You know who I don’t talk about enough? This guy.

That’s Larry Hall, my stepfather. He married my mom after my parents divorced, and when I met him I thought he was a dreamy, irresponsible goofball completely unlike my father.

Luckily, I was right. Not so luckily, it took me awhile to appreciate that fact.

There were seriously some years in the late Eighties and early Nineties when it was legitimately questionable that I’d grow up to be a decent human being. (It might still be. Ha!) The most glaring model of masculinity so far in my life led me to confuse assholery with strength, and I’m sure there were times when Larry checked his watch and calendar for when I’d move the hell out for college…or prison.

Yet through all of that, he introduced me to the Middle Earth Role Playing game and typed my first serious story for submission to Hitchcock’s and watched the premiere episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with me. More importantly, he made my mother safe and comfortable for the first time in a quarter century, and though I didn’t know it, he did the same for me.

Now, I’m not going to kid you into thinking you’d want to HIRE Larry to work at your company or government agency or to guard your building as he did briefly later in life. He seemed to be often drawn to jobs that had cool accessories, like badges or one of those pointy bishop hats, but his priority was getting home to talk endlessly with my mother while smoking on the back porch, or to read and nap afterward.

He was kind of a hedonist that way, though an inexpensive one. Which worked out well because they were almost always broke in the way society measures wealth.

He and my mother and younger brother Andrew went through some terrible times financially because, alas, the world doesn’t know what to do with people who work to live instead of the other way around. Yet even through their deprivation (and believe me, it was fucked up), they had this weird fatalistic cheerfulness that said, “Life is totally shit just beyond the glow of our flashlights, but at least we have those.”

When he met my mother while they both worked at a social service agency, he told her he was gay. She reported this to me with whispered drama before he came to visit the first time, like we should hide our most fabulous glitter from him. And yes, he had a gentle voice most of the time and liked fragrances and was better at dancing than any of us.

He might have told her he was gay to avoid the risk of romantic entanglement before he was ready, or maybe he was bisexual. It doesn’t really matter.

He later married Mother, which made him at least a Dianne-a-sexual, and that worked out just fine for both of them.

The last thing any of us needed was a capital-M Man, at least as they usually assert themselves in the world. Larry balanced the masculine and feminine with a wide streak of empathy and perceptiveness that men are encouraged to extinguish.

The most masculine thing I ever saw Larry do was rush out with a gun to investigate an intruder, though unfortunately it was a tiny pearl-handled .22 that might have been better kept in a garter belt than a holster. But let me tell you, he carried that thing outside into the darkness like a New York City cop to protect us, so again…the balance.

I don’t know how he’d feel about me telling these stories about him. I hope he wouldn’t be embarrassed because I’m not making fun of him at all. These are the stories of a hero.

Before he died, Larry said he was proud of the man I’d become, perhaps with the unspoken clause of that sentence being “…despite all the signs.” That meant more to me than any praise I could have gotten from the guy on my birth certificate because Larry knew manhood, all of it, and his path wasn’t narrow.

The night before he married my mother, there was a small bachelor party with his best man, my brother-in-law, and teenaged me. Marty had to drive him home because he’d gotten a little tipsy, and he had to ask whether to turn off at an exit or not.

“Go forward,” Larry slurred. “Never straight.”

That’s manhood. That’s fatherhood. And I wish I could tell him I know that because of him.

Someone I know has come home for the summer after their first difficult year of college, struggling with anxiety and depression. They started as a junior because of dual enrollment credits, and they’re attending with a prestigious scholarship about an arcane and technical subject.

Nobody that brilliant would ask me directly for advice, so I’ll write it here to be taken or left.

When I started college thirty years ago this coming August, I had the weird kind of smarts that were hard to distinguish from being a deranged idiot. I think I had a lot of raw mental horsepower that I didn’t know how to control, like putting a rocket engine on a unicycle, and back then it was common for educators to step back and just hope people like me wouldn’t become serial killers.

My cunning vocational scheme was to earn a PhD in English, become a famous writer with an adoring audience of voting age readers, and then run for public office to become the first truly literary President who would save the world with a sense of wit and epic drama.  

Even Manson’s Helter Skelter made more sense than that.

I felt like a lot of people had high expectations for me, but none higher than my own. I didn’t have the added pressure of your scholarships and a global pandemic thrumming through everything in life like the cosmic microwave background, so I can only imagine how much harder it is for you.

The odd thing about being a wunderkind is that people are either watching you intensely to perform or they’re not looking at you at all, and it’s hard to tell which is worse.

• If they’re watching, you have the pressure of living up to their hopes and investment in you.
• If they’re not watching, you have to decide what YOU find important enough to do, and it’s hard to imagine anything worth doing if it isn’t measured or judged.  

When faced with the risk of disappointing other people or disappointing myself, I always went for the latter. I never took a single creative writing course in college because I couldn’t face the possibility that I’d fail at something that mattered so much to me.

(That may not be an issue for you, but I’m guessing that being thought of as smart in your subject isn’t helping.)

It took me years to learn that the key to getting anything done for people like us with anxiety and depression is to lower the stakes. Even though it feels like we’re failing for not taking our work seriously enough, the truth is that we’re taking it too seriously.

Pressure amplifies anxiety and depression, and though some of it isn’t avoidable, one kind is: the pressure you put on yourself, especially at the start of something new.

Here are some things to know:

• It’s likely that some experimentation is still required for whatever medication you’re taking. It took about three years for them to get mine straight, and I’ve been taking the same meds for fifteen years now. And while I’m perhaps not a paragon of productivity, I’m getting shit done and not hating myself, so there’s that.
• It’s also likely that no amount of rational thought will lead you out of the way you’re feeling, so don’t make yourself feel worse for your “failure” to do that.
• One thing you’ll learn as you get older is to take some of your own thoughts less seriously. We’re smart, but not every thought is gold. Some of what we think comes from bad evolutionary software or failures of neurotransmitters, and one easy way to know the difference is to assume that almost all judgments of your own abilities are deeply skewed.  
• Meditation can help you separate your thoughts from your “self.” I’m told LSD can do that too, but I’ve never tried it. Meditation is probably safer.  
• The most powerful word I know for people intimidated by their own work is “tinker.” I don’t try things or plan them or even do the most important things…I tinker with them, playing around to see what works or feels better in each iterating experiment.
• You’ve gotten where you are quickly, but you actually have a lot more time than you think you do. You don’t have to decide everything right now.
• If you have discovered that you don’t love the thing you thought you did, that’s perfectly okay. If you’ve discovered that you do still love it but not in this time and place and circumstance, that’s okay, too. If you’ve discovered that you love it so much that you’re afraid to risk screwing it up, then just know that nothing stays screwed up forever.
• If you woke up tomorrow and said, “Fuck this, I’m going to HVAC school,” every member of your family would have your back.
• Take this summer and do absolutely nothing of consequence. I’d suggest walking, though. Maybe not in the middle of the night in the hood like I used to. Ask yourself some questions in a journal, too; one that always works for me is, “What the fuck am I doing here, really?”

That’s a lot to take in, and it’s possible your summer is over now that you’ve read it. The upshot is this:

There are people who will care about you no matter how you decide to apply your talent.

Try to be one of them.