She is pencil thin with some of the sharpest eyebrows I’ve ever seen. Her office smells like tongue depressors. All institutional offices smell like tongue depressors. The scent hangs in her office like incense, a prayer to the institutional gods to bless her voyage into my head.  

My elementary school psychologist stares at me from across her desk. She smiles without showing her teeth, which means she isn’t actually smiling. She is making herself smile. Her lips are thin and fragile, as if a half-hearted gust of wind could blow them off her face. Everything about her seems stretched. She is resting her elbows on her desk with her hands held in the air. She is gesturing with both pointer fingers extended; her other fingers hang limply while she motions about. The mass consumer–sized, wannabe-tranquil water fountain in the corner of her office whispers wetly as she searches for words. The fountain is loud enough to murder silence but discreet enough to play with the subconscious—constantly extending the invitation to go pee. 

“Let’s talk a little more about how home makes you feel at school,” she says, her pointers bobbing about with each syllable. Like a bouncy ball over the text of a singalong. 

I don’t know what exactly landed me in her office. My mom might have asked the school whether she could speak with me about our situation at home—the turmoil of addiction and fighting was a constant in our family life. Divorce circled above our family’s half-dead unity like a vulture. Or perhaps I had gotten in a little bit of trouble at school, and they contacted home, and some less pleasant details came to light. Either way, this woman had spent the past couple of weeks pretending to be more interested in my life than any other person ever had. 

I tell her that, sometimes, being angry about things at home makes it easy to not care about things at school. 

“Let’s dive into that a little more . . . see what we can find,” she says, her face twisting into a hybrid expression of curiosity and sympathy. She readjusts. Her chin now rests on a cupped hand, long fingers curling around her cheek as she leans in. As if peering into a fish tank, she squints. “Do you usually feel frustrated before you decide to ‘not care about’ something in particular, or does it usually start with sadness?” 

It could be either, I say. 

“It could be either. . . . Yes, I’m sure that’s true. So, Scott, tell me, what are some of the things that make you the most frustrated or sad at home these days? I’m talking about the things that activate this ‘not caring’ at school.” 

My bitter, ready-to-be-pissed-off little self asks her who Scott is. 

“Oh, goodness,” she chuckles. She looks down at a paper. “What’s the matter with me . . . Skyler—yes, goodness me, Skyler—it’s going to be a long day.” 

The chip on my shoulder deepens as I barrel through to my preteen years. I watch my parents’ marriage collapse into the vortex of divorce. Various species of grief enter our lives. My dad’s blood increasingly concentrates with alcohol. He loses his house and moves in with my grandparents. One night he is so drunk he calls 911 to ask to be sent to rehab. He goes to rehab and relapses shortly after returning. My mom struggles financially to support my brother and me. She is a nail technician. She gets her GED in hopes of finding better work opportunities. No new opportunities come. We move a couple of times, changing schools in the process. My mom enters other relationships after splitting with my dad. Many of which are with men I think are weak and selfish. Eventually, she meets Ron. She takes us on her first date with Ron, who also brings his son, Thomas, along. The date is at a sports bar with a bizarre amount of crane machines in it. 

My older brother and I are playing the crane machines with Thomas while my mom and Ron chat at our table. We all take turns losing. Cold disappointment glides through my stomach as stuffed animals, balls, and other assorted flotsam slip through the crane’s thin, weak claw. I don’t actually want any of the things I am trying to win, but I am pissed that I am losing. 

As we mindlessly burn through Ron’s dollar bills, I think of Kevin. A man my mom had a relationship with several months earlier. A man who was more interested in partying and using my mom as entertainment than in inviting her to be a part of his life. He also drank a lot. Kevin’s friend, Todd, was always around during the weekend-long visits we would make to Kevin’s apartment with my mom. My brother and I hated it there. Todd would call us pussies when we would ask to go home. My mom eventually found out Kevin was cheating on her. She barely ate for days when she found out. I listened to her crying from my bedroom down the hall from hers. It was a weekend I was supposed to be at my dad’s. He had showed up drunk to pick me up, and my mom sent him away. 

I slip out of recollection, and I look back at Ron and my mom laughing at the table. I am filled with dread at the thought of being subjected to another weak, undisciplined, Luciferian-spirited man sent to torment us. 

Things with my mom and Ron get serious after the sports bar date. He is around our condo a lot. He is different from Kevin in that he puts in a lot of effort getting to know my brother and me. One day as I am walking home from the bus stop, I turn the corner of my street and see Ron by our front door. I walk up to him. 

“Hey, bud, let’s hop in the car,” he says, standing up from the doorstep, car keys in hand. “We are going to pick out some shoes.” My mom has been saying recently that I need new shoes. I assume this is a ploy to further win over my mom—a ploy that I am fine with. I am happy being a pawn in this man’s chess game to win my mom’s heart. He seems to really want to make time for catering to her. I hop in his car, and we drive out of the neighbourhood. 

Ron is wearing sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, and bobbing his head to Godsmack as the car rumbles along. Godsmack sucks, but I start to think that maybe Ron doesn’t. He flicks his cigarette out the window and turns the music down. 

“Skyler, I wanted to talk with you about something.” He lifts his sunglasses from his eyes and sets them on top of his head. “Your mom and I have been talking about getting you guys out of that condo. How would you feel about moving into my house?” 

We have only known Ron for a few months. I think about how the condo feels cramped sometimes. It doesn’t have a dishwasher either. There is only one shower. Ron makes decent money at his factory job, so money wouldn’t be a constant stress anymore. I think that my mom would be much happier if she didn’t have to constantly stress about money. Ron also has a huge movie collection. 

“I know you have been let down by guys in your life. But I promise, bud, I will be there for you. I want to be with your mom, and being with your mom means all of us being a family. Which is something that I think would make all of us happy.” 

I choke up. A sensation of relief floods my body, as if I’ve been running for years and my lungs are finally pushing and pulling air freely again. I think that would be awesome, I say. 

A month or so later, we move in with Ron. I change schools again. There is a lot less dread this time around. Ron lets me pick out colours to paint my new room. He takes me out to buy some posters and decorations to hang on my walls. Ron and my mom get married in a small ceremony. My brother and I give her away. My mom is happy. My brother and I get along with Thomas. We don’t see Thomas all that much because he lives with his mom and stepdad half the time. But the time we are together is typically fun. I begin playing football and wrestling at my new school, and I am pretty good at both. I am getting decent grades for the first time. I start to notice that Ron is irritable in the evenings. My mom explains to me that Ron has bipolar disorder. A year goes by. Ron is constantly angry and picking fights with everyone. I get home from football practice one day and go to the fridge to get a pitcher of water. Ron slams the fridge door shut. I open it again. Ron slams it. I ask Ron what he is doing. 

“What are you going to do about it?” he asks. 

He is dead serious. I open the fridge again, and he slams it. His lip curls. I laugh a little. He gives me a little shove. I shove him back. He really shoves me. I remember that I am a six-foot-one thirteen-year-old. I throw him to the ground, and a struggle begins. He puts me in a headlock. His armpit smells like Old Spice and his fingers like cigarettes. I pull my head from the crook of his arm and push the side of his skull as hard as I can into the linoleum floor. I feel the ridges of his teeth through his cheek. My mom is summoned by the noise. She is screaming. She breaks up the scuffle. Ron storms off and sulks in his recliner. I drink water. 

A few months go by. We find out that Thomas, my stepbrother, has been molesting his stepsister. He is sent to juvie rehab. Ron withdraws from our family entirely. He is angry and depressed. My mom desperately tries to support and help him. He wants us out of his life and files for divorce. We move into an apartment. 

Around this time I am invited to a church youth group by my friend Tyler from school. I don’t believe in or care to understand Christ as I eventually will, but I make some wonderful friends. I begin doing everything with the boys I fall in with. After several months I am spending nearly every weekend at one or the other of their houses. Mostly, they are all a part of intact, financially secure families that are devoutly Christian. Their homes are quiet and easy. After a while, I notice that one of my closest friends, Nick, never seems to be allowed to hang out with me one-on-one. One day I pull him aside while we are hanging out with some friends in the church parking lot. I ask him why his parents never let us hang out together outside our large gatherings. 

“Don’t be upset, but my parents said we can only hang out if we are all hanging out in a group,” he says, looking down. He is fidgeting. He makes to crack his knuckles, but nothing cracks. 

Why do other people need to be around, I ask. 

He explains that his parents are worried about the influence I might have on him. To be fair, I am a bit of a class clown and get in a little trouble at school. But it is never mean-spirited or inappropriate troublemaking. Many of the times a teacher tells me to go out in the hall or go to the principal’s office, they say it while biting a lip and hiding a smile. I am disruptive—and probably annoying—but good-humoured. 

“They said it’s more about being unsure about your parents and home life than anything about you,” he says. 

I tear up and tell him that I need to go home. He is possessed by the most sympathetic and mournful expression I have ever seen on the face of a friend. He knows I am crushed. I am about to cry. I can’t stay here and make a scene. I tell him I will see him at school tomorrow. I leave him with my other friends in the church parking lot and spend nearly two hours walking home to my apartment. I am crying and clenching my teeth so hard it sounds like I am chewing sand. I get home and no one is there. 

These vignettes are not the most disturbing examples of trust-breaking, heartache, or human failure from my past. I share them not because I perceive them as particularly severe but because they are experiences that, for a long time, called into question the integrity—indeed, the worthiness—of some of the most common human institutions. A school psychologist forgetting my name after several meetings marked the beginning of my distrust of institutional professionals, especially those working in therapy or counselling. Even the act of talking through one’s problems came to seem masturbatory to me: pointless, vapid whinging that led down a circuitous path of misery while slowly piling up billable hours for a professional listener. As far as I was concerned, the therapy industry was where the otherwise uninterested party would meet those who are dying inside on the grounds of building a sturdy career. A profession that views people as knots to be untied by a calculating and trained hand—a hand that avoids earning the privilege of accessing these things through the natural means of mutual love, shared experience, and trust. Given my willingness to endure the emotional and mental equivalent of chewing broken glass—divulging intimate details and uneasy feelings about my life—this impersonal, uncareful mistake of not remembering my name seemed an utter betrayal. A pulling back of the curtain, revealing not the flesh and bone of a caring person but the machinations of a system. A system that demands the emptying of oneself for nothing in return. 

The breakdown of my family seemed to explain itself while I watched my mom seek love in a society that, by all appearances, seemed committed to breaking vows and sacrificing others’ sense of security to the whims of inclination, sex, or pride. What does family mean, compared to any other relationship, if it is so fragile and insecure? Are those who are predisposed to loyalty expected to serve endlessly at the leisure of fickle little kings and queens? Kevin used my mom for a good time. Ron used our family for a time. Both disposed of us when they were through. I was convinced that humans had devolved in some manner. No longer capable of permanent and unconditional commitment. Aside from the Christian families, the people I’d known in childhood who had held true to these commitments were very old. They belonged to a generation and culture whose lifespan was thinning out. And so, too, the ancient secret of their now esoteric ability would die with them—the ability to remain present and true to those you are bonded to by vows or blood. 

Some of the doors of community were locked to me by things I couldn’t control. A child, helplessly shaking the lock in frustration, would do no good. This particular door—a door by which I might access my friend—could be passed through only by those with the proper key. Nick was one of a few friends at church whose parents made sure their children’s fingers weren’t too close to my mouth. To be viewed from a safe distance, I imagined them thinking. It was only after this experience at the hands of my friend’s parents, within a church community, that I began to wonder whether something was wrong with me. Do they know something I don’t know? Am I doomed to something terrible? Are they smart to keep their children out of my fallout zone when the atom finally splits? Eventually, Nick suggested that maybe I should just tell his parents that I am not my parents. Tell them my story. Paint a clear picture beyond the bits of gossip the parents traded after hearing tidbits from my friends. Let them know that I am aware that my family life isn’t ideal and that I want something different for my own life. In short, I had to acknowledge that I, like them, believed my family wasn’t good enough.  

So I told them what they wanted to hear. They were heartbroken as I told my story. The lock on the door clicked open, striking down my dignity and sense of loyalty in the process. Nick and I were never again limited in our ability to spend time with each other. But a part of me despised his parents for making me go through the ritual. To play freely with my friend, I had to flay open my heart and provide his parents the reassurance that I thought the same things about my parents they did. I didn’t feel that way, but the choice was either to affirm them in their insecurities or to be kept at arm’s length of a dear friend. I chose my friend. I was very careful about sharing any details of my life with my friends after that, lest they make it back to any parents and I must perform the rite again. 

These are, though, the faulty ideologies of a boy. Mere monsters born out of reframing the shortcomings of others in order that I might cope. I never sought to understand these occurrences from the sympathetic point of view. Everything I experienced at the hands of others was more complicated than these understandings allowed for. Or, in the case of the school psychologist, perhaps simpler than I allowed. Regardless, I wanted the enemies of my dignity, security, and self-worth stripped naked and exposed. Not as mistake-prone human beings, but as evil actors who are willing to torture the innocent in pursuit of their own liberties. I believe I always knew these explanations of “how things really are” were coping mechanisms. Which is why, despite it all, I threw myself fully into the glories of human institutions as I grew older. 

I am married to a woman who is, as far as I am concerned, as heavenly as cool morning air haloed by a sherbet-cast sky. She is the mother of my three (soon to be four) children. She has turned our home into a tranquil cantina. A place where any who are worn down by the burdens of life or the difficulties of long days can come and find deep and invigorating rest. She serves with a quiet dutifulness that would never leave her unprepared to face the famous biblical warning to all who have homes to host in: “Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” At times I struggle to believe she is real. She is the kind of high-grade cement God hopes to form out of all of us for pouring a proper foundation for marriage and family life. I am in love with her in the way I wish my dad or Kevin or Ron could have loved my mom. My mom’s torment, as unfair and undeserved as it was, became my teacher. I could not give my mom the justice I thought she was entitled to in any literal sense. So I sought to deliver it by other means. Her suffering would never be in vain if it resulted in her son learning what the dignity and genius of a woman is worthy of: a tender love of service, playfulness, and leadership. A love that my mom did end up finding in the end in the form of my stepdad Chuck. A man who was able to show a woman who has faced down dragons that not all men are serpents. They have been married now for ten years.  

I was never truly without the support of friendship and community either. The early shade of loneliness cast from familial strife and insecurity allowed me to wander blindly into the embrace of true friend after true friend, by means that I can credit only to divine providence. Tyler, the boy who invited me to church all those years ago, beckoning me into communion with my first group of long-term cronies, is still my best friend. As I sit here writing this, he is flying out for a visit from Hong Kong, where he now lives. I talk to him almost every day, just as often about nothing as about politics, art, and the general strangeness of our times. And despite what has been a particularly stressful week at work for me, the irritation of labour cannot withstand the total joy that is time and laughter with an old friend. A joy that acts as a balm to cure most pessimisms that might otherwise quietly work to suggest that we humans are downright rotten. It is a balm readily available to me through a cast of courageous and wonderful friends I have made over the years. 

Even the temptation to clam up and retreat before an assumedly indifferent audience did not win out. While I admittedly still harbour a degree of suspicion toward the therapeutic institutional machine (mea culpa, truly), here I sit, spilling my guts. The little institution that is this magazine has been crucial in the excavation of my life, allowing me to explore the relationship between experience and the human mind. Details that had previously been sources of shame contributing to my overall feeling of inadequacy are now under the lamplight of human eyeballs—the eyeballs of strangers, no less. I offer these details in the hope of aiding and encouraging them—you—to participate in the Augustinian practice of searching the horrors and glories of one’s past for what is good and true. To never abandon hope.  

But I suppose that is what a worthwhile institution allows people to do. It offers the opportunity to sift through the individual lies we tell about ourselves and the world around us and instead uplift widespread, collective truth. To bring to light the things that are worth fighting for. To prove, despite all the suffering and heartbreak in this world, that men and women are capable of great acts of courage, honour, and commitment—that we are, in fact, architects of noble aims. To wrench wisdom out of despair and hope out of hopelessness. These are things I have really come to understand only as I have begun writing these past couple of years. All in pursuit of the most difficult discovery of human understanding: what it is that I truly believe.  

There is no better instructor than desperation, capable of resurrecting faith and bolstering one’s resolve to keep it. As the fallenness of the human condition pressed in, aiming to kill the boy of my early years, it was my belief in the basic worthiness of the institutions I had suffered under that spared me in the end. A marriage redeeming betrayal. Friendship withstanding exile. A faith transfiguring despair. Through these and more, I have come to see the unyielding, gracious strength available in the bonds that spring from our nature and properly ordered desires. In the end, it is a posture of patient endurance that uncovers an institution’s true reward. Good institutions are capable of guiding civilizations toward unthinkable heights, even as they are uniquely suited to helping boys hang on long enough to become men.