Free Providence by Daniel Quinn Page B

me to figure out where to go from there. He wasn’t going to ask, for example, if I’d ever had any feelings of sexual attraction to a person of my own gender. I would’ve taken that as a sign that the presence or absence of such feelings had some bearing on the matter, and that wouldn’t do.
    The psychoanalyst isn’t there to provide reassurance. He’s there to provide a mirror in which you can see yourself. And at this point what I saw in the mirror had little relation to the image that was actually there. I was like an emaciated anorexic who looks in the mirror and sees someone who is fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.
    What was wrong with me was not my sexual orientation. What was wrong with me was that I was so profoundlyinsecure that I needed someone else to tell me what my sexual orientation
was.
I had no
inner
assurance on the subject of my own identity. But of course I didn’t see this at all. When I left his office after a session like this, I would be thinking: “Oh my God, maybe I
am
a queer.”
    After a year of this, I was living in a state of perpetual anxiety and inner tumult, which I imagine is par for the psychoanalytic course. When it comes to psychoanalysis, a year is just scratching the surface.
    Meanwhile I fell in love, and this presented a crisis on several levels. In those days, for an earnest young man like me, to fall in love was to get married, and to get married would be to say good-bye to any possible return to the Trappist life. Perhaps even more distressing, to get married would be to adopt a life-style that, for a fundamentalist Roman Catholic, is spiritually second-rate. I assure you it’s true. Heavens, read St. Paul! Marriage is something you do if you must, something you do if you can’t manage without that filthy stuff called sex. Better to marry, Paul says, than to burn. Nowadays Catholics downplay this message, but it’s there, loud and clear: Virgins occupy a distinctly higher spiritual plane than married folks.…
    What was wrong with me was not my sexual orientation. What was wrong with me was that I was so profoundly insecure that I needed someone else to tell me what my sexual orientation was.
    Yes, this seems to contradict what I was saying a minuteago, that I was no longer investing myself so totally in the cause of God. But in fact there’s no contradiction here; if I’d still been investing myself totally in the cause of God, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to fall in love at all. But once I’d fallen in love, I immediately began to question what I was doing. As I say, I simply didn’t know what I was about, who I was, or what I wanted.
    In addition to these reservations, there was this: Would I, as a married man, be able to pursue a career as a writer? I remember asking the poet Paul Carroll what he thought about this. He was clearly doubtful but wasn’t comfortable giving me advice about such a thing. I asked a painter friend—himself married. He said, “If you don’t marry Katherine, you’ll always regret it.” Believe it or not, I clung fervently to this advice. I gave this person’s opinion far more weight than my own inclinations, because I wasn’t sure I could trust them.
    So one day I walked into Dr. Zirpoli’s office and said, “Well, I’m going to get married!”
    He was completely flabbergasted. He said, “I thought we agreed at the outset that you wouldn’t make any major life decisions without reviewing them here.”
    It was my turn to be flabbergasted. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was any of his concern. He suddenly ceased to be nondirective and told me in no uncertain terms that any marriage I entered into at this point would end in disaster. He couldn’t have been more right, but I certainly didn’t see any grounds for this dire prediction. In fact, I suspected him of simply wanting to keep me as a patient, which meant keeping me as my father’s little boy.
    However, since I’d created what he considered to be astate of emergency, I