Moments That Change Your Life

My first book, Street Freak, is thirteen years old now. My assumption is that most people have read it by this point, but that’s probably not a very good assumption. The executive summary: I suffered from bipolar disorder while I was a trader at Lehman Brothers and even spent about three weeks in a psych ward.

Now, when most people think of a psych ward, they might think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or something like that. That is not too far from the truth. Plastic spoons, no shoelaces, Velcro shower curtains. I checked myself into the hospital because I thought that the federal agents wouldn’t be able to get me there. It was a delusion, but it was beyond a delusion—I was experiencing psychosis and literally seeing people and things that weren’t there. It was the scariest period of my life.

A psych ward is…boring. There is not much to do. There was a TV in the common area, but I was never much in the mood to watch the idiot box. There was a ping-pong table, too, but I never took advantage of that, either. I just wanted to be left alone. There was a bookshelf, and I read a book about a woman who was stranded in Antarctica, as well as some John Updike books that my wife had brought me. There were some activities—there was yoga in the morning, but the yoga was sad, because inevitably someone would start crying in the middle of yoga. There were meetings for people with a dual diagnosis, but those meetings were sad, because people would cry in those, too. When people asked me what I was in for, I told them that I was in to get away from the federal agents. I was that far gone.

One of the activities I did was painting—they gave us these plant pots to paint, and let me tell you, I am a terrible painter, and I painted the terrible-est plant pot in the group. I thought it was good. I saved it, and I have it on a shelf on the third floor of my house, the one artifact from that period of my life. It gives me gratitude.

One night, I was hanging out in my room, and one of the nurses came by and asked if I wanted to go to a writing seminar.

“No thanks.”

“You should really go.”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Please, let’s go to the writing seminar.”

I relented.

So I go in this room with a rectangular table and about eight other patients. There was a complicated woman sitting at the other end. She looked as if she was wearing about five scarves. She looked like a writer. What I didn’t realize was that I was sitting in the presence of a literary giant. The woman was Siri Hustvedt, who has written a whole bunch of fiction and non-fiction books and even was published in the Best American Short Stories series at least once. She was in her fancy clothes and I was in my socks.

So she had us do a writing exercise called I Remember, to write about a period of your life, perhaps from your childhood, and the feelings associated with it, including as many details as possible. We had about twenty minutes. I had a pen and paper. So I wrote about my childhood on Governors Island, which used to be a Coast Guard base. I wrote about my best friend, I wrote about playing tee-ball, I wrote about my abusive father—oddly, it was one of the best things I had ever written. Then Siri asked us to read what we wrote.

Afterwards, she motioned for me to come out into the hall. From what I remember, she was taller than me.

She looked me directly in the eyes, and said:

“Have you ever thought about being a writer?”

This is the moment that changed my life.

So we chatted for a bit, and she told me her background, and I suddenly realized I was talking to a real writer, and here was this real writer telling me that I could be a writer.

There were no more invisible people after that.

*   *   *   *

So I think about that moment a lot.

In my last essay, we talked about contempt prior to investigation. I had contempt prior to investigation. Do you want to go to a writing seminar? No. I want to sit in this room and feel sorry for myself. Imagine if I hadn’t gone. What would my life look like today? Well, I’d probably still be trading, spit out the bottom of the bulge-bracket world by now, trading odd-lots of ETFs for some bucket shop with a bunch of other Wall Street castoffs. I’d be divorced, and an alcoholic. And perhaps I wouldn’t have been med-compliant, and maybe I would have killed myself by now. That is what was in my future. That is what was in my future if I said “No.” So today, I say yes to things.

I can’t be clearer about this. Siri Hustvedt saved my life. Now, I am not the writer that Siri is—my froggish leavings just pale in comparison to what she does. She’s smarter than me, and a better writer by a factor of eleven. But I’m good at what I do. I don’t have an expansive vocabulary of ten-dollar words, but I have insane flow, and a strong first-person nonfiction voice. And my career as a writer has been a bit uneven—two traditionally published books that were big hits, and three self-published books that did pretty well, too. But I’m no Morgan Housel, no million-book bestseller. I hope I will have one, but that is not why I write—I write to live. If I don’t write, I will go insane. I write for my own mental health. Even if I had an audience of my wife and my cats, I would still write—for myself. Yes, I take my medication, and yes, I get plenty of sleep, and yes, I get some exercise, but writing is a big part of staying mentally healthy. And it all started in that room in the psych ward in 2006.

Sometimes I think about those moments, because I have had a few of them, like the time I was on the options floor in San Francisco and almost got hit with a flying water bottle, which resulted in a job offer, and the beginning of my trading career. Or in 1989, when I laid down on a couch and put my head in a strange girl’s lap and asked for a kiss. We are still together, 35 years later. Chance encounters. Pure randomness. And you never know in the moment that you are having one of those moments—you can only see it in retrospect.

Artists and athletes want to be discovered—they want to get that big break. A high school pitcher gets a visit from an agent. A DJ playing at a small club gets spotted by a promoter and is invited to play at a festival. You’re writing a book, toiling in anonymity, you put it on Amazon for $0.99 and it sells a million copies. I am interested in those lightning strikes, those moments of serendipity that change the course of your life—for the better.

I haven’t talked to Siri in a while. We corresponded briefly in 2011—I sent her a copy of Street Freak for a blurb, and she was really, really happy to hear from me. She also blurbed All the Evil of This World, but that was a tough book. I’d like to meet with her again someday. It’s been 18 years, after all, so I can tell her in person that she saved my life. She knows it, but I want to tell her in person. It also speaks to the power of affirmation—you never want to piss all over someone’s dream. If you tell someone that they can do something, they will probably do it.

I’ve said this before—I am the luckiest person in the world. I cry when I think about it.