February 19th, 2024. I’m not okay, and that’s not okay, but it’s okay.

SO, I don’t talk about it much. It was a long time ago and, if you judge a person to be who’s on the inside, and not merely who’s on the outside, it didn’t even happen to me… But in college I suffered a mental break around the time that I discovered a real Love of guitar. It’s perhaps the danger of investing too much of your self-image in what you DO rather than who you ARE. The thing I DID shifted and I lost WHO I was.

Or maybe it was the Van de Graaff accident.

In the summer after my sophomore year at Maryland Institute, College of Art, I wasn’t doing a lot of visual art and I was really, really invested in playing guitar. I was working nights at the school security desk. This was stressful and a little bit crazy, because it was a security job in Baltimore City and I was working graveyard shifts. I would spend every second that nothing ELSE was happening playing guitar, writing and learning and recording, and on a grave shift in Baltimore, generally you had a LOT of seconds where nothing else was happening – though when something else DID happen it was generally pretty dramatic. It was stressful and maddening. I learned that I can easily mistake red blood for green oil paint.

But during the days I was working at the Maryland Science Centre as a “public programmer”. I did shows that taught people about liquid nitrogen and iguanas and Tesla coils – and Van de Graaff generators.

And I was becoming obsessed with the idea that I was a musician, maybe not a visual artist after all. At some point, maybe late that summer or during that winter semester (I have little memory of this time of my Life and all of my Journals have been burned) I suffered a pretty bad electrical accident with the larger of the two generators : the grounding pole polarized, shot out of the wall, leaving the generator to power up through my body. If it’d arced in some way into the Faraday’s Cage or into the audience, it probably would’ve killed me. If I’d been standing differently it would’ve stopped my heart. My hair went up, my muscles locked, I asked someone to quickly go grab someone to cut the power to the generator and stood there sweating till someone did. At the time there’d been three people to suffer something similar and survive – one cracked all his ribs from muscle contractions and another was blasted backwards through a wall and was in a coma for a week. I came through very fortunately unscathed.

This is a long preamble to my breakdown. I was going through a pretty massive mental upset of self-redefinition, getting little to no sleep as a LIFESTYLE, and then I blasted myself with 200 million volts of electricity. It’s a good origin story, as origin stories go.

Fast forward weeks or months, and in my junior year of college, I started missing time.

I was seen in classes that I had no memory of. I was missing classes and had no memory of where I was. I started finding text files on my computer that I had no memory of writing. Weird poetry, lengthy essays on math and existence, and an equation that I’d written out in which I’d mathematically “proven” that I had no soul.

I got on a train, left Baltimore and disappeared for a week. I have patchy memories of it all, but a paper note that I saved for years was from someone I met randomly who let me crash at their house for a couple of days. I had no idea at the time, but of course this went on to eventually inspire traveling as a musician…

When I came home to lots of very freaked out friends, I got help from the, frankly underqualified, but absolutely fascinated councilor at MICA. He was a huge proponent of the idea that though this was a huge problem, I hadn’t harmed anyone and this could absolutely be worked out if he could sort out the core of what was going on in my head. Though to this day I’m not a huge believer in therapy, I am very grateful he took this approach.

I was shown to be suffering fugue states that, if not solved, could potentially devolve into a mental breakdown resulting in completely fractured personalities, what was called “multiple personality disorder” at the time – what would be “dissociative identity disorder” nowadays… I was justifiably terrified, the councilor was overjoyed with the opportunity, and I had to take incompletes in several courses as I thought about withdrawing from school.

But the councilor, in a stroke of genius, brought in a mathematician from Hopkins. The mathematician went through my papers, disproved the equation, showed me the math was wrong. I got a good night’s sleep and things cleared up almost literally overnight.

This is, by the way, the long version of the origin of “rob”. “Robert” didn’t make it through the experience. “rob” was diminished by it. It’s not the explanation I usually give.

I kept seeing the councilor regularly, watching for signs of slipping back. My classmates, apartment mates, they all really helped keep an eye on me and frequently shook me at random thinking I’d been “sleepwalking” or something. We eventually got on the same page and they quit that, but in conversation one day I brought up the Van de Graaff accident to my councilor and he was like “oh, I wish you’d brought THAT up earlier – electricity can have a dramatic effect on brain chemistry”.

Sooo – yeah.

Ever since I’ve had real memory issues if I don’t get enough sleep. I’ll misremember dreams as memories until I run across something that contradicts them and this can be really jarring. It means that at times I’ll forget someone’s dead, or be shocked to encounter someone I met that I thought had died. Or simply not understand that a whole conversation must’ve been a dream until I remember that it happened in my old elementary school that I KNOW I’ve not set foot in for almost 40 years.

Why the Hell am I bringing this up? Because I was sitting at my computer and I looked at my monitor and flipped through the text documents sitting open and I read a sentence I didn’t remember writing and I freaked out. Have I been that frightened of who and what I am as an artist? Can I be fracturing again? Am I trying to find another “me” to be because I’ve failed that badly as who and what I AM?

It took me most of the day, but I don’t think so.

I think I just haven’t slept most of this week. I think I’m exhausted and sad.

I’ve been trying to find contexts in which that sentence made sense, and I think I’ve got a narrative that works. The time stamp lines up with a meeting I didn’t want to be in. I think I simply wrote something out of character and unmemorable and didn’t delete it.

But it brought a lot flooding back. It brought a lot of memories and awfulness. I came back from that random train exploration inspired and exhilarated – to friends that were terrified and worried. It was my first experience with anyone CARING that I was missing and I guess that’s why I got help. It was magnified by another friend’s death: out of his mind on heroin he slipped down an elevator shaft while at a party that I was supposed to go to the night I left. He snapped his spine and, paralyzed, died of dehydration over the course of the week that I was missing. He was found the morning I showed back up. Maybe his death is why I got help.

Nowadays I don’t feel like I’ve got the “right” to mental illness. It’s like… I used it up. Someone asked me recently if I was “on the spectrum” because I acted like it. “It’s okay, I am too”. I don’t know that I can just CLAIM something like that. I’ve been threatened with diagnoses, but I come from an age where that’s not just a badge you flash to get people to understand why you do the things you do, it came with therapy and drugs and consequences. In Ontario someone told me I should attend their neurodivergent peer group. Again, I just don’t believe it’s something you get to self-diagnose.

It’s not the same thing. I know that. But it’s a slippery slope, a dangerous one. And from the inside it’s awfully difficult to sort out. So maybe I DO need a seminar, a buddy, a support group. And at times I’ve definitely needed help. But I’ve worked hard to be who I am, and a lot of that is built around not simply being okay with not being okay, but fighting it tooth and nail. I don’t want to slip back or split up with myself. I don’t want to break. I don’t want to let myself break. I don’t want to give myself PERMISSION to break. I’m working. That means I’m not broken. Or at least I’m fixed ENOUGH to function.