Paul exiled me back to The Gym. I was still managing only about three hours of sleep a night and was probably becoming increasingly erratic, though at the time I felt I was slowly getting stronger and clearer in my thinking. I stopped seeing Dr. Gompf and refused any other kind of medical or psychiatric intervention, mostly at the urging of Howard and the group, who helped me see that my medicalization was for the benefit of those around me, to help contain and mute me, rather than my own. They helped me see that dulling or numbing my perceptive capacity was a kind of violence; a self-inflicted wound. Rather, I started to ask—how could I transform my relationship to my own sensitivity of perception? How could I transform my relationship with the sounds I was hearing? To The Hum? If this was a natural phenomenon, how could I learn to live with nature, as opposed to in opposition to it?

It’s important for me to assert my agency in all of this. I was not brainwashed. I was not coerced. Of course, the more that I insist that I was not brainwashed, the more it is used as evidence against me now that I was. But I do not see myself as a victim or a dupe, and I never once felt like one at the time. I chose to engage and believe and participate in these meetings and the conversations that occurred therein. There was a genuine climate of care, compassion, and intellectual inquiry at work in Howard and Jo’s home. I felt trusted and heard. I think all of that has been lost in the reporting of the events that followed. This, in no way, is meant to dismiss the serious allegations that have since emerged about Howard, and which are before the courts at the time of my writing this. But speaking from my lived experience alone, the house on Sequoia Crescent felt like a refuge for a group of well-meaning, hard-working, and exhausted people who were just doing their best to get to the bottom of their own suffering.

Quite apart from the sense of community, one of the key things the meetings gave me was a pride of purpose. They restored an element of dignity to my life. I was done with being fucked up. I was done with being wrong. I was done with being a patient. I actually started keeping a journal during this period, which I will spare you the details of—it’s all rather solipsistic and quotidian—but what I was struck by, when re-reading it for the purposes of this book, was how lucid my writing was at the time. It was not the chaotic rambling I expected it to be. It was methodical, considered, and measured. I didn’t hurl myself into the embrace of the group in some unthinking, unguarded way; I retained all my usual cynicism and skepticism, and really wrestled with how vulnerable to make myself, how much to expose, how much to let in. It was incremental. Contrary to how Paul may have seen or thought of me I was, recognizably, myself through it all. As I read the diary, I took comfort in that.