193: What if your deepest secret was shared with the world?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. There were people all around me, but I didn't feel like I was one of them. I felt like I was sort of drifting along as something besides human. Like I had stepped onto another planet inside my head. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 193. What if your deepest secret was shared with the world?

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To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts. That's amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Check out our recently completed six-part series, The 82% Modern Stories of Love and Family, ad-free with your Prime membership. I was always really a bit of a loner as a kid.

I was sort of aware that there was tension in the household, but not really sure what it was about. I am, I'd say, a product of the Midwest. My mom is originally from Kansas. My dad is originally from Nebraska. I was born in Oklahoma, and then we moved to Columbia, Missouri, where my brother was born. And then we moved to a suburb of St. Paul in Minnesota.

My parents would fight every Sunday after church. So there was a lot of tension, but I wasn't really quite sure what a lot of it was about. And I don't have a lot of clear memories before the age of, say, nine. For the longest time, it was a lot like trying to look through, say, the junk drawer in your kitchen. Like every memory was kind of tangled up with other memories. But a few things happened around the age of nine.

One of the first strongest memories I have is this couple that my parents knew came to visit. Their names were Steve and Sharon. They were a good-looking couple, and I remember I developed quite a crush on Steve. They were staying in the living room on the pull-out couch, and I was in the living room watching cartoons. And he had been taking a shower, and he came in to the living room where his suitcases were, and he just had a towel wrapped around him.

I remember wanting to know what was under the towel, but at the same time, I remember knowing that that was not something that I should know or think about. And so I kind of turned that part off in my head at the same time that it flicked on. A few months later, my parents separated. They had been fighting a lot, and my father first moved down into the basement for a few months.

I really wasn't sure what was going on or what was the reason behind it until much later. But essentially, my father had come out to my mother. He had long been wrestling with attractions to men. But coming from the Midwest at their age in that time period, it was just not even an option.

I didn't know this at the time, but he had had a couple of affairs with men during that time. And I think they tried to make it work. And I think a little bit of the reason why they moved around so much was just trying to hopefully, if we move often enough, we'll leave our problems behind. But obviously, that isn't really what happens in life. Our problems follow us.

I'd say about six months after they separated, they sat me down in the living room and they asked me if I knew what gay was. I really didn't. I think I had heard it, you know, hurled across the playground a couple times. You know, this was 1980, Falcon Heights, Minnesota.

I had no frame of reference for what gay meant, and I was a long ways away from connecting the feelings and the thoughts I had had about Steve and other guys to this word, let alone to the fact that they were now saying that they both were gay, both my mother and my father. My mom's history or story of coming to terms with her sexuality is less concrete in my head

I think what happened was when my father came out to her, she had those few months to kind of question herself that allowed her, I think, the time to realize that she might be a lesbian. When they sat me down in the living room and told me that they were both gay,

I could feel that it was this momentous moment in our lives, but I couldn't quite figure out why, and I didn't quite understand what gay meant, and I didn't quite understand what it meant when they said that they were both gay. They made sure to tell me that they both loved me and that they probably were not going to be getting back together, but that they would both continue to be in our lives. And my father was going to move out and get his own place, and my brother and I would be in joint custody between my mom and my father.

I remember the other thing they said during that same conversation was, you know, this is something that a lot of people may not understand. And so you may not want to tell anybody. So for me, it was something that I didn't understand, but it was something that already I knew kind of marked us as something a little shameful and something not to talk about either with my friends at school or with anybody really.

And I was a long ways away from connecting it with the feelings that I was starting to have for other boys and other men. Once I figured out what gay meant, I always knew that I was, and I was very much not wanting to be gay. And I think that that can be hard for some of my gay friends to understand when I tell them that I had two gay parents. But my parents were not perfect people by any stretch of the imagination.

I never really felt very understood by my father and I never felt very connected to him emotionally. But I did feel that with my mom and I felt like she understood me and she kind of knew what made me tick. But she could be extremely unpredictable in her moods. At the same time that my father was leaving her, she was having a really hard time with drinking and she started to drink a lot.

She made a really good impression on strangers and friends, but behind closed doors, she could be really unpredictable. I think it was much easier for her to get really angry than to get sad. I think sadness for her felt much scarier than being angry.

She grew up in Kansas and she was the oldest child and then they had a son and he was born with Down syndrome. And when my mother was 13, he had a stroke and that took away his voice and it paralyzed one side of him.

Back in those years, her parents did what was more or less expected at the time, which is they put him in an institution with the state of Kansas. But then after that, they never visited him again ever for the rest of their lives. And I think my mother was extremely scarred by that.

I think that she felt like she could be sent away at any time for any reason. And she developed just this super intense fear of being alone or being abandoned. And it drove her, I'd say, more than any other sort of inner drive. So when my father left, my brother and I were sort of bearing the brunt of a lot of her anger and frustration and sadness of being alone and fear.

I think she got pretty scared of her own alcoholism. She started going to this women's recovery center in Minneapolis called Chrysalis. That's where she met her first girlfriend, was in one of those sobriety groups. I think she found it easier to find women who were more compassionate towards her and more loving and more giving of themselves. I think my father was a bit of a hard man to love.

So one day around the same time when I was nine years old, this is before my father moved out. My father and I were alone in the house and my mother and my brother were out. I was in the bathroom and I was taking a bath, a bubble bath with my toys. And I was nine years old and the door opened and my father came in and he was naked and

and he had an erection. It was sort of an immediate shock. And he pretty quickly got right into the bathtub with me

He was standing up in the bathtub, his penis was right in my face, and he was telling me, sort of like, he was trying to present it almost like a facts of life discussion, like pointing out the different parts of his penis, and he said, "You can touch it if you'd like." And, you know, it was, to be honest, it was the absolute last thing I wanted to do.

But I was such a good little kid and I just wanted him to be happy. And so I, you know, against my will, I reached out and touched it. And then my memory skips a little bit there. And the next thing I remember is he took me up to their bedroom. He laid down on the bed and had me sit on the corner of the bed. And then he sort of slowly masturbated himself to the point of climax.

You know, it was just this incredibly, incredibly awkward, scary thing for me to go through. I had no idea why he was doing this or what I was supposed to do. And I think a little part of me sort of floated away from myself. And I was kind of looking at the whole picture sort of from the ceiling and sort of staring at the bedspread instead of at him because I didn't want to look at him. I just felt a bit frozen.

And there was a part of me that knew that what was going on and that what he was doing was wrong. All I wanted to do was just get the hell out of that room and be by myself where it was safe. I just felt like I couldn't do that. Like I said, I was just always the good little boy. And I thought that if I was just perfect and kind of sat there until it was over and just let it happen, then I could go back to my life. And it was just so bizarre. It just made my skin crawl.

And I think that's probably why I sort of separated a little bit from myself and I didn't know how to be good in that situation. I remember when it was over, he told me that I couldn't tell my mom and then he sent me on my way. Immediately, I put that whole night kind of in its own little box in my head. It wasn't something that I completely forgot about. I think there was always a little part of me that was aware of it.

The best way that I can think that I could describe it is if you've hung like a painting or photo in like a spare room of your house and you know it's there, but you don't walk by it very often. So you kind of forget what it looks like. You know it's there, but you don't really see it anymore. And that's kind of how this memory felt to me.

This is really the only example of overt incest that I can remember. I'm not sure if there were other instances or not. It's the one that I can remember.

I feel like this is common with incest survivors in that we often compare what we went through with others and then we sort of minimize what we went through. And I have that impulse all the time with this memory, which is to be like, oh, he just masturbated in front of me. There was no penetration. There was no pain. There was just this incredible awkwardness.

But at the same time, it did affect me. And I think one way it affected me is I never knew from that moment forward what he was capable of. Whenever I was around my father after that night, I felt just this cold emptiness inside me.

It was like I wasn't allowed to have any feelings for him, any sort of affection for him. And he was really not the most affectionate man otherwise. And so I grew up a bit estranged from him within the same household, just never sharing anything about myself with him. I think it combined in my head with a lot of things that were really hard for me to disentangle.

It got tangled up with the fact that he came out of the closet and he was gay. And it got really tangled up with my own slowly emerging consciousness that I was gay. And so I never really was able to kind of come to terms with my sexuality without that being part of it. I think it felt more like I had been corrupted.

There were other instances after that that weren't really overt incest, but felt pretty gross. Like, I remember I once saw my father having sex with another man. He took me to go across the state to go visit somebody that I'd never met before, this man. You know, one way I really survived as a kid was through books, and I was reading late into that night, I think a Stephen King book.

I remember late that night just suddenly becoming aware that my father and the other man had been in the living room and I hadn't heard anything for a long time and I just sort of peered over the bookshelf and I saw them having sex on the floor of the living room and it was just this eye scalding moment that I just wished that I could unsee. I was okay at my mom's house even though she could be really upset and unpredictable and drinking and take her anger out on me but at least she was sort of

safer than my dad felt. My dad didn't feel safe to me. And so whenever I was at his house alone, I pretty much just shut myself off in my room. And I never really talked to him and I never shared anything with him.

Eventually, he dated a couple of different men, and then my mom dated a couple of different women. Then they each ended up with partners who were also previously married with kids. I ended up in this sort of strange couple of families, I guess, that were pretty unusual for the Midwest in 1985. I was really quiet and pretty serious and a little melancholy pretty much my whole life.

But I was also a really good kid and I was really good in school because I think my motto throughout all this was the best way to survive all this is to be really good and to draw as little attention to myself as possible. So if I get a bunch of A's and if I'm really nice to everybody, then nobody can sort of fault me for anything. And outside of our house around other people, I didn't talk a whole lot about what was going on.

By the time I was in high school and I started to make some good friends, I started to get what I needed outside of my family. And I stopped looking to get any sort of emotional support from my family because things with my dad never really changed. They just stayed kind of calcified and frozen and empty.

And with my mom, it just remained really rocky and unpredictable. And she and her partner were very attached to each other and very in love with each other. And then my mom's partner's kids were very well taken care of. And then my brother and I were kind of like the odd men out.

And it was pretty painful to see sort of the disparity between how they were treasured and we got the short end of the stick. And I've talked to my mom's partner in years since, and she said to me, well, how much do you want to know? I said, well, I want to know everything. And she said, well, your mom never wanted to have children.

She said, I mean, I hate to say that to you, and I don't mean to say that to you to hurt you, but I think a lot of it had to do with how she was raised and having to sort of take care of her brother before he was sent away to the institution. And she had had children more or less to comply with the expectations of the times, but if she had really known herself at the time, then she probably wouldn't have had kids.

Some things that are painful to hear aren't surprises. And when her partner told me this, it made sense to me. And it made sense looking back that she had a very rocky kind of relationship to being a mother. So I did a couple different things that would sort of get me adopted by other people. One was I started writing at a very young age. I wrote my first poem when I was nine years old, and it was about loneliness.

But I was always good at it from a very early age. And I noticed that certain teachers would take a shine to me if they read my writing. I noticed that they could be really sweet to me and consistent in their affection towards me, which my mother was not. And so throughout my schooling, there were a handful of teachers who I would show my writing to, and they would take me under their wing a little bit and sort of mother me a little bit. You know, I had this nickname in high school called, Mike is every mother's favorite but his own. So...

I was really good at like charming other people's mothers, but I just couldn't seem to charm my own. Today's episode is brought to you by Quince. It's been a busy season of events and travel, and my wardrobe has taken a beating. A total overhaul isn't in my budget, but I'm replacing some of those worn out pieces with affordable, high quality essentials from Quince. By partnering with Top Factories, Quince cuts out the cost to the middleman and passes the savings on to us.

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From my first crush on that guy Steve forward, I knew that every time I had a crush on somebody, it ended up being a guy. So I knew that I was probably gay, and it was the absolute last thing I wanted for myself.

I don't know if it was partly because of my parents being gay and being very imperfect, flawed people and not wanting to turn out like them. And I never really had a sexuality that was separate from the incest that had happened to me. And when I look back at high school and growing up in my dad's house, they always had a copy of the local gay paper from Twin Cities.

So I grew up reading that paper and I grew up reading pages and pages of obituaries of gay men who died of AIDS. That was another factor, I think, keeping me kind of in the closet at the time was just this sort of abject fear of what would happen to me if I were to come out. So I would have done anything to have been straight, straight.

And it stayed that way until I went away to college. And I went to a tiny liberal arts school in Sarasota, Florida. And that's where I met guys who were out, who were my age and who seemed to be pretty happy. I could finally kind of envision a life for myself. And that led to me sort of finally coming out.

I kind of came out fully, sort of like jumped out. Like I was really super proud of it all of a sudden. But at the same time, I was very conscious that I just, I wanted it to be my thing. I did not want it to have anything to do with my parents. And in fact, I didn't tell them for most of that year.

I finished college. I didn't quite know what to do with myself at that time. And so I moved back to Minneapolis. I dated some and I worked some kind of low wage jobs and I wrote a lot of poetry. And I was actually starting to get some recognition for that and winning some awards for young poets. And it was kind of fun. But I was anxious to explore life as a gay man on the coasts, either New York or San Francisco.

In Minneapolis, I met a guy and kind of fell in love with him and I convinced him to move to San Francisco. And so we moved there in '97.

We started going out to the clubs and bars, and that kind of led to me trying some of the recreational drugs like ecstasy. And I really, really loved ecstasy. I think as a mildly depressed young man, it was a bit of a revelation to try that and to experience that. And then I tried crystal meth, and before I really could get a handle on it, I was addicted.

That led down some really dark places for me. And I was trying to hide it from my partner at the time. And I was not faithful to him. And I really wanted to quit. And I just couldn't seem to quit. And my life just got really dark. And I think I was probably clinically depressed on top of being a meth addict. So that was really getting messed up in my brain chemistry. One thing led to another. And I finally went to a 12-step meeting.

Eventually got sober for the first time. October of 2000, I got sober. What was happening at the same time that I was really struggling with crystal meth was that my mom was diagnosed with ALS, which is a degenerative disease that is always terminal.

For as hard of a relationship that we had, I'd say those last sort of five years, things mellowed out between us. And I think things were finally just starting to get good between my mother and I when she got sick. She had a very particular rare type. Often it leaves the mind intact, but in her case it did not. So she fairly quickly became somebody who wasn't really my mom anymore.

I moved home for six months. It was hard. She was nearing the end of her life, and I think that she felt like she was being punished. I remember once we were in church, she had lost her voice pretty quickly, so she wrote notes. And she wrote a note to me and passed it to me, and it said, "I'm afraid I won't get into heaven." We talked about it a little bit more, and I think it had to do with her feeling like she had been such a bad mother to us.

You know, it was pretty brutal to try to show up for her and while also trying to stop drinking and stop using drugs. You know, after six months of life back in Minneapolis with her, I realized that I really needed to get back to my life and to my partner. So I moved back to San Francisco. I wasn't able to salvage things with my partner at the time, but I did get sober. So a few months after I got sober, I was 29.

As one does in early sobriety, you kind of start to sort of clear up the wreckage of your past. And for me, part of the wreckage of my past was having not had a HIV test in many, many years. I knew that I had had unsafe sex on several occasions, and I was really afraid of the answer. But I decided that that was something I needed to do. When the doctor came in and, you know, he sat down and he put his hand on my shoulder and he told me that I tested positive,

It was sobering and I didn't quite know what to do about it because at the time my mother and my family were really wrapped up in taking care of her in her final months. The other thing that was really in my favor was that my numbers were really good and they stayed really good. I felt like it was more mature not to tell my family than to tell them at the time because I felt like my mom was the one who really needed the attention.

I had about a year sober when my mom died and she died in February of 2002. Around the time that all this was happening and when my mom got diagnosed, I had started keeping a blog online.

I was just kind of writing about my life and writing about what was going on in my life. And it was a way as a writer to kind of practice my skills at that too. You know, this was the early days of blogging. This is like 2000. There was a lot of things that we know about the internet that weren't so clear back then. And one of those is if you put it on the internet, it will be discovered. My father, one night after my mom died, was having a dream about her.

And he dreamed that they were going through papers together. And when he woke up in the morning, he's not sure why, but he did a Google search on her name and that led him to my blog. And so he read all of my blog and there were many months of entries there. And there were two things that were really hard for him. One was he discovered that I was HIV positive.

And I made mention, a very indirect, subtle mention of the night that he molested me. All I called it was that night. I don't quite remember exactly what I said. I said something like, not forgiving my father for that night. That's all I said. It was just that sort of like one sentence. I remember I came to work, opened my email, and there was an email from him. And the subject line said, devastated.

And I clicked it open and in there he told me that he had found my blog and he discovered that I was HIV positive. And then he mentioned the post about that night and he wanted to know what I meant by that night. And we had never talked about it. We had never talked about what had happened that night. And we had never really had much of a conversation about anything, really. We really grew up pretty estranged from each other. So I just decided I'm just going to be brave and I'm just going to tell him what I remember.

What followed was a back and forth that lasted a few days, I'd say. And, you know, his reaction, I think, was to really diminish what he had done and to really not be fully honest with me or maybe with himself about his motives. And I was kind of brave and I was like, look, you know, this is what happened. This is what you did.

And he finally admitted it. And then, you know, he tried to frame it like he told me, you know, we were so emotionally distant from each other and it was my way of trying to connect with you. And I wrote back was like, well, that may be true, dad, but you also had an orgasm. So this was not just you trying to connect with me emotionally like this was there was a sexual element to this for you. And he wrote back, well, I guess so.

It was an awkward, not completely satisfying exchange that we had. I think I was relieved that it finally came out and that it finally got talked about. But I wasn't completely satisfied with his response. And I don't think he really understood the long-term effects of what he had done to me. That was kind of the end of us talking about it.

I think at the time, you know, his inability to really own up to what he had done or the consequences of what he had done and me sort of, you know, not let him take the easy way out. I sort of felt like I was now the adult in the room in a way that I hadn't before.

And I was really surprised, I think, at his lack of self-awareness. And I think because of my experience with being in therapy and also with being in recovery and having to do a lot of work on myself and to really look at myself and my motives and my actions and be responsible for my behavior. And I think that I felt like I was a lot more self-aware than he was.

was. And if anything, his lack of self-awareness seemed almost clinical level or personality disorder level. There's something kind of missing in him that most of us have as human beings. There's a lot of situations that he sort of doesn't seem to understand. And he has a really hard time, I think, understanding other people's emotions and other people's decisions and experiences.

And so I think it was really hard for him to try to own up to the full consequences of what had happened to me. You know, I think because I was newly sober and I think because my mom had just died, I had a bit of an idealistic, romantic idea in my head that I could be the bigger person and kind of forgive him as best I could. In a way, I sort of did. And in a way, things went forward.

From that point, I started to visit him in person. That would continue over the course of the next few years. I think things were always hard and awkward, and I never really felt completely understood. But I felt like if I just kept showing up and kept trying it, and kept trying to be like a good son, then we would sort of establish something that we had never had before. So after I got sober, and after my mom died,

decided to try to take my writing more seriously. I was writing pretty much all memoir at the time, so I was using direct experiences from my life. And I got into a few different programs, and then I went to Columbia in New York City. Was there for two years for their coursework, worked my ass off. It was a really great experience. I really grew a lot as a writer. And then I came back to San Francisco, and I finished my thesis there,

When I came back, I started dating a guy, Frank, who I had known through recovery, but also he cut my hair. He was my barber. We started dating and things got pretty serious fairly quickly. During that time, we would sometimes go visit my father and his partner in Arizona.

It was hard to really bond with him, but I kept trying and we kept visiting. At the same time, I was finishing my thesis, which was a book. The book was a memoir of my life and it was mostly about my family, pretty much everything that I've been talking about. I had made a really big decision early on in the writing of the book, and that was I couldn't hurt my dad. I didn't think that I had it in me to tell the truth. So I completely left it out of the book.

So I was getting really close to the end of this book and I was getting, at the same time, suicidally depressed. I think that my whole mission as a writer was to try to tell the truth. And I really wanted to live up to that ideal and I was on the verge of finishing this book that was not the truth.

I felt like I had painted myself into this corner where if I didn't tell the truth, then this thing that I'd worked so hard on would be meaningless to me. But if I told the truth, then I could probably kill my father, or at least it felt like people finding out about him molesting me could kill him. I didn't know what to do, and I just got suicidally depressed, like so much so that I ended up going to the ER at Kaiser Hospital.

I finally started up with a psychiatrist and they started me on some new meds and then they diagnosed me for the first time with major depression and chronic PTSD and some generalized anxiety. After things kind of got evened out a little bit after a few weeks on the new meds, we went and visited my dad again. While we were there, my dad kind of pulled me into his study to have a one-on-one conversation and he told me that he had been writing too.

He told me that he was writing and he was posting stories to the internet and he told me that he was excited about it and he said that he was getting thousands and thousands of readers and hundreds of emails of support and kind of fan emails and I was a little blown away. But at the same time there was just something about it that I could have put my finger on it but there was something that was troubling me about what he was telling me and I couldn't, I didn't know why.

It was clear that he wanted me to read the stories, and he told me where they were posted. So we went back to San Francisco, Frank and I. I was working at a law firm, basically as a glorified file clerk at the time, writing on the side. And one night after everybody had gone home, I pulled up the site, and it was all erotic stories. He had been writing under a pseudonym, and he probably had maybe a dozen stories posted.

They were kind of in two different categories. One were erotic stories about grown men with other grown men. And then there was a whole other category of stories that were about intergenerational incest. They were stories that had basically every kind of family member you could think of having sex with pretty much every other family member you could think of. And then I got to this one story that

That took place in a bathroom. And it wasn't exactly the same as what had happened to me, but felt the same. And the boy in it was named Michael, my name. I turned off the computer and I was starting to tremble a little bit. So when I left work after reading the stories, I was in downtown San Francisco and it was dusk. I had to take the train home to my house right

There were people all around me, but I didn't feel like I was one of them. I felt like I was sort of drifting along as something besides human. Like I had stepped onto another planet inside my head. I felt like I wasn't really in my body and I felt a little bit like I had some say over my body, but I didn't feel real. And almost like I wasn't completely visible.

I remember I got onto the train, the BART train, and I just felt like I had to, okay, Mike, just hold on. Just keep hold of yourself. Keep hold of yourself. You can do it. You can get home. You can get home to Frank and to your dogs. You'll be okay. I was trembling and I was trying to hold it in. The trembling just sort of got more and more pronounced. And I was trembling so much that people were sort of like moving away from me.

I'm like the strange guy on the train who might go off at any second. And I just felt like I just wanted to explode. And I didn't know explode with what. I just felt like I had to go get alone, get away from everybody, get off the train. Got off at my stop, and I was finally kind of alone. And I just couldn't hold it in anymore, and I just started to fucking cry. But it was like howls. It was like an animal. It sounded like something feral.

The noises that were coming out of me were just so fucking old. It just felt ancient. It felt like an animal who's at the end of its life. It was just old, completely betrayed, old pain that I'd never, ever, ever dealt with. And I didn't know how to deal with it. And it was all sort of mixed up with this sort of growing fear and feeling unsafe.

I kept thinking about all those hundreds of emails of support he got and all those thousands of people who were reading it. And I just kept thinking, there's all these guys out there who read this story. And I just felt so fucking exposed and betrayed and confused. He wanted me to read them. He asked me to read them. He wanted me to read them.

All these people, all these anonymous men, these thousands of anonymous men were out there in the world and they had all jerked off to the story about him abusing me. They knew something. It was like almost like they had participated in it or wanted to participate in it.

And I got home and I just broke down and Frank wasn't home yet, but I called my sponsor and I just cried. I bawled and I told him best that I could as to what happened. And this was sort of the start of my realization that this was an absolute batshit story. And just realizing like, oh my God, this is going to be really... Like if I didn't feel alone before now, I was like, oh shit.

I think a lot of it is about the taboo of incest and especially like male-on-male incest and especially father-to-son incest. It's just something that nobody really wants to think about, let alone talk about. It just felt like it was something that I was instantly already corrupted by.

I really had no answer for the question of why did he want me to read these stories. And the only thing that made any sense to me was this was just another way of trying to connect with me, but in that completely inappropriate way. And him being such an alien, him missing that part that makes people people.

I just remember going back and revisiting parts in recent years, and there were little things that he would sometimes do that would creep me out, but that I wouldn't let myself dwell upon them. One of them is that I noticed that when he would hug me, he would sort of full body hug me. He would press the complete front part of his body up against me in a way that felt like a lover hug.

That sort of memory and then the fact that he's eroticizing a character named Michael, it was hard for me not to come to the conclusion that he was still eroticizing me, his son, in some way. And I just didn't know what the hell to do with that. The night after I came home from reading the stories at work, the next night Frank and I went to a 12-step meeting and I was sitting there and I was just getting filled with this anger.

I had never felt anger like this before. It was really scary anger. It was the kind of anger where I actually felt like I could start to understand people who become active shooters. I had that much sort of rage coming out of me and I felt like I couldn't stay in that room. And so I got up and I left the room.

I started writing this email to my dad on my phone. It was basically like, "What the fuck were you thinking? Why the fuck did you want me to read these stories? You're a fucking sick pervert. I don't ever want to fucking talk to you again. I don't want you in my life. I don't want you to be anywhere near me. I don't understand why you had me read these stories. What the fuck is wrong with you?" And I sent that off. And then the next day I got an email in response and he was really upset.

This is another sort of example of why I think there's just something about him I can't quite understand or place, in that he thought that I was upset about the quality of his writing.

He thought that I was upset that he wasn't a better writer than he was. He didn't seem to understand that what he had done was completely fucking batshit crazy and inappropriate. And he seemed to think that I was pissed off that he was just posting poorly written stories to the internet and had me read them. And this is kind of what I mean by, I feel like my father's a bit of an alien.

When I talk about him with my friends and stuff, I think they're pretty quick to see him as being sort of malicious in his intentions and in his motives and in his actions. And I have a harder time coming to that conclusion with him.

I keep coming back to this sort of like person who's almost like not quite sure how to be a human being and keeps hurting people around him because he has no self-awareness of his own motives or actions.

And then he kind of launched into me being a selfish, self-centered person who had never shown up for his family, who was writing this book that was, it was all about the mistakes that his family members had made. And that I was just out to make a name for myself by publishing this book about all of their mistakes. And it

It really hit close to home because I think as family members, we know each other's weak spots and he definitely knew mine and he knew that I was conflicted about writing a memoir and exposing that kind of stuff. And so he got right into my soft spot. And then I came home after reading that email and I just sort of like launched myself at the phone as soon as I got home and I called him and I just started screaming at him.

Like I've never raised my voice to my dad ever

It was like sort of a primal type scream. I mean, I called him every fucking name in the book. I berated him for what he had done. I brought up every painful memory I could think of. And I didn't let him speak at all. It was like a primal scream that went on for an hour. And sometimes he would try to chime in. And I had him on speakerphone and Frank was sitting there with me listening. And Frank just kept looking at me and being like, he doesn't get it. He doesn't get it.

He doesn't get it. And he was like, well, what do you want from me? My dad said. And I said, I don't really want anything from you anymore. I don't want to be in your life and I don't want you in my life anymore. I'm done. And I hung up the phone and my shirt was dripping with sweat. My phone, I remember the screen was just completely covered in flecks of spit. I was like a burnt out light bulb. I was just completely worn out and exhausted.

We had a couple more email exchanges back and forth, and they just didn't really go anywhere. And he was really upset that I was talking about it with other people and threatening to write about it. But he still wanted to be in my life, and he was really fighting me on this no more contact. I made one little concession to him. I said, I will let you back in my life on one condition, and that is you start therapy.

I knew he was completely lacking in self-awareness, and he seemed to be completely unaware of what he had done or the long-term consequences of what he had done. He needed somebody from the outside to check him, like we all do. That's what therapy is good for, is we need an outsider perspective to kind of help us see some of our blind spots. And I knew when I made that conditional offer, I knew that he couldn't do it.

And I was right. He didn't go to therapy. And then he sent me an email saying he and his partner were finally going to get married because it was legal, finally legal. And I was not invited to the wedding unless I could be nicer to him. Unfortunately, kind of what happened is that I was kind of shunned by that part of the family. That contributed to the feeling of isolation and loneliness after that.

It was sort of the beginning, really, of my complete bewilderment as to what lay at the heart of this man. And honestly, I kind of proceeded to lose my mind for a long time after that.

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And it became sort of like this fear of the world and being like, well, if my father was capable of that, what are strangers capable of? It's like if you're alone in the house late at night one night and you hear the sound of somebody walking through your house towards you. That feeling that you get when you hear that noise was how I felt all the time, all the time that I was awake.

I still would go to work and I would somehow kind of get through work, but at this law firm that was on multiple levels of a building,

They had a few empty offices that I knew about. At least once a day, I would have to go into an empty office and I would barricade the door and I would turn out the lights. I had headphones and I put on music and I would take off my shoes and my belt and I would lay down on the floor and I would listen to music and I would just rock myself back and forth for like an hour.

I bought myself a military knife that I could carry with me all the time. Whenever I was not at work, I was in the spare room of the house I had with my husband. It affected our sex life. I stopped sleeping with him. And he could only seem to exist in the spare bedroom. I watched nothing but true crime. Nothing. That's all I could watch was true crime.

I felt like I couldn't stomach anything that was sentimental or sweet. And all I could do was just console myself by watching shows where really awful people did really awful things to other people. It was those people that I was identifying with. They made me feel less alone in the world.

Between that and playing Candy Crush on my phone, I managed to sort of like turn off my head because left alone, my head would just sort of eat itself with terrifying thoughts and just abject fear.

At the time, the best sort of metaphor I could think of to explain how I felt was picture an astronaut who's out all alone in space and his tether to the spaceship has been cut and he's sort of spinning off slowly in space all by himself and his air tank is depleting. And I felt like that astronaut and I didn't know how to come back to Earth. I felt like I had one foot on Earth and then one foot on this other planet where my father lived.

And I came from him, so I was partly alien too. I finally started therapy consciously by seeking out a guy who was specifically trained in those who had been abused as kids sexually. That same therapist had a small support group of five of us gay guys who had been sexually abused as kids. And between the two, I gradually started getting a little bit better. But it was really slow going.

The other thing that helped at the time was there was a group called Male Survivor, and it's specifically for men who have been sexually abused as kids. And, you know, being in group with guys who had been through a lot more abuse as kids than I had ever been, it's like I just felt like a bit of an imposter in that respect. And then this whole thing with the stories just felt like, who could relate to that?

It was the sort of thing that left people speechless. And so I kind of felt like it was almost incumbent upon me to try to ease other people of that burden of not knowing what to say to me. The only way I knew how to do that was to just withdraw from the entire world and to try to not need anybody. It was like I was trying to protect people from this terrible sort of sickness inside me.

I had started this other job, like gardening, and so I was working with the earth and with growing things, and that felt really good. And I was working with a small team of people who I grew to really adore them as well. And so I felt like I was making progress.

I still was afraid of everybody else and I was afraid of social situations. And so like I had stopped going to meetings, which I knew was a very dangerous place for a recovering alcoholic to be, but I didn't feel safe there.

I wasn't going. Frank was sober, so he was going. And I think he was having a really hard time with what I was going through. And he was just worried about me. And it was really eating away at him. And I think he felt incredibly lonely in our marriage, just like I did.

I used to leave this part out and I used to leave all the blame at his doorstep, but I can't do that anymore. We had an open relationship, but we also had ground rules to that relationship. And about a year before all this took place, I had broken one of those rules and I'd slept with somebody and not told him about it. And then a year passed and while I was in the middle of this kind of breakdown, he found out about it. It was sort of the straw that broke the back for him. He broke up with me.

I quickly realized that I couldn't stay in the city and get my own place on what I was making anymore. So I had to leave San Francisco and I had to leave everything that was kind of keeping me tethered to the planet, the support group and therapy and sobriety. I was basically kind of bouncing around the country on my own. It was probably a good two years.

I had one really great thing going for me at the time, and that is right before Frank broke up with me, we had adopted this chihuahua named Agnes. And Agnes, from the very first night we brought her home, she sort of picked me as her person.

With everything that I was going through, it felt like nobody was picking me. And so her picking me as her guy was incredibly important to me and made me feel like I had to take good care of her. And so I was off spinning around the country alone, but I had Agnes with me and couldn't seem to hold down a job anymore unless she was with me. So I found jobs where I could bring her with me

The other thing that was happening to me was that anger was coming out of me and it was coming out of me sideways and it was coming out of me at people who didn't really deserve it. I had always been this incredibly quiet, unassuming, sweet man who was never angry.

Clearly, I had tons and tons and tons of anger inside me that had never been expressed. And now this whole thing had kind of like opened up that trap box within me and let that out. But it was coming out. I didn't know how to express it. So it was expressing itself towards people who didn't deserve it. And then I would lose that job or quit that job before they could fire me. And then the next job I took in Portland was that I would pick up lost luggage from airlines at the airport.

and I would deliver lost luggage throughout the night from 10 p.m. till about 4 a.m. And I would have Agnes riding shotgun with me the whole time because I needed to have her with me. I couldn't bear to be without her. I was quickly running out of money in Portland, and I moved. I ended up in Boston with some family. I stayed in their basement for a little while, and then I ended up where I currently am in western Massachusetts.

Things here at first were really, really dire. I've never, ever known loneliness like that, and I hope I never do again. I had nobody in my life, and I was just afraid of everybody. And I was afraid of life, and I was just barely just sort of scraping by with these jobs. And I was getting so scared that I was becoming one of those people to whom nothing good could happen again.

In Boston, I started drinking again. I hadn't been to meetings, and with everything that was going on in my head, I guess I just needed something to cope. I couldn't seem to stop drinking. I missed the gay community of San Francisco. I was just so terrified that nothing good was ever going to happen for me again. And thank God for the Chihuahua.

I knew intellectually that if I weren't around, that somebody would take care of her, but I just couldn't do that to her. I just wasn't capable of doing that to her. I had to be there for her. She kept me alive. So I guess finally what started to turn things around for me was I finally got a sponsor locally in a 12-step program.

Having that personal connection to recovery again, somebody who I could talk to, who cared about what was going on with me, and who wasn't scared off by the things that had happened to me or the things I needed to talk about. The one thing that could save me was the one thing that I couldn't accept, and that was human connection.

I needed it desperately, but I just couldn't sustain it. I couldn't accept it. I was too scared of people. And so once we started working together, I was able to stop drinking. And that was, so I've been sober for about a year and a half. I'm actually coming up on 500 days of sobriety. Getting sober has been really the foundation for all the good stuff that followed for me.

Just stopping drinking and all of the horrible hangovers and the guilt and the remorse and the way that it interferes with every other good thing you're doing. I'm also in therapy once a week. That's been really helpful. And I finally have a few friends in my corner. So when I would date kind of long distance, during that time, I was really desperate for somebody to rescue me.

You know, I was really fantasizing that one of these guys would just sort of whisk me back into a life that was working and that was good and that had hope in it. And they didn't. And I kept being left alone. And finally, it really became clear to me that I had to rescue myself.

While all of this was going on, I just had this sense in my head. It was a story that I told myself that like, I've been through a lot and there has got to be some sort of like universal ledger of suffering, right? That somebody is keeping score and clearly somebody's going to flip to my page, look at how much I've suffered and be like, okay, okay, Mike's had enough. We're going to let him off. We're going to change things for him.

There was a little boy in me that wanted to believe that's true, and it's not true. And I think when I finally kind of made my peace with the fact that I had to be my own rescuer. So I had to like get sober and I had to sort of start taking care of myself and I had to get on my feet financially.

For me, there was really no shortcuts back to happiness. It was a lot of hard work and it was a lot of investing and spending time with friends and looking for friends who would have my back when things were really bad and who I could have their back. And they brought joy back into my life. They brought laughter back into my life.

I'm not super perfect at it. I'm still learning. I'm still not very good. When I'm stressed, the first place I go to is isolation, and that's where I feel safest, I think. But I'm getting a little better.

Also, I've been working really hard both creatively on my creative writing and I put that book obviously aside for a long time. And I've started to kind of pick it up and I've been working on that. And the other great thing is I've had four essays accepted for publication in really great journals in the last year, which is, that's really big for me. I feel like my writing has kind of turned a bit of a corner in the last year.

I also look at mental health really differently these days. I look at it almost like a sort of flying contraption that has all these different moving parts to it. And once you get it kind of moving and all those little parts moving and it sort of lifts up into the air and it kind of coasts along relatively easily without a whole lot of effort on your part. But then when you stop doing one or two of those parts, it kind of crashes down to the earth. I'm on medications that helps.

I write, I go to the gym, I have my friends. All those things are kind of my flying contraption and I just try to keep them all going. But for me, sobriety is the main thing. I feel like it makes everything else for me possible and I'm really grateful for that. I think a lot about those guys on that site, the other astronauts. I wish that I could help them more directly

The hardest part was the loneliness and just that feeling that life turned its back on me.

But opening up and letting people in is important. And it's hard to do at first when you've been hurt and betrayed so much. And so I want this life. I want this life that has hope. And what really changed for me was when I finally kind of opened up my life and started letting people in. And it's made me that much more open.

firm in my beliefs that really if there's a meaning to life, it's about connecting with other people and taking care of each other. Today's episode featured Michael McAllister. You can find out more about him at his blog, dogpoet.com. That's D-O-G-P-O-E-T dot com. Or on Instagram at dogpoetmike.

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I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was produced by me, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Andrew Waits and Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the This Is Actually Happening community on the discussion group on Facebook, or at Actually Happening on Instagram.

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I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new Dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.