A Life Divided Into Before and After

I’m knee-deep in writing a memoir. Perhaps this should have been apparent to me before, but now, due to my writing this book, it’s obvious to me how my life is divided into Before and After: Before my mental illness and After.

Before only encompasses 25 years, so that is only a small portion of my life today, as I just turned 63. Considering that time was spent in a chaotic state, with mental illness percolating, so to speak, they were not joyful years. I was smoking pot, confused about my sexuality, and, during the last few years, addicted to cocaine.

I don’t know if an unsuccessful suicide attempt qualities as a trauma. I don’t know if being diagnosed with mental illness with a team of psychiatrists telling you that the prognosis is poor and not to hope for much qualifies as a trauma.

For anyone who has experienced a trauma, it’s natural and easy to divide one’s life into before the trauma and after the trauma. When you ignore a trauma, it festers, and the negative effects manifest themselves in other ways. (Here is a Modern Love column from The New York Times that describes one way in which ignoring a trauma has a detrimental effect on a life.)

A study from Japan, which included MRIs of students before and after that nation’s devastating 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami, identified five areas of the brain that were altered in the students impacted most by the disaster. The fact that…