afterwards was put into perspective by that acceptance, and assured me in a specific way that what I felt intuitively about my worth for love had actual proofs in the real world. It was time for a general release of conformity with expectations. It was time for walking into the world at large, perhaps no different a time than birth. It was time to risk, and ultimately to embrace, homelessness.
And in that decision to go off medication, there was enough sense and wisdom to lead me ultimately to be tapped by the Chicago elite society as a first. Same person, making the same decisions, to the same end. Part of recovering from mental illness is satisfying everyone that the decisions you made going into it were good ones. I have tried here to do that. Judge for yourself.
As such, it forces critics to look at outside reasons for my mental collapse in 1974. I was disregarded then by Ralph Montgomery and Bob Turner, who both held the position of Associate in the firm The Architects Collaborative where I was working as an apprentice, as a serious candidate for promotion as a seeker of the position of architect. Whether it was because I engaged in banter as a peer in the office, and in so doing left myself open to private judgments which may have been uncomplimentary because of the feeling of architects that as an apprentice I ought to not radiate my humanity so much because to them it was looked upon as superiority because they were not able to do it themselves to such a degree, that speculation is certainly relevant to any assessment of the events then as being either explanatory, or not, of the collapse. When the course of my employment had gone so far as to cement in everyone's eyes just what kind of an architect I looked to becoming, it was then time to watch what was made of it, and it so happens that just about nothing was made of it. In particular, no private gestures were made. Professions work by such gestures. Without them nothing evolves. And receiving none myself, it became tacitly obvious to me I was not going anywhere in that firm on the merits of my personal radiance. However, it was my feeling then, as it is now, that my humanity was uncommonly good and occupied a higher class of considerations than mere craft. Seeing no private gestures, I could come to only one conclusion--the firm that I had attributed good judgment to, as among the best in the profession from my vantage point, was unresponsive to my better nature, something I had come to appreciate as readily getting a positive response from friends at Yale as an undergraduate, people who had no need to see it as acting superior because they had no deficits themselves in terms of human radiance, each in his own way.
Because the firm did not warm to me professionally, and it was apparent that its judgment was equivalent to that of the whole profession, my entire dedication to the profession was dealt a serious blow. I could not sustain the exploration of all avenues of personal development as an architect. But it was a logical negative factor, being an across the board effect of equal volume everywhere, devaluing all my accumulated efforts, rather than a sharp effect on any single stand I had taken. No alternative reaction to what I actually did do was possible, and any fishing for such alternatives must begin with a rejection of one or other of my most innate qualities and long-established patterns of behavior.
Now you could say, "well, he didn't get promoted and became depressed." But this leaves out the fact that I was deeply involved in office life, and had a stake in everyone's own lives. I didn't know how important it was to look for private gestures. I thought my public stance would naturally lead me up the ladder of public promotion. It was my youth and lack of appreciation for minute interactions because I had never had a fulfilling romance, one that would slow me down and speed me up where those had natural rewards, respectively. All my romantic efforts to that date had been wild guesses, because my family life trailed behind my personal life, for better or worse, and this left me in a major struggle to find satisfaction in love. So when I felt great, I radiated it. At Yale, it was apparent where I was coming from because they had some idea of the kind of problems faced by people who outdistance their families. In architecture, it's more of a public world, and there are rough seas. People rely on private gestures because the public ones are so dangerous. I lived dangerous that way, living as a public person, because I sensed somehow I had a problem of rarity, one that only a rare confidante could comment to in any way, and in the mean time, life beckoned so I had to put my business out in public and play those risks as the only way to present myself fully. Well, bam, it went awry and I became mentally ill. But eventually I did meet the rare confidante. And pursuing that meeting, I was admitted to Yale's Ph.D. program in astronomy, a proof of good decision-making. But as a way to meet the rare confidante it was still dubious. I chose to go off medication, in order to confront the problems of love over developing the tools of craft. I travel this world not as a functional intelligence, but as a lack of a lover, until I find one. Hopefully Crystal Newell is the one. Yale's acceptance proved I had the makings of craft. In my position, really known only by me, this was a signal to look for love in a certain way, different from how I had looked before then. It was something I had needed ever since grade school, and all the romantic deprivation I had suffered then and afterwards was put into perspective by that acceptance, and assured me in a specific way that what I felt intuitively about my worth for love had actual proofs in the real world. It was time for a general release of conformity with expectations. It was time for walking into the world at large, perhaps no different a time than birth. It was time to risk, and ultimately to embrace, homelessness.
And in that decision to go off medication, there was enough sense and wisdom to lead me ultimately to be tapped by the Chicago elite society as a first. Same person, making the same decisions, to the same end. Part of recovering from mental illness is satisfying everyone that the decisions you made going into it were good ones. I have tried here to do that. Judge for yourself.
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