I sometimes think my life can be measured by the buildings in which I have tried, with varying degrees of success, to become a stable person. There was the faux- Neo-classical public library where, as a boy, I discovered that silence could feel less like an absence and more like a structure one could lean against; the concrete psychology building at the local junior college, whose narrow hallways always smelled faintly of dust and overheated wiring; the rehabilitation center whose windows did not open more than three inches, as if fresh air itself required supervision. Even now, when I pass certain institutional corridors with their beige cinderblock walls and bulletin boards layered with outdated announcements, I feel a strange and almost affectionate recognition, as though I am encountering earlier drafts of myself preserved in architecture.

It was during my second year of graduate school, in a seminar room overlooking New York City and the river that appeared gray in every season, that I first noticed how easily intellectual excellence can disguise private collapse. At the long table we spoke fluently about Foucault, about the administrative language of diagnosis, about the history of confinement and the invention of the asylum, yet none of us seemed prepared to acknowledge how many of us depended upon our own carefully managed pharmacologies just to remain seated there, nodding thoughtfully, annotating articles whose margins filled with our small and increasingly desperate handwriting.

My own notes from that period, which I still keep in a banker’s box I rarely open, reveal a curious dual record: on the right side of the page, careful summaries of theoretical arguments written in a neat academic hand, and on the left, in a slanted and more urgent script, reminders to myself such as eat something today, remember what the therapist said about sleep, or sometimes just a single word written repeatedly as if it might function as an anchor: stay stay stay stay. The Princeton Notes method gave me a lot of opportunities for thinking and thinking back.

It would be misleading to say I was unhappy then. Unhappiness suggests a clarity of feeling that I did not possess. What I experienced instead was a kind of atmospheric pressure of the mind, a weather system of thought that made ordinary movements—answering emails, attending office hours, standing in line for coffee—feel as though they were occurring at a slightly incorrect altitude. There were mornings when I would arrive on campus having no clear memory of the drive there, only the vague sense of having been delivered by some competent but absent-minded chauffeur who, I gradually understood, was also me.

My psychiatrist at the time, a soft-spoken man whose office contained an unusual number of landscape photographs of northern lakes in winter, once suggested that dissociation is not always the dramatic fracturing people imagine but can instead resemble a series of subtle departures, small interior migrations in which parts of the self step out for air without announcing when they plan to return. I found this explanation comforting, not because it solved anything, but because it framed my experience as something almost geographical rather than defective. I began to imagine my mind as a kind of archipelago, certain islands well mapped and frequently visited, others appearing only in fog.

Around this same time, I developed what I insisted on calling a “professional relationship” with alcohol, by which I meant that I drank with the same seriousness I applied to my research. I kept mental notes on quantities, tolerances, intervals of abstinence, the false clarity that arrived around the second drink, and the dulling that followed the fourth. Looking back, it seems obvious that I was attempting to conduct an experiment in self-erasure while maintaining the language of control. It is remarkable what behaviors can be justified if one describes them with sufficient analytical precision.

There is a photograph from that year—taken by a colleague who believed, as many academics do, that documenting our lives might help us understand them—in which I am standing beside a conference poster displaying my research on narrative structures in medieval testimony. I appear composed, even faintly confident. My posture suggests someone comfortable with scrutiny. What the photograph cannot show is that only an hour before, in a restroom stall on the same floor, I had been trying to recall which version of myself was scheduled to present that afternoon: the disciplined lecturer, the exhausted patient, or the quiet internal observer who seemed to watch both with anthropological interest.

It has often seemed to me that academic success depends less on brilliance than on one’s ability to maintain a convincing continuity of self across different rooms. The classroom requires one voice, the therapist’s office another, the late hours alone at a desk yet another still. For most people these transitions appear seamless. For me they sometimes felt like costume changes performed without leaving the stage.

And yet, despite everything—or perhaps because of it—I found that my work deepened. My writing from that period became more patient, more attentive to contradiction, less interested in easy conclusions. It was as though the very instability I feared was also teaching me how to read more carefully, how to notice what is omitted, how to sit with ambiguity without rushing to repair it. I began to suspect that what we call resilience may sometimes simply be the decision to keep observing.

Even now, years later, I sometimes walk past the river behind that old seminar building and watch the slow movement of the current, which seems always to be carrying the same fragments—branches, leaves, the occasional lost glove—toward destinations I cannot see. Memory works in much the same way, I think. We stand on the bank, taking notes, believing ourselves to be stationary observers, when in fact we too are in motion, carried forward by forces we only understand in retrospect.

It may be that I will write a book on nothing more than an attempt to document that movement with some degree of honesty. Or perhaps it is simply a map drawn by someone who is still trying to determine which parts of himself have already arrived, and which are still finding their way.