Note: The examples in this piece are drawn from moments in my own life where the structure I call a catalyzed emergency appeared in miniature.
What these moments share is not their subject matter but their pattern. A system—whether emotional, institutional, or social—exists in a temporary equilibrium. Then a relatively small catalyst activates tensions that were already present beneath the surface. Once activated, the situation accelerates and decisions that previously seemed distant are suddenly made in real time.
In each case, the catalytic moment itself was small: a candid remark during a conference break, a humorous but revealing line in a professional meeting, or a single sentence spoken in a social situation. Yet in each instance the effect was immediate. The atmosphere shifted, ambiguity collapsed, and the underlying structure of the situation suddenly became visible.
The personal examples described here are therefore not offered as dramatic events in themselves. Their significance lies in the way they illustrate, at the scale of everyday life, the same structural pattern that appears in larger historical crises.
Catalyzed emergencies, it turns out, are not rare occurrences reserved for moments of world history. They happen quietly and frequently in ordinary human experience.
Once you begin thinking about catalyzed emergencies, it becomes difficult not to see them everywhere.
Most of life proceeds in a kind of provisional calm. Conversations unfold along familiar paths. Institutions conduct their meetings, relationships drift through their usual rhythms, and the tensions that exist beneath the surface remain politely contained. Decisions are postponed. Conflicts are softened by habit. The system holds together because nothing has yet forced it to reveal its deeper structure.
Then something small happens.
A sentence is spoken a little too plainly. A truth appears unexpectedly in the middle of a casual conversation. Someone says something in a meeting that suddenly exposes the machinery of the institution.
The catalyst itself is often tiny compared to the shift that follows. Yet once it occurs, the atmosphere changes almost immediately. Decisions that once felt distant suddenly move into the present. The underlying structure—emotional, institutional, or relational—becomes visible.
Once you start noticing these moments, you realize they are everywhere.
I remember one such moment during a conference break with the young woman I call Isobel. We were talking in that loose, slightly intimate way people sometimes do between sessions, when the formal structure of the day has momentarily dissolved. The conversation drifted into unexpectedly personal territory, and at one point she mentioned something about her private life that was startlingly candid.
The remark itself was quiet and almost offhand. Nothing in the hallway changed. People were still pouring coffee, drifting between rooms, checking their schedules. The conference continued exactly as it had a few minutes before.
Yet internally something shifted very quickly.
A boundary that had previously existed only as an assumption was suddenly visible. The emotional geometry of the situation rearranged itself in an instant. It was one of those moments when the surface calm of an interaction suddenly reveals the deeper structure beneath it.
Looking back, it was a perfect example of a small catalyzed emergency. The remark itself did not create the tension that followed. It simply activated something that had already been present but unspoken.
Institutional life produces similar moments, though usually in a different register.
Years ago I attended a meeting where Steve Keegan, then responsible for development at the International Baccalaureate, delivered one of the most unintentionally perfect lines I have ever heard in a professional setting. Attempting to strike a tone of humility, he reassured the room that the organization should not think too highly of itself.
“We are not special,” he said.
Then, after a brief pause that only improved the effect, he added:
“Of course we are unique and special in many ways.”
The room erupted in laughter, not because anyone intended to mock him but because the remark revealed something everyone recognized instantly. Institutions often survive on carefully balanced narratives about themselves—humble yet exceptional, ordinary yet distinctive. When those narratives momentarily contradict themselves in public, the entire room suddenly becomes aware of the structure holding the organization together.
Again, the catalyst was small: a single sentence.
But in that moment the underlying psychology of the institution briefly revealed itself. Everyone in the room could see the gears turning.
The same pattern appears in more personal moments as well, sometimes with surprisingly decisive consequences.
I remember a night when a man was attempting to pick up Mariko. It was the sort of situation that unfolds quietly in bars and restaurants all over the world—nothing dramatic, just two people talking while someone else tries to determine what role they themselves are supposed to play in the unfolding scene.
For a while the equilibrium held. The conversation drifted, the man continued his efforts, and I watched the situation with the vague uncertainty that sometimes accompanies these moments. Was I a bystander? A friend? Something else?
Eventually I said something very simple.
“We’re together.”
That was it. A single sentence. A declaration that had not existed in explicit form until the moment it was spoken.
But the effect was immediate.
The conversation stopped. The geometry of the room rearranged itself instantly. What had previously been ambiguous became clear. The situation resolved itself within seconds.
Looking back, it was another catalyzed emergency. The sentence itself did not create the underlying possibility. That possibility had already been present in the emotional structure of the evening. What the sentence did was activate it, collapsing uncertainty into decision.
The remarkable thing about these moments is how small they often appear at the time. They do not arrive with the dramatic clarity of historical turning points. They slip quietly into the flow of ordinary life—a conversation during a break, a remark in a meeting, a sentence spoken in a bar.
Only later does the pattern become visible.
Most of life feels gradual while we are living it. Days follow one another in a steady rhythm. Institutions maintain their procedures. Relationships drift along familiar channels. The tensions that shape events accumulate quietly beneath the surface, rarely forcing themselves into view.
Then something small happens.
A remark. A confession. A declaration.
And suddenly the structure reveals itself.
The catalyst may be nothing more than a sentence spoken at exactly the right moment. But once the reaction begins, the system rarely returns to its previous state unchanged.
Note: This is Part III is our series on the concept of the “Catalyzed Emergency.” You can read the other two essays below.
Note: The concept presented here emerged from a recurring observation: certain events appear to produce consequences vastly disproportionate to their scale. Assassinations, attacks, epidemics, or even seemingly minor encounters can trigger transformations that reshape entire systems. Yet these events rarely create the underlying crisis themselves. More often, they activate tensions that already exist beneath the surface of an apparently stable order.
The Theory of Catalyzed Emergency proposes that many systems operate in a state of provisional equilibrium that conceals latent instability. Political alliances, institutions, and social relationships often persist through the management or postponement of unresolved tensions. Under such conditions, relatively small incidents can function as catalysts, accelerating processes that were already structurally possible.
Historical examples illustrate the pattern. The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand triggered a general war within a European system already strained by militarization and alliance commitments. The September 11 attacks catalyzed geopolitical tensions that rapidly transformed global security policy. The emergence of HIV/AIDS likewise revealed vulnerabilities embedded in medical, social, and political institutions.
What these events share is structural rather than causal similarity: a relatively small catalyst activates latent instability, compresses decision time, and forces a system into crisis. The theory proposed here attempts to describe this recurring pattern.
A Structural Model of Crisis Activation
Abstract
This paper develops a formal framework termed the Theory of Catalyzed Emergency, which explains how large-scale transformations in social, political, and interpersonal systems often arise from relatively minor triggering events. Rather than treating these events as primary causes, the theory proposes that they function as catalysts that activate latent instabilities already present within complex systems. Once activated, these instabilities compress the temporal horizon of decision-making and produce what may be termed a decision emergency, in which actors must rapidly commit to positions that reveal underlying structural relationships. Historical cases—including the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the emergence of HIV/AIDS, the September 11 attacks, and the 2008 global financial crisis—demonstrate recurring patterns in which catalytic incidents transform latent structural tensions into overt crises. The model integrates insights from historical sociology, crisis theory, and complex systems analysis.
1. Introduction
Major historical transformations are frequently narrated through trigger events: assassinations, terrorist attacks, market collapses, or disease outbreaks. Yet these explanations often obscure the deeper structural conditions that render systems vulnerable to crisis.
The Theory of Catalyzed Emergency proposes that crises arise when pre-existing instabilities within complex systems are activated by catalytic events that dramatically accelerate underlying processes. The catalyst itself is rarely proportional to the transformation it produces. Rather, it functions as a structural ignition point, collapsing decision horizons and forcing actors to reveal latent alignments.
This perspective intersects with several intellectual traditions. The sociology of knowledge associated with Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann highlights how social realities are actively maintained through everyday institutional practices. Similarly, the philosophy of history articulated by Walter Benjamin emphasizes moments in which historical time is suddenly ruptured, exposing underlying tensions previously masked by routine order.
The present framework seeks to formalize these insights by identifying the structural conditions under which catalytic events generate systemic crises.
2. Latent Instability
All complex systems contain internal tensions. Political alliances, economic networks, institutional hierarchies, and interpersonal relationships operate through temporary equilibria maintained by norms, expectations, and procedural delays.
Latent instability emerges when such systems exhibit:
unresolved structural contradictions
suppressed or deferred conflicts
asymmetrical power distributions
unresolved decision pathways
These tensions do not immediately produce crisis because systems possess mechanisms of equilibrium maintenance—diplomatic negotiation, bureaucratic inertia, cultural norms, or emotional restraint.
However, this equilibrium remains contingent rather than permanent.
3. Catalysts
A catalytic event is defined as a relatively small incident that dramatically accelerates the activation of pre-existing structural tensions.
Unlike direct causes, catalysts function through activation rather than creation. They do not introduce instability into the system; rather, they trigger the release of instability already embedded within it.
Historical examples illustrate this mechanism.
3.1 Geopolitical Catalysis
The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand is widely treated as the immediate cause of the First World War. Yet the European political system in 1914 was already characterized by rigid alliance structures, militarization, and nationalist tensions. The assassination catalyzed these conditions, triggering rapid mobilization across the alliance network.
Similarly, the September 11 attacks activated structural tensions surrounding transnational terrorism, Middle Eastern geopolitics, and global security policy, initiating a prolonged transformation of international relations.
3.2 Epidemiological Catalysis
The emergence of HIV/AIDS catalyzed profound transformations in public health, sexuality, and medical research. The virus interacted with pre-existing social and epidemiological structures—dense urban sexual networks, stigmatized communities, and fragmented health infrastructures—producing a global crisis that reshaped cultural and scientific discourse.
3.3 Economic Catalysis
The 2008 global financial crisis similarly illustrates catalytic activation. Years of accumulated financial risk within global credit markets were activated by the collapse of mortgage-backed securities, rapidly transforming localized financial instability into a systemic crisis.
4. Temporal Compression
A defining feature of catalyzed emergencies is temporal compression.
Before the catalytic event, systems operate under conditions of extended decision time, allowing actors to defer commitments. Once the catalyst occurs, however, the system enters a phase in which decisions must be made rapidly.
Actors suddenly confront binary choices:
mobilize or delay
intervene or abstain
acknowledge or suppress
cooperate or defect
The system thus enters what may be termed a decision emergency, in which the range of possible actions narrows dramatically.
5. Structural Revelation
Catalyzed emergencies perform an important epistemic function: they reveal the underlying structure of systems.
During periods of equilibrium, alliances and loyalties may remain ambiguous. Crisis moments force actors to declare positions, thereby exposing hidden relationships of power, ideology, or affinity.
In this sense, catalyzed emergencies serve as diagnostic events that illuminate structural features otherwise concealed by routine stability.
6. Formal Propositions of the Theory
The Theory of Catalyzed Emergency can be summarized through six formal propositions.
Proposition 1: Latent Instability
All complex social systems contain latent instabilities arising from unresolved structural tensions.
Proposition 2: Equilibrium Maintenance
Such systems maintain temporary stability through institutional norms, procedural delays, and conflict suppression.
Proposition 3: Catalytic Activation
A catalytic event activates latent instability when it triggers processes already embedded within the system.
Proposition 4: Disproportion
The magnitude of systemic transformation following a catalytic event is often disproportionate to the scale of the triggering event.
Proposition 5: Temporal Compression
Catalytic activation compresses the temporal horizon of decision-making, forcing actors into rapid commitments.
Proposition 6: Structural Revelation
During catalyzed emergencies, underlying structures of power, alliance, and vulnerability become visible through the actions taken by actors under pressure.
7. The Catalytic Cycle
The dynamics of catalyzed emergency can be represented as a cyclical process.
This cycle explains why many historical transformations appear both sudden and inevitable: the underlying tensions accumulate gradually, yet the catalytic moment that activates them may occur abruptly.
8. Scale Invariance
One of the most striking features of catalyzed emergency is scale invariance. The same structural pattern appears across multiple levels of social organization.
At the civilizational level, catalytic events may trigger wars, revolutions, or global crises.
At the institutional level, leadership changes or policy decisions may catalyze organizational transformation.
At the interpersonal level, seemingly minor encounters may activate latent emotional dynamics that permanently reshape relationships.
This cross-scale recurrence suggests that catalyzed emergency may represent a general structural property of complex adaptive systems.
9. Conclusion
The Theory of Catalyzed Emergency reframes the relationship between events and historical transformation. Rather than treating crises as the direct consequences of triggering incidents, the theory emphasizes the role of latent instability and catalytic activation in producing systemic change.
By identifying the structural conditions that make catalytic activation possible, the theory offers a more nuanced account of why certain events produce transformative consequences while others do not. In doing so, it highlights the importance of analyzing not only the catalysts themselves but also the underlying tensions that render systems susceptible to catalytic rupture.
Note: This essay is Part I of our series on the concept of the “Catalyzed Emergency.” You can read the other two essays below.
Note: This piece sits at the intersection of music, memory, and atmosphere rather than narrative disclosure. It reflects on a late-night encounter whose emotional resonance exceeded its visible duration, while respecting the privacy of the people involved and the ambiguity that gives such moments their meaning.
The essay is less about what happened than about how certain hours alter perception — the thin, liminal spaces where experience feels lightly refracted and ordinary interaction carries unexpected depth. References to artists like Franz Wright, Clem Snide, and Steve Earle, function as interpretive companions rather than explanatory frameworks, illustrating how art often provides language for encounters that resist direct narration.
If the piece feels intentionally incomplete, that is by design. Some experiences are best preserved as atmospheres rather than stories — moments acknowledged without being fully claimed, interpreted without being resolved.
In that sense, this essay is not an account but a calibration: a quiet recognition that certain hours open briefly, rearrange something internal, and then close without explanation.
And that noticing, in itself, is enough.
A brief reflection on songs, hauntings, and the thin hour of the night
Epigraph “All I wanted was a little money / All I needed was a week or two…” — Steve Earle, What’s a Simple Man to Do? (2002)
I first learned the shape of this feeling not through Steve Earle, but through Clem Snide’s cover of Franz Wright — an artistic relay in which one voice carries another’s encounter across distance and time, transforming the original into something that feels simultaneously intimate and secondhand. That is often how hauntings arrive for me: sidelong, refracted, mediated by art before experience recognizes itself inside the echo.
A borrowed door into an original room.
And that is where the hour begins.
There exists a space late at night — or early in the morning, depending on temperament and life stage — when cognition thins and the world grows slightly porous. The clock reads 3 AM, but the number matters less than the condition: the hour when ordinary structures loosen their grip, when language quiets, when identity becomes less declarative and more receptive.
At that hour, the city changes character.
Sound carries differently. Light softens into suggestion. Distance feels compressed. Time feels elastic.
Even familiar rooms acquire the faint strangeness of places visited in dreams. Furniture appears slightly displaced from its daytime certainty. Street sounds arrive as fragments rather than narratives. The mind, deprived of external reinforcement, becomes a receptive surface for impressions that would dissolve immediately under daylight scrutiny.
It is not mystical. Not dangerous. Not even especially dramatic.
Just thin.
I have had moments there — most of us have — when the boundary between witnessing and participating becomes ambiguous. One moment in particular remains lodged in memory like a quiet shoulder tap. There were real people involved, real conversation, real movement through space. And yet layered within the literal event was something harder to categorize: a presence that did not claim metaphysical authority but nonetheless altered the emotional pressure of the moment.
I cannot narrate specifics. Confidentiality holds the center, and the encounter was not fully mine to claim. But proximity alone can leave residue. Sometimes you do not own the story, yet the story alters you.
Earle’s character inhabits a world of visible stakes — border desperation, economic precarity, the sudden rearrangement of circumstance that forces moral improvisation. His question, What’s a simple man to do?, is less rhetorical than existential. It captures the sound of a human recognizing that the script he believed himself to be following has dissolved without warning.
Franz Wright’s terrain is quieter but no less destabilizing. His encounters are interior, structured around visitations that resist empirical verification yet exert undeniable psychological gravity. Wright’s presence is not law enforcement but the invisible: the sudden sense that one’s life has drifted subtly from its intended trajectory, that something unsummoned has stepped forward and is waiting for acknowledgment.
My hour lived somewhere between those poles.
Not danger. Not mysticism. A pressure change.
A moment when the ordinary surface of experience felt slightly displaced by depth — as if an unseen observer had entered the room and paused long enough for recognition without introduction. The encounter unfolded within the grammar of everyday interaction, yet its emotional register belonged to a different frequency.
Here is the calibration, because honesty matters more than narrative ownership:
I turned.
And what I saw was both literal and not literal at all. A person whose presence carried echoes beyond biography. A crossing of emotional currents that felt disproportionate to duration. A moment whose significance resided less in content than in atmosphere.
These encounters are rarely sustained. They appear, register, and dissolve before interpretation can fully assemble. But dissolution does not negate impact. Some experiences operate as quiet rearrangements — subtle shifts in perception that reveal themselves only through later reflection.
You do not leave with answers. You leave with altered attention.
Music offers a framework for understanding this phenomenon. Covers, reinterpretations, and artistic relays mirror the structure of thin-hour encounters: one experience passing through another consciousness, reshaped without losing origin. Clem Snide’s refracted Wright, Wright’s visitation, Earle’s desperation — each functions as a mediated echo, a reminder that human experience rarely arrives unfiltered.
The encounter at 3 AM belongs to this lineage of mediation. It was not an event demanding explanation but an atmosphere demanding acknowledgment.
Afterward, the memory settles differently from ordinary recollection. It does not assert itself loudly or demand retelling. Instead, it persists as a quiet calibration tool — a reference point that subtly informs later perception. You find yourself recognizing similar atmospheric shifts more quickly, attuned to moments when reality thins and emotional depth approaches the surface.
Such experiences resist mythologizing not because they lack significance but because their significance depends on restraint. To narrate them too fully would distort their nature. They exist precisely in the space between explanation and silence.
You live with them quietly.
Without overclaiming. Without dramatizing. Without converting them into personal mythology. Without pretending you earned, summoned, or deserved their arrival.
They came because certain hours open.
Most do not.
You do not chase these moments. Pursuit transforms them into performance. Instead, you cultivate a form of attention that allows recognition without grasping. When the next thin hour arrives — and it will, though unpredictably — the task is simply to remain receptive enough to notice.
The encounter does not require interpretation. It requires witness.
And perhaps that is the deeper resonance linking Earle, Wright, and the thin-hour experience itself: each represents a moment when life’s ordinary narrative pauses just long enough to reveal underlying possibility. A reminder that identity is less fixed than assumed, that meaning often arrives indirectly, and that some of the most consequential experiences unfold without external spectacle.
They do not change your life in visible ways. They change the way your life feels from within.
You return to ordinary routines — morning coffee, daylight conversations, the practicalities of schedule and obligation — carrying an unspoken awareness that certain hours remain portals rather than merely timestamps. The world resumes its solidity, but the memory of porosity lingers.
And so the encounter remains:
not a story, not a revelation, not a lesson, but a quiet rearrangement.
A reminder that sometimes the world steps slightly closer without explanation, offering a glimpse of emotional depth that cannot be captured but can be carried.
You do not chase it. You do not interpret it. You do not claim it.
You simply remain awake enough to notice when the hour opens again.
I will lay laid open… I do it ’cause I’m a family man… With the beat in now… And your chest came out ’Cause you weren’t too scared.
Big Red Machine — “Deep Green / Deep Dream”
There is transference. There just is.
Matthew Thomas
I. — The Pull That Isn’t Personal
It’s real because it’s grounded. It’s real because the adult self is the one in the room.
That sentence might sound simple, but it marks a fault line between two entirely different ways of collaborating. The younger version of me would have blurred this difference almost immediately — not out of desire in any straightforward sense, but out of hunger. Out of the impulse to turn recognition into destiny, resonance into narrative inevitability, voltage into myth.
In earlier years, artistic encounters carried an undertow of idealization. When someone appeared whose sensibility aligned, whose aesthetic instincts felt familiar yet surprising, whose presence produced that unmistakable flicker of creative electricity, the experience was difficult to contain inside ordinary frames. Recognition felt like revelation. Shared language felt like intimacy. Creative energy felt like evidence of something larger than collaboration — something fated, symbolic, charged with meaning beyond the work itself.
But time has taught me that this interpretive inflation is not depth. It is transference — not as pathology, but as architecture. A current running through collaboration that invites projection, narrative layering, and emotional over-interpretation. A dynamic that can produce beautiful work, but also confusion, distortion, and boundary collapse when left unexamined.
What has changed is not the presence of that current but my relationship to it.
The boundary is no longer defensive; it is intelligent. It is not erected to keep the other person out but to keep the work alive. It is the condition that allows collaboration to breathe without suffocating inside symbolic noise.
And the boundary itself is deceptively simple:
We stand side by side, not on top of each other’s meaning.
We remain in our own psyches. We allow resonance without fusion. We allow voltage without blur. We allow openness without myth-making.
This distinction may appear subtle, but it carries enormous implications. It is the difference between collaboration as encounter and collaboration as reenactment. The difference between creative exchange and symbolic entanglement. The difference between working together and unconsciously attempting to resolve unfinished narratives through one another.
In this sense, transference is neither villain nor obstacle. It is part of the terrain — inevitable wherever humans meet in creative space. The danger lies not in its presence but in its invisibility.
History offers cautionary examples. Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein, initially framed as therapeutic, evolved into a complex emotional and intellectual entanglement in which transference blurred professional boundaries and personal identities. Toni Wolff later entered Jung’s life as collaborator and intellectual partner, yet the triangular dynamic that formed illustrates how symbolic roles can quickly overtake relational clarity. None of these figures lacked insight or integrity; what they lacked was a boundary capable of containing the symbolic intensity generated by their shared work.
That boundary — the one Jung struggled to hold, the one Sabina never had the power to define, the one Toni inhabited with both strength and vulnerability — is precisely the boundary that matters in artistic collaboration. Not a line of separation but a line of differentiation, one that preserves psychological sovereignty while allowing creative permeability.
The collaboration that underlies this piece has tested that boundary in productive ways. The work carries voltage. The exchange of ideas, images, and aesthetic intuition generates moments of recognition that could easily be misinterpreted as evidence of deeper narrative convergence. The temptation toward symbolic overreach is real, as it always is when creative chemistry emerges unexpectedly.
But the boundary holds.
Not through suppression or distance, but through integration. Through the adult self’s capacity to remain present without narrativizing the encounter into something it is not. Through a commitment to form — not as rigidity, but as container. Through an understanding that artistic collaboration thrives when the symbolic field remains clear enough for the work to speak in its own voice.
Openness with form. Exposure with spine. Laid open, but not laid bare.
This is not restraint for its own sake. It is creative hygiene. It is the discipline that keeps collaboration from dissolving into projection, keeps admiration from mutating into idealization, keeps creative voltage from being mistaken for emotional destiny.
The boundary is not what limits the collaboration; it is what makes it possible.
And in that sense, the boundary is not a line between collaborators at all. It is a line that keeps the field clear so the work can keep happening.
This is how adults collaborate: with clarity, with shape, with mutual sovereignty intact, with symbolic noise turned down, with the quiet confidence that resonance need not imply fusion. The trio remains intact — internal voices aligned rather than fragmented — allowing openness without collapse and connection without reenactment.
Music has offered a parallel language for this dynamic. The Big Red Machine ethos — stepping forward without fear while remaining rooted in personal identity — models a form of creative openness that resists mythic inflation. The lines echo not as romantic declaration but as psychological instruction:
I will lay laid open… I do it ’cause I’m a family man… And your chest came out ’cause you weren’t too scared…
Openness is not the danger. Losing oneself inside openness is.
This brings the piece to its quieter question, one that underlies all collaboration, all transference, all creative exchange:
Can I remain open without giving myself away? Can I step into voltage without mistaking it for destiny? Can I meet clarity without dissolving into it? Can I collaborate without collapsing? Can I inhabit a resonant field and still leave it as myself?
The answer, tentatively but firmly, is yes.
Not because discipline has replaced feeling, not because detachment has replaced intimacy, not because protection has replaced vulnerability, but because integration has replaced fragmentation. Because the internal architecture is stable enough to allow openness without fear. Because the dream that once blurred boundaries now functions as threshold rather than invitation. Because the symbolic layer — what I sometimes describe as the Draco grounding — operates not as mystical escape but as orientation, a reminder that identity persists across shifting relational fields.
Transference remains part of the architecture. It always will. A subtle undercurrent running beneath creative interaction, capable of enriching perception when acknowledged and distorting reality when ignored. The adult task is not to eliminate it but to refuse its authority as narrative director.
The adult self leads. The trio leads. The work leads.
And so the closing question emerges, less dramatic than the fears that once accompanied it, but more meaningful:
What does it mean to stay laid open and still stay mine?
That is the adult version of transference — not avoidance, not collapse, but clarity held with a steady hand.
Dedication
For the collaborators: the drifters, the drop-ins, the ones who catch the tune mid-air and don’t flinch.
You keep the corners loose and the truth a little crooked. My kind of people.
Note: If you like this piece, you may also like “Elodie and Matt: A Modern Fairy Tale.” You can read it below.
This reflection is inspired by reporting on the case of Lawrence “Larry” Ray, whose actions at Sarah Lawrence College became the subject of extensive journalism and later criminal prosecution. Ray, the father of a student, embedded himself within a group of students and, over a period of years, exerted psychological and material control that culminated in multiple federal charges. In 2022, he was convicted in U.S. federal court on counts including racketeering conspiracy, extortion, forced labor, and sex trafficking, following testimony detailing patterns of manipulation, coercion, and abuse.
The essay above is not intended as investigative reporting or a comprehensive account of the case. Rather, it uses widely documented elements of the Sarah Lawrence story as a lens for examining broader dynamics of influence, consent, authority, and psychological boundary erosion. Readers interested in detailed factual accounts are encouraged to consult court records and major journalistic coverage of the case.
Epigraph “I can’t force myself to say something More than I can think of a thing to do Any more than you can pull yourself out of nothing When there is nothing forcing you to.” — Bedhead, Extramundane
This isn’t really a story about sex, crime, or even a “cult” in the way headlines tend to frame it. It’s a story about how consent can be quietly eroded — not through force or spectacle, but through a gradual shift in tempo. An adult inserts himself into a group of bright, searching young people and begins, almost imperceptibly, to reorganize how they interpret their own experience. Nothing dramatic happens at first. There is conversation, attention, fluency in the language of care. The early moves feel supportive, even mentorship-like. And that is precisely why they work. By the time anything overtly troubling emerges, the conditions for real choice have already thinned out. The ground tilts before anyone recognizes that it’s moving.
The students drawn in aren’t naïve caricatures or damaged stereotypes. They’re thoughtful, introspective, and accustomed to treating their interior lives as material for reflection. That habit, usually a strength, becomes a vulnerability in the presence of someone adept at narrating other people’s feelings back to them. The dynamic isn’t driven primarily by charisma or intellectual brilliance. It’s driven by tempo. Boundaries aren’t crossed so much as softened. A late-night conversation becomes a pattern. A pattern becomes a shared framework. A framework becomes dependency. And when harm finally appears, it doesn’t feel like a clear rupture between “yes” and “no.” It feels like a choice being made inside a structure already built.
There is often a moment when the room shifts, but it rarely looks like a turning point. Someone says they’re exhausted, and exhaustion is reframed as a signal with hidden meaning. Confusion becomes resistance. Ordinary hesitation becomes evidence of deeper moral or psychological blockage. Each reframing lands with the texture of insight rather than coercion. Over time, reactions are no longer treated as self-authorizing; they become data awaiting interpretation by the person occupying the role of guide. The students aren’t agreeing with an authority figure so much as agreeing with a version of themselves that figure has begun to narrate. When narrative voice drifts outward like that, autonomy doesn’t vanish dramatically. It diffuses.
The difficulty in describing situations like this lies in the absence of clear theatrical markers. There is no singular moment of surrender, no obvious villain/victim tableau. The participants often experience themselves not as surrendering but as collaborating. They believe they are doing the work, gaining insight, moving toward growth. Particularly for intellectually curious students, the promise of self-understanding is compelling. When directives are framed as pathways to clarity, resistance can feel like failure rather than protection. The structure tightens without ever announcing itself as such.
What emerges from observing cases like this is less outrage than a kind of double vision. On one level, the mechanics appear familiar: authority built through interpretive fluency, dependence fostered through narrative control, legitimacy derived from proximity to vulnerability. On another level, the situation remains unsettling precisely because the openings are so ordinary. The dynamic does not depend on extraordinary charisma or theatrical manipulation. It depends on recognizable human needs: attention, guidance, belonging, the desire to make sense of one’s own experience. Intelligence does not necessarily protect against these forces; in certain contexts, it can deepen engagement with them.
That recognition invites a measure of humility. The distance between observer and participant is not always as large as hindsight suggests. What protects one person in a given moment may be temperament, timing, or simple circumstance rather than superior discernment. The impulse to locate safety in personal invulnerability can obscure the broader lesson: susceptibility is situational, and the pathways into these dynamics are rarely marked by obvious warning signs. Often they look like ordinary conversations extended just a little too far.
If the Bedhead lyric offers a frame, it is through its quiet attention to inertia. The line does not describe dramatic coercion but a subtler erosion of agency — the sensation of trying to act from a place that has already been partially displaced. “You can’t pull yourself out of nothing when there is nothing forcing you to” captures the paradox at the center of this story: the absence of overt pressure can itself become constraining. Consent may appear intact even as its underlying architecture shifts. The drift is gradual, almost ambient, and therefore difficult to name in real time.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect is the ordinariness of the openings. The story is not about an extraordinary manipulator but about how easily authority can be constructed within familiar relational spaces, and how collaboration can feel indistinguishable from growth until perspective changes. The lesson, if there is one, is less about condemnation than awareness — a recognition of how narrative authority operates, how tempo shapes consent, and how autonomy can narrow without any single decisive moment marking its loss.
Dedication For those who walked. And for those who couldn’t.
Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy my other piece on educational institutions. You can read it here.
The night of December 31, 2012: Long dream about climbing Mt. Everest. This third Everest dream was very different from the first two. First, I was at a school and then climbed up a small opening, kind of a snowy slit barely big enough to fit through. There were some basketball games going on and I planned to be back in 20 minutes or so. Therefore, the school was probably my high school. At first, the slit was just itself, but then Everest loomed up over me to my left. I entered the frame, from the left. Everest was enormous, black, and composed of huge blocks of ice-like mini-mountains such that it was difficult to discern where the actual peak was, or the possible way up.
I was all alone and it seemed to be dawn, then two figures sleeping on the ice in orange suits started to stir. They arose and then there were 20-30 more, mostly kids led my two overweight men. We all spilled down to a kind of small clearing that may also have been a breakfast space. The men explained that they could take the group only to 11’000 feet, no higher. There was some disappointment, not much. Everyone looked very well outfitted, except the speaker who was plump and wearing a kind of jersey.
This group went away and there were other climbers, one or two of whom I spoke to. It all started to take a rather long time and I knew I would be late getting back. I started to head back up to the ridge that would lead back to the slit, but realized that I had forgotten a shoe in the clearing. Eventually I got back to the ridge with the shoe, looked up, and saw what was probably Everest’s peak. It was rounded and covered in black ice. It looked very far away, although at one point in the dream, perhaps before, I had analyzed what looked like a viable path toward the top. Back at the snowy slit, I ran back down it at full speed, cheerfully.
First Interpretations: The Everest dream is the third in a series. The first Everest dream I climbed Everest overnight. It took about 12 hours. Everest was covered in asphalt and climbing it was a breeze. The second one I was with my son. We did not get to the top, and the mountain was somewhat more realistic, craggly with ravines. There were shops alongside the ravine we were climbing made of wood and we ate there and also climbed around through the shops that were all connected and made up a kind of maze.
There was no pressure to get to the top, lots of climbers on the mountain. In this most recent one, Everest was at its most interesting and symbolic. It was massive and loomed above me with presence. It was to be revered, feared, awed. The access is interesting as well–the slit almost like a birth canal, covered back over itself and very narrow. Then, it opened unto another world entirely.
Impressions: The birth canal to a spiritual world. Most people, even well equipped, cannot go above 11’000 feet (you can do this in a day hike). Also, 11 could signal the 11th house, with the 12 house of mystery being difficult to access. I could make out the top, but didn’t have the time and wasn’t equipped just now. Still, it was an honor to have been there, and I came back exhilarated.
Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy “Border Dream.” Available below.
Note: This is Part II of the series on my week with Isobel. Part I is here, and left off with my decision not to sleep with her, come what may.
PART II — Thursday → Saturday, Early Morning
Thursday
I woke up Thursday a little shook to be honest. Things had progressed so far, so fast, and although my feet seemed under me, it was hard to be sure. The fact that she had made a hard pass at me the day before was on my mind. In any case, we met by appointment in the morning . It went the same as before; we walked over to Pret again, but this time she ordered lightly and barely ate. As it turned out this was a sign of things to come. I finished my sandwich and coffee, and we walked back to campus, side by side, talking easily but underneath it something had shifted. We were no longer orbiting — we were a dyad, openly.
Back in the garden, same bench, same proximity. We weren’t spying on sessions anymore. We weren’t even pretending to. We talked all morning like our lives depended on it. And in a way, they did. We covered the history of thought, we recovered our careers, and I told her all about the various ups and downs I had had over the last several years at my school. We talked about astrology and she voiced some of her doubts. I told her I wasn’t a “believer” per se, but that the study fascinated me. We left it open.
After the morning break, we reconvened at a bench in the courtyard, this time in public. I was in a bit of a dilemma, you see my wife was scheduled to come to town that very night, and she would attend the dinner gala, the final dinner for the week. Somehow, I had to get ahead of this situation; I had to lower the temperature. So, I did what I often do in a difficult situation, I leaned on Dylan, specifically the quote from “Oh Sister” off of the album Desire.
I told her, “I feel like we should be like brother and sister.” Containment disguised as poetry. It was the best I could do. This took her aback a bit, and then I explained that my wife would be arriving, in a matter of six or seven hours. She didn’t say much, just took it in. She already knew I was married. She didn’t know my wife would be in Oxford. Whole different deal.
This revelation changed something in her body, and something in mine. We went to lunch — Indian again. Normally I ate fully, and she usually ate less, but that day we both pushed food around the plates. She couldn’t eat a bite; her appetite had totally shut down. Mine was not much better, and I picked at the curry to try to make it look decent. We paid and left. The epiphany of Tuesday had tipped into cognitive and bodily overload by Thursday.
During the afternoon, we talked as before but because the sessions were winding down I think we actually went to a session. I also browsed the bookstore, which was really cool. It was a big table in the common area and it was run by a bookseller who had his own astrology bookshop somewhere in the south. I had switched from the Mendoza Line to Dylan and was playing “Red River Shore” and “Mississippi” in addition to Oh Sister.
Evening arrived. My wife arrived at the hostel two minutes from campus. I went to meet her and walked her back to FAS. She met Isobel and Maddy before dinner — brief, surface-level. My wife complimented Isobel’s shoes. I could barely hold in a laugh for some reason. After all, she couldn’t have known what she was stepping into.
We ate in the dining hall — I sat with my wife and the one Japanese woman there, switching English and Japanese. Isobel sat elsewhere with Mystery and her daughter. There was a collection for the tutors — I took the box table to table, people applauding, giving money. My wife later said I was performing. Maybe I was. I was also alive.
After dinner my wife was tired from travel and wanted to sleep. I walked her to the hostel, kissed goodnight, then went back to the courtyard. Wine, tutors, Maddy, Isobel. A lighter night between us — more social, less fused — but the thread held. We probably stayed until one.
I slept well. The finish line was visible.
Friday
We met again in the morning — Pret. This time she made a scene of helping me pick breakfast. My appetite returned. She still didn’t eat. We walked fifteen minutes to a large park, quiet, green, open.
She was struggling — not with me, but with everything. Engagement, career, identity, meaning. We sat on a bench. “Don’t sit too close to me,” she said.
“OK, how close is good?”
“Right here,” she said, indicating a space about one inch to her right. We talked about our situation–there was nothing else to talk about. We named it outright.
Then she got up and walked to a small arched bridge over a narrow river and said, She stood there for a bit, and then said in a loud declarative voice:“This is my bridge.”
I said, your bridge absolutely.
She stayed there a long time, twenty minutes maybe. I sat on a bench farther back. Eventually she came back to sit beside me — to my left again, shoulders touching. Then, she began to collapse onto me. Shoulders low, breath shallow. I half carried her back to campus. Ambulances and sirens on the street — not symbolic, actual. The world felt like an emergency. We moved slowly. It took almost 40 minutes.
At this same time, I was thinking, obviously. I came up with a name for what Isobel and I were experiencing. I called it the “catalyzed emergency,” just instinctively. I knew at once what I meant, and I also knew one day I would write this story.
We got back to campus and she went to look for Claire Martin, the tutor from day one. She ended up finding Claire, who was free, and Claire held space for her for ninety minutes. No charge. A private grace from a wonderful soul.
I went to the bookshop again. I talked to another Dylan fan and we had such a good chat that I pulled up Dylan’s Red River Shore and played it to him on my phone. He didn’t know it, but loved it. He did a moment chart on his phone and we talked about Dylan’s chart.
At the bookstore I met Melanie Reinhart, for the first time in person. Melanie was the first astrologer I reached out to in 2012 when I was first getting deep into the subject, and it was she who referred me to Darby Costello. So this was a fortunate meeting indeed.
We talked for nearly an hour about her childhood in Africa and her longing to return. I bought Sue Tompkins — Aspects in Astrology because Melanie said another author, who had a book on the charts of musicians, wasn’t a real astrologer. I couldn’t lose face in front of Melanie so I chose Tompkins, but although it’s a great book, I suspect the other one was more my speed.
Melanie asked me up to her room to help carry her bags down the three flights of strips. When we got to the room, she finished packing, and I carried her bags down from her third-floor suite and said goodbye at the gate.
Afterward I found Isobel again, near the entrance. She was steadier, post-Claire. We pushed through the crowd in the quad and slipped to the chapel to say goodbye privately. We spoke plainly — never forget, life-changing, go back to our lives. I told her I wanted to know her as an old woman. She agreed. We exchanged WhatsApp.
She left campus.
I said goodbye to Maddy later in the quad. I said goodbye to Jim, the dream tutor whose session Isobel and I attended and I left out of this story. “You’re a funny guy,” I said. “Takes one to know one,” he answered. The Exeter gate closed behind me, and I walked to the hotel my wife and I were to stay at alone.
My wife was in London at the Sherlock Holmes Museum. I wandered Exeter, then went to the Tolkien exhibition — letters to his children, original sketches, it was a really moving experience. Afterward a stationery shop — a single Tintin postcard. Dinner at the hotel restaurant — bouillabaisse and red wine. Then I texted Isobel. One message became a hundred.
I sent her “Leave the City” by Jason Molina and Red River Shore. She listened and cried. She said she wouldn’t go home to her fiancé that night — too flooded — she would stay at a hotel instead. We planned how we would keep in touch.
I slept next to my wife in a new bed, and in a new world.
Saturday, Early Morning
My wife had returned somewhat late from London and she was tired and slept early. She had an early flight, and a bus pickup 5:15 AM.
When the morning came I walked her to the stop. Street quiet, air washed and pale.
We hugged, kissed briefly, light and familiar, and she boarded the bus.
I stood there watching it pull away. Not knowing yet what I had broken open. Not knowing yet what I had kept intact.
Sometimes an argument tells you more about the man making it than the subject he claims to be discussing.
“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” — Carl Jung
“Chronologically I know you’re young, but when you kissed me in the club you bit my tongue.” — Loudon Wainwright III, “Motel Blues”
Note:In On the Safe Space (aka Corner Girl), I wrote about the interior rooms we protect — the places where selfhood gets built without interruption or performance. This piece is about the larger boundary: the one society owes to the developing self.
Opening Alan Dershowitz has a way of wandering into arguments that look like legal questions but are really psychological ones. Back in 1997, he argued that statutory-rape laws were “an outdated concept,” a position he has never meaningfully walked back. It wasn’t a constitutional insight then, and it isn’t one now — it’s an ethical fog of his own making, clever on the surface, a little out of control underneath, and surprisingly indifferent to the actual developmental reality of adolescence. I’m not a lawmaker, and I’m not pretending to be one. I’m simply an adult who has spent decades in and around schools all over the world, watching young people grow into themselves — slowly, unevenly, beautifully. And from where I stand, there’s nothing arbitrary about protecting the forming self from the fantasies of adults who should know better.
Thesis Bodily autonomy begins with the smallest choices — what you eat, what you refuse, what you allow into your system. Anyone who has ever fought for control over diet, appetite, or health knows that dignity is never abstract. It lives in the body first. Food, sleep, sex, presence, touch — these aren’t lifestyle accessories. They are the basic architecture of selfhood.
And that’s why autonomy matters. Not as a slogan. Not as a political hashtag. But as the ground of being human.
People like Dershowitz talk about age-of-consent laws as if they’re philosophical puzzles, as if desire and authority rise from the same level floor. But bodily autonomy doesn’t work that way. It has requirements. Preconditions. A forming self needs time, scaffolding, protection — the freedom to grow into decisions that will define a lifetime. Bodily autonomy is the core of human dignity. And dignity requires a federal age of consent set at 18 — with room for close-in-age relationships, but no room for adult fantasies about adolescent equality.
Ethical Architecture
Autonomy isn’t a mood or a vibe. It’s a developmental achievement — the slow process of learning to inhabit your own body without needing permission, without coercion, without fear. Emotional regulation, impulse control, identity formation, consequence mapping — none of that arrives early.
I learned that early with food. When I was fourteen, I wanted to become a vegetarian. My mother didn’t approve, and at one point tried to enlist a doctor to shut it down. Decades later, it’s still not funny to me. It was my first glimpse of how threatened adults can feel by a young person’s bodily autonomy — even when the stakes are seemingly mild.
If this is true about diet, something reversible and lower-stakes, it is infinitely truer about sex, where the stakes shape a lifetime. This is why age-of-consent laws exist: not to police sexuality, but to protect the dignity of someone whose selfhood is still under construction.
Psychological Layer
Adults love to project adulthood backward — to imagine that adolescents are simply smaller, louder grown-ups. But when an adult looks at a teenager and sees “maturity,” they are seeing their own desire reflected back at them. It’s projection disguised as equality. And that’s the shadow: the part of the adult that refuses responsibility. When an adult insists “adolescents know what they want,” what they’re really saying is: “I want them to know what I want.” Desire is real. But consent requires architecture. Adolescents feel everything — intensity, longing, hunger, embarrassment — but they don’t yet have the scaffolding that turns feelings into sustainable decisions. They’re still learning how to hold their boundary, which means adults must hold it for them. Layer on top of that the baked-in authority of adults — teachers, coaches, mentors, older partners — and it becomes obvious that any adolescent “yes” is distorted by fear, approval-seeking, and conditioning. That’s not consent. It’s compliance. The danger is never the adolescent’s feelings. The danger is the adult’s refusal to be an adult.
Policy Layer I’m not talking about university students and professors. That’s not my area. I work in a high school; I work with adolescents. My authority such as it is is rooted in those spaces.
And there are practical reasons for setting the line at 18 that have nothing to do with purity politics. Eighteen is already the age of legal majority — the moment a person can sign contracts, make medical decisions, join the military, lease an apartment, and carry full responsibility for their choices. Consent belongs in the same category: it requires structural independence, not just emotion.
Before 18, almost every part of life is mediated by adult authority; after 18, the power balance shifts. A federal standard removes the patchwork of loopholes and state-by-state inconsistencies that predators rely on. And for the record, I support lowering the federal drinking age to 18. I’m not arguing for innocence. I’m arguing for dignity — and dignity requires autonomy, not surveillance, and certainly not adult desire dressed up as philosophy.
Close-in-age exceptions protect real relationships. They do not protect adults who want to pretend a teenager is their peer.
Why It Matters Now
Silence used to feel like neutrality. It doesn’t anymore. I’ve been in and out of high schools around the world — Tokyo, Kyoto, Singapore, China, Southeast Asia, North America — and I’ve seen enough to know that adolescents today are more exposed than ever. More pressure, more surveillance, more chaos, more online distortion.
Adults can either disappear into clever hypotheticals, or they can show up. The world is louder now than it was in 1997. More invasive. More demanding. Adolescents have less room to breathe, to fail safely, to grow without an adult’s shadow pressing against their outline.
That’s why I’m saying this aloud. Not because I enjoy the argument. Because silence, at this point, feels like complicity.
Closing
At some point adulthood has to mean something. Not moralism — responsibility. Adults hold the boundary. We don’t collapse it when it’s inconvenient or reinterpret it because we prefer a clever argument. Adulthood is the willingness to carry the weight of our power without pretending it isn’t there.
Which is why Dershowitz’s old argument still bothers me. It treats adolescents like abstractions in a constitutional seminar instead of actual forming selves. And you don’t need to mention Epstein or anything else to see the flaw — you only have to hear the tone. A man brilliant enough to win a debate in his sleep, is nonetheless a little off-the-hook. Dershowitz is strangely pre-occupied with farmer’s market battles, and often more enchanted by the elegance of the puzzle than the dignity of the child.
But here’s the thing: I’m not coming for art. I like Loudon Wainwright. I love “White Winos.” I like “Motel Blues,” even with its sideways energy. Songs are allowed to be messy. Human desire is allowed to be messy. And if the girl in the song is legal and in the club, then that’s that. Adults can make mistakes, write about them, sing about them, and turn them into something worth listening to. That’s art’s job. But real life is different. Real life has a boundary. The line between adolescence and adulthood isn’t drawn to stifle desire. It’s drawn to protect dignity — the child’s dignity, yes, but also the adult’s. A clean boundary keeps everyone honest. It keeps projection from rewriting the story. It keeps the shadow in check. It keeps the music in the music, not in the courtroom. A federal age of consent at 18 is not about purity or panic. It’s about clarity. And clarity is what lets adulthood do its actual work. Because the truth is simple: I can enjoy Loudon’s songs, raise an eyebrow at his more questionable moments, and still believe absolutely in a boundary that protects adolescents until they’re ready to stand on the same ground as the adults around them. Art can be blurry. Ethics can’t. And adulthood — the real kind — knows the difference.
Dedication For the forming selves, and for the adults who finally decided to act like adults.
Well it’s always been my nature/ to take chances/ my left hand drawn back/ while my left hand advances. Bob Dylan, Angelina
I’m glad I did it all then you know that I didn’t listen/ glad I went and got it all outta my system. My Morning Jacket, Outta My System
It’s never been a fair fight.
Craig Finn. It’s Never Been a Fair Fight
Note: What follows is a direct and somewhat graphic account of my experience of being badly abused as a child. The abuse happened at the hands of my aunt’s (father’s side) first husband when I was six and seven years old in the very early 1980s. As I will recount, the abuse had deep and lasting impacts on me and it took me years, decades, to process and understand what it did to me.
I make absolutely no claim to be an expert on childhood abuse or to speak to anyone else’s experience of this all too common problem. My experience is my own, and that’s all I can really speak to. In addition, although he conducted what I consider to be vicious abuse of my brother, I understand that anyone impacted by abuse may categorize events in different ways. Therefore, I will allude only glancingly to these aspects, and only through the lens of how this impacted me personally. I will, inevitably, make reference to the role of my parents and my aunt in the events, and as I mention below when I began to fully process the abuse I directed a certain degree of anger at these adults. As time has passed, however, I have come to understand that although they were not able, for whatever reason, to stop the abuse, and although it was conducted, at least in my case, in their direct view, the primary responsibility lies with the abuser himself.
In early 2024 I did seek out legal advice from a firm that specializes in childhood sexual abuse, and they gave me a professional and compassionate hearing, however in the end declined to take up my case and directed me instead to the Washington State public system. I will detail those events below. I am not currently pursuing legal avenues, and instead am hoping that by making this public I can finally fully exorcise the lasting damage that was done to me. I take full responsibility for the content of this piece.
I was born in South Bend, Indiana in June of 1974. My father was pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Notre Dame at the time, however when I was around six months old my parents moved back to Santa Clara, California, where my mother’s parents were living. My father did not finish his master’s at Notre Dame because of some issue with the faculty there, however I believe that he did later finish at Santa Cruz University in California. In an interesting side note I also pursued a master’s degree, in History at the University of Northern Arizona in the late 1990s, and did not finish because of a conflict, or disagreement, with my thesis advisor. Life has a funny way of repeating itself.
We lived in Santa Clara until I was, I believe, two years old, and then my parents moved us to Gig Harbor, Washington. My understanding is that my father wanted to move to Washington State to be closer to his sister, Nancy (Nan) Thomas. Nancy is my father’s younger sister and it was she, I believe, that introduced my father to my mother, who was Nancy’s friend when they all attended Santa Clara University.
It just so happened that Nancy was then married to a man who would become my abuser. My first memory of this guy, just some fucking guy as far as I’m concerned, is also my first real memory in life (Note: This has since been revised to happier memories when I was two in California. I will detail these at a later date). It goes like this:
When I was very small, two going on three, (I know I was three in Gig Harbor because my brother Mike was born there in June of 1977), we lived in a small house right next to the Pacific Ocean. What I recall about this time was, we had a dog. My father was working at a nearby lumberyard which I occasionally visited, and, I think, was sort of seeking what would be the next stage of his life. My parents had no money, but I didn’t understand this at the time.
My first vivid memory is of playing a game called “Shovelman” on the beach of the Pacific Ocean right by our house. I don’t remember the rules of Shovelman, but it involved a frisbee. However I do recall, with absolute precision, that one time the frisbee was thrown out into the ocean, which, in western Washington, was very cold. This guy ordered me to swim for the frisbee, and when, predictably, I struggled mightily to reach the frisbee in the freezing water and came out gasping for breath, he laughed and laughed, like a total sadist. Of course I didn’t know what a sadist was at the time, but I recognized his essential nature even then. I knew for sure at that moment that he was a bad guy. Now I don’t fully know if my father and mother liked this guy or considered him a friend. All I know is, he was around some. I later learned that my uncle Kim did not like him. Hated him in fact. Kim has had an interesting and varied life, and is my godfather. I love Kim, and salute him here for his instincts.
While my first memory is a negative one, presaging as we will see later events, I also have positive memories from this time. I recall right around this time the days after my brother was born that some of my mother’s family visited us including her mother Barbara and her youngest sister Leslie. My mother has nine siblings, all, fortunately, still alive and all wonderful people. Leslie was quite young at the time and is only a few years older than myself I believe. Anyway, I looked up to Leslie and thought she was cool, so when we all went to a restaurant I sneaked under the table and pulled on her leg, like little children do. I wanted her attention, but I’m not sure if I got it. As I mentioned above, I also recall visiting my father at the lumberyard and thinking he also was cool and had a cool job. I don’t know if he would remember that line of work the same way or not.
In any case, my family did not stay in Gig Harbor very long, and pretty soon we were back in California, this time in Palo Alto, which is a town adjacent to Santa Clara. These days, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and the nearby San Jose are well known for being sort of the heart of Silicon Valley, but back then they were not really on the map in that way. My mother was working as a swim coach at Stanford University and my father was working at a school in town. This was a wonderful period of my life as I spent time at Stanford hanging around the pool while my mother was coaching which was a total blast. I may recount this time in more detail at a later date. Suffice it to say I was an outgoing, curious, and happy child, eager to see what the world had in store for me. As I will detail below, I believe I was at this time essentially an extravert, and the primary, from my perspective, impact of the later abuse would be to turn me into a somewhat serious introvert. Over and above all other impacts of the abuse, this is the one I resent the most. It is my belief that my natural extraversion, my interest in and ability to trust and like people, was deeply damaged by the actions of my abuser. I will never fully get over this aspect of the situation, and have had to work very, very hard to overcome what I see as a kind of inversion of my essential nature.
In the year 1980 my family moved once again, this time to Spokane, Washington. And again, this was, as I understand it, for my father to be closer to his sister who was by that time working as a young lawyer in the same city. My abuser was also, I believe, a lawyer. It is certainly true that, although younger, Nancy was on the upswing of her career much more quickly than my father. Other than that I don’t know the exact reasons for this following of his sister, however my father found a teaching job at St. George’s school in Spokane WA. I would attend St. George’s from grade 1 through 12, and have written rather extensively about my time there. Interested readers can find these pieces on this blog.
St. George’s was great, and overall, although my parents were still broke, I had a good childhood. However, there was one dark aspect, which was we would regularly visit Nancy and this guy at their home on the South Hill in Spokane. On occasion, but much less regularly, this couple would visit us at our house on the outskirts of the city. I believe that all of the incidents recounted below occurred in 1980 and 1981. I know this for a couple of reasons, first of all because the volcano Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980 and at Nancy’s house in the backyard there was a big craggly rock which had pockets of ash residue from the eruption and this event was a big topic at the time. Secondly, I know that I was enrolled in first grade at St. George’s so I must have been six. My brother Mike then would have been three going on four. I wrote about my wonderful brother Mike before here.
The action at the Thomas household there was not all bad–there was the ash and a nearby park called Cannon Hill Park which was pretty cool. The house on the South Hill was pretty large, certainly larger than our own, and I got to know my cousins, both of whom were even younger than myself. I would say we visited dozens of times over the course of a year or two, and I remember the house and its environs well. In any case, ash and parks aside, the main event at the Thomas house turned out to be regular and vicious abuse from this guy which was conducted in full view of everyone in the living room of the house. After a little dinner or whatever, he would “tickle” myself, my brother, for extended periods of time, 20-30 minutes at a time or so or more. This “tickling” was not in any form playing; it was, instead, a totally vicious fully body attack.
It was absolutely excruciating and horrible, and he would touch every single part of my body and dig his fingers in as deep as possible and screw them around. At first I didn’t know what to make of this or what to do, but overtime I came to hate this so much that I began to fight back. My bother Mike, at three, was obviously in no position to do so, and so he, in my recollection, absolutely got the worst of this. The amazing thing, amazing to me to this day, is that the three other adults, my mother and father and this guy’s wife, would just stand there and watch. There is something deeply sad about adults that cannot, for whatever reason, stand up to a bully.
Later, much later, I would confront my mother about all this, and she has since said that her inability to intervene is one of her deepest regrets.
What I think happened was, when I began to fight back he gave up on abusing me. Also, I suspect, from my understanding of abuser psychology, that I had, essentially, “aged out” of whatever his mindframe was. My sense is that he preferred his victims to be as helpless and defenseless as possible, and I was no longer fitting the bill.
Now I should note that I don’t know what his problem was or what he thought he was getting out of this abuse. And, I don’t wish to research it really, because I would prefer to spend as little time as possible engaging with people of this sort. What I know for certain is that in the early 1980s he was a brutal man. That’s a flat fact.
I will detail what I understand to be the effects on myself and some of the later repercussions of his abuse a little later, but first of all I will recount my attempts to engage with the legal system over this issue, as well as indicate, in a compressed form, how I came to process and understand the abuse. Now I wish to tread carefully here because I do not want to get sucked into a discussion of, or really even take a position on, what is known as repressed memory. I understand that this topic is highly controversial, with strong opinions on all sides. Although I have read a lot, I am not an expert on psychology, much less a topic as fraught as this. What I will say is that I never repressed the memory of the abuse; if you had asked me at any given time in my life if I was brutally attacked by this guy, in full view of other adults, I would have said absolutely yes, that happened. However, what took time was to fully work out how deeply and negatively it impacted me, and in what ways. I think I always intuited it, however it took a some very difficult life experiences to get to the bottom of it.
The first of these was in 2010, when I was already 36 years old. It was at that time that I began spiraling into my memories and trying to uncover some kind of nugget that would unlock a range of issues that I was encountering at the time. In this year, and on a few other occasions after, I would, somewhat obsessively, go over events from my sixth and seventh year, always centering around my aunt Nancy, her house, and what I perceived to be my essential ambidexterity. More on this point later. At some point I intuited, in some way, that Nancy may have had a miscarriage before the birth of her first child. My mother, when I asked her, confirmed that this had taken place, and asked how I knew it. I didn’t, but somehow worked it out, just because I was spending so much time thinking this constellation of issues. It was also during this times that I was also trying to get to the bottom of my sexuality, my introversion, and my inability to learn to play the piano because of seriously weak left hand. I will detail these, and other aspects of the situation, later.
In any case, it was in 2022 that I fully worked out the effects that the abuse had had on me over time, and began, for the first time, to identify as a sexual abuse survivor. This was not something that I wanted to have to incorporate into my personal narrative, however it became inevitable. I looked into the law in Washington State, and as I recall, as I understood it at the time, the statute of limitations was three years which began at the moment that the victim became fully aware of their injury. From my point of view, I became fully aware of my injury in 2022, and therefore, after thinking about it, I contacted a law firm in Washington State in early 2024. This firm specialized in sexual abuse cases, however they were pretty high-powered and I got the impression from their website that they specialized in suing institution, schools, churches, and the like. On this basis I felt that it was somewhat unlikely they would take up my case–there was probably just not enough percentage in it. Nonetheless, their website indicated that they meant business, so I contacted them and a little while later had a call with an associate from the firm. He told me that all the lawyers were all in court, but gave me a full and proper hearing and said that he believed my story. He also asked me an interesting question, which was, did the abuse happen more or less than 20 times? I said my recollection was that yes, it was over 20 times, and he took a note of this. My impression was that for a case like mine, 20 times was some kind of legal threshold.
A few weeks later the associate got back to me via email. As mentioned above, he said that the firm would decline to take my case, and recommended I pursue the public legal system. He also said that he hoped that I got justice. I thanked him in response, and was not overly disappointed because it was clear that their focus was on institutions and I had done my best.
Now I should mention that before I contacted the law firm, I did Google this fucking guy to see what came up. It is true that I didn’t want to, and still don’t really want to, research this guy, however I wanted to see at a minimum what internet footprint he had. It turned out that he had a website where he described himself as some kind of elite international mediator and the site had a picture of him climbing a mountain.
So I guess he leveraged his legal background into some kind of mediation role, which is guess is all related. And I have no idea, he may have had success as a mediator. In actual fact, it is not even my intention to comment at any length on who or what he is today (I do believe he is still alive). Is it possible that he cleaned himself up in some respect? Maybe. But actually I doubt it. It is my opinion that someone as twisted as he was in his early adulthood doesn’t really get over that. I can forgive a lot of things–for example taking a life when drunk driving or something of that nature. Mistakes are made, and mistakes of that sort are basically unintentional. However, this guy, with his Shovelman action and his subsequent brutality, in my estimation, doesn’t really ever get better. Am I being unfair? Perhaps. It’s really hard to say.
In any case, although the firm turned me down, reaching out to them was one of the best decisions I have ever made. By attempting to work through the legal system I had engaged, fairly and properly, with the available channels, and I felt immeasurably better about the whole thing. I did not at that time decide to pursue the public option, because I am not located in Washington State, and I didn’t feel that taking this route any further would be feasible. Instead, I thought about using the only real platform I have, my blog, to discuss my thoughts on the matter. Aside from the legal system, this seemed to me to be the next best thing. And so here we are.
In what follows I wish to enumerate what I understand to be the long-term effects of my abuse. I will, in the interest of my own privacy and that of others, somewhat undersell these, and it is not my intention to burden the reader with my own issues over time. In addition, I would like to make clear that my encounter with the legal system as well as my somewhat long-gestating decision to go public with my story and my conversations with a few trusted friends, has ameliorated, to a significant degree, the effects of my personal abuse. In any case, here is what I feel:
From my earliest memories I wanted to play the piano. When I was in first or second grade I asked my mother to enroll me in piano lessons, and she declined, saying that she had no money. A few years later my brother Mike was allowed to take cello lessons, and he became very good very fast. I would wait in the car while my brother and my mother attended cello lessons there on the South Hill in Spokane. Naturally, I never held this against my brother, who was an awesome musician and I was proud of him, however I did resent, for a very long time, being denied the opportunity to pursue music. It is my understanding that although people can learn music at different times in life, the earlier the better. I have subsequently tried to learn the keyboard by myself, and somehow was able to play “Ocean Rain” by Echo and the Bunnymen and “Someone I Care About” by the Modern Lovers. I didn’t dominate Ocean Rain, but it was least passable. But I still can’t really read or play music. I wish, beyond almost anything, that I would have had the chance to learn music at an early age.
However, my strong feeling, underlined by years of reflection and memory spiraling, is that the abuse from this guy essentially crippled my left hand. I don’t know exactly how I know this, but I have always known it. So I probably wouldn’t have been that great at piano anyway, because the left hand is pretty important. And, the destruction of my left hand is intimately and directly connected to my crippled ambidexterity, the inversion of my extraversion, as well as my somewhat ambiguous sexuality. I will take up these issues in turn.
First, as mentioned above, there was as a result of the abuse, a long-term impact on my left hand. When I was very young, maybe four, I learned to swim in the pool at Stanford, and my strong memory is that I was developing a certain ambidexterity. Ambidexterity is related in some respects to dyslexia, which I also have a very mild case of, however it also has some salubrious aspects, for example in sports and music. I understand this intuitively and experientially, that I could have been a good piano player if I had been able to take lessons and if I had not been, essentially, crippled from the repeated abuse. Thus, the quote from Dylan at the top. It’s been forty-five years since I was first abused by this guy, and only now is my left hand, so to speak, advancing.
Second, as mentioned above, I was an extravert until I was six years old when I suddenly turned into a pretty serious introvert. Now, I absolutely don’t wish to imply at all that one orientation is better than another–both have great strengths. However, the issue here is that I was one thing, and then became another. And this corresponded to, and was directly triggered by, the abuse that I suffered. Somehow, the repeated and protracted abuse turned me inward. I no longer trusted people, essentially, and although I still liked, and still do, many people, something went off track. This is the reality.
Third, I know for an absolute fact that my sexuality was deeply damaged by this guy. I can’t speak to any other form of abuse, however my case of male on male abuse, which I experienced (and yes I absolutely categorize my experience as sexual abuse because he violated every part of my body including my genitals) led to a situation where it became for me, once I hit puberty, somewhat difficult to work out what my sexuality was and in what direction it ran. I was, without doubt, attracted to girls, however in the back of my mind there was some kind of lingering, and for me uncomfortable, ambiguity, as well as a distinct inability to approach women. Now, I fully understand that the inability to approach women is a pretty normal aspect of heterosexual teenagers, who are awkward at the best of times, but I always sort of knew that there was something else going on. And what was going on was, my genitalia was first touched, without my consent obviously, for lack of a better term, by an adult male when I was six years old. And that damaged me.
In essence, and again I know instinctively this to be the case, the abuse was so brutal and so protracted that it in essence re-wired my brain. As with repressed memory, I don’t wish to take a strong position on the issue of the left-brain and the right-brain, although I have read and deeply integrated the book The Master and His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist, which goes into this matter in far greater detail, and with far greater insight, than I will ever achieve. What I know is the connections within my brain were compromised, indeed fractured, by the abuse. Although it took years for me to fully work this out, I have absolutely no doubt that this is the case. It was, in my belief, something about the pure digging of his fingers that did the damage. Some light tickling would not, I think, have had this effect, however the intensity and depth of his action were, I know, of a completely different level.
Basically, I have been dealing with long-term PTSD from his attacks, dealing with it for 45 years in one way or another, and 15 years more intensely. And you might say “hey there Matty baby, how do you know that your supposed ambidexterity, for example, was so compromised by this guy’s actions?” In answer to that I wish to make an analogy to the trans issue. Now I understand that the trans issue is highly political, and, I guess, pretty complex. However my basic stance is as follows: I do not believe that people who experience feelings of transsexuality or gender dysphoria, basically, are “making it up.” A few may be for various reasons, however I believe that, generally speaking, the set of feelings they experience are real, and also because I have never had them, I cannot speak to them with any authority. Such it is with sexual abuse. The feelings and understandings of sexual abuse victims are, I believe, valid and need to be understood in the context of they know best what the effects of the abuse were. While I cannot perhaps fully explain how I know what I know, I know.
I have a few final thoughts. The first is, as mentioned above and now underlined, my bother also received similar treatment from this guy. I mention this only because I have, ever since, suffered from a great degree of guilt for my inability to protect my brother at that time. Indeed, it was primarily this aspect of the situation, more so than the damage to myself alone, that caused me to direct my anger at my abuse to my mother, and by extension my father and Nancy. I still carry this guilt, and don’t suppose I will ever really get over it. Once again, there is a good deal more to the story, but that’s all I really wish to say at this point.
The second refers to what I described above as the re-wiring of my entire mind and body. Perhaps there is a more clinical term for this, and I think that psychologically alert readers will be able add understanding around this, however this is the best description I can offer. As the second quote at the top of this piece alludes to, the life we have led has been what it has been. I strongly wish I had never suffered the abuse that I did, and have had as a consequence, some of the most painful imaginable situations, however the mere fact that I cannot turn back the clock means that the life I have lived will have to stand, in all of its glory and messiness. This is true, I think, for everyone.
Finally, and I am in no way being facetious, I want to express my deep indebtedness to the great Craig Finn. Craig Finn is the lead singer and songwriter from the bands Lifter Puller and The Hold Steady, and has also had a substantial solo career. One of my very favorite songs of all time is “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” by Finn, which I have written about at some length here, and from which the third epigraph for this piece comes from. I am not exaggerating when I say that Finn saved my life, probably more than once, and has, over time, helped me overcome the damage done by my abuse. Thank you Mr. Finn sir. I love you.
I will choose to close this narrative here. As alluded to above, there is a lot more to the story, however in the interest of the privacy of a range of people, not the least of which myself, I will desist. What I would like to say at the end of the day is, abusing a child is never a fair fight. And so I am deploying the only real tool that I have at my disposal, my pen. Thank you for reading.
Dedication:
For all my friends and family who have taken such good care of me over the years.I wouldn’t be here without you.And for Spencer Krug, the greatest piano player I am aware of.
Note: It you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy the other pieces below which take up somewhat similar themes.
