The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness Read Free

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independent of each other. My mother was always very physically
affectionate with my dad in public; he was less so with her, but never
dismissive or rude. It was just always clear that he was the boss. For
my mother, it was always "Anything you want, dear," just as it had
been for her mother. If she'd had any particular professional ambition
when she went off to college, I've never known what it was, although
she was a central part of a successful antiques business she and my
father started together. Still, nothing's changed much in their dynamic
in the intervening years. Recently, my mother announced that she'd
given up her own political opinions in order to share my father's.
    For his part, in spite of a sense of humor that often verged on the
bawdy, my father could be quite absolute in his opinions and
reactions. There was also a touch of suspiciousness in his interactions
with others, particularly when the subject at hand was money. In this,
he was just as his own father had been.
    My parents were both outspoken in their disgust for religious or
racial bigotry. For example, we could swear all we wanted, but the use
of racial or ethnic slurs was utterly and always forbidden. As
provincial as Miami seemed back in those days (my father often said
that it had all the disadvantages of a big city and none of the
advantages), the tension between the city's African-Americans and
Cuban immigrants, and the riots in 1970 (during which our
African-American housekeeper was harassed by the police), taught us
that even a familiar landscape could turn violent and unpredictable in
the fog of prejudice.
    Whatever their faults (or ours), there was no shortage of "I love
you's" from my parents when I was a child, nor is there one now; to
this day, they're openly affectionate with all of us, and even my friends
are greeted with a hug and a kiss. My parents were never cruel or
punitive, and never physical in the ways they disciplined us; they
simply made it known from our earliest days that they had high
expectations for our behavior, and when we missed the bar, they
brought us up short.
    Nor did we ever want for anything material. My family was solidly
in the middle class, and as time went on, our means increased. My
father's law practice dealt primarily with real estate, land deals, and
some personal/estate planning, all of which expanded as Miami itself
did. When I was thirteen, my parents opened a small antiques and
collectibles shop a five-minute trip from our house. It, too, thrived,
and they began to collect and sell items from Europe, which in time
meant two or three trips to France each year and a lot of time spent in
New York City as well.
    So there were never any concerns about having a nice place to live,
or good food to eat, or missing our yearly family vacation. It was
expected that we would attend college; it was a given that our parents
would pay for it. They were loving, hardworking, comfortably
ambitious (for themselves and for their children), and more often than
not, kind. To borrow a phrase from the psychological literature, they
were "good enough"—and they raised three decent children, no easy
feat in that or any age. My brothers grew up into fine men; Warren is a
trader on Wall Street, and Kevin is a civil engineer in Miami. Both are
accomplished in their professions, with wives and children they love
and who love them in return. And my own penchant for hard work
and my drive to succeed is traceable directly, I know, to my parents.
    In short, they gave me and taught me what I needed to make the
most of my talents and strengths. And (although I couldn't have
predicted or understood back then how vitally important this would
be to my life) they gave me what I needed to survive.

    When I was about eight, I suddenly needed to do things a little
differently than my parents would have washed me to do them. I
developed, for loss of a better word, a few little quirks. For instance,
sometimes I couldn't leave my room unless