George’s College Essay

December 2005

Thin blue and yellow wires snake from globs of Vaseline in my hair to a biofeedback computer.  It’s two months before my thirteenth birthday, and I’ve been sitting in a midsized hospital office for two hours, staring at red glowing bars on the monitor, trying to turn them green.  Nothing has changed.

Usually I love a challenge – to make myself do things.  I have learned to push myself until I succeed.  By the time I was eleven, I had led my family up all 48 of New Hampshire’s mountains over 4,000 feet.  My family knew they could join me or get out of my way.  But this isn’t a mountain. 

The psychologist, Dr. Kravitz, walks into the office and stands behind me.  “This problem can not be solved through force or effort, George.”

I listen with half my mind; the other half is dealing with a two-month-long headache – a constant throbbing and stabbing.  The doctor has told me that I have chronic headache syndrome, a condition that tends to afflict “intelligent young people with type A personalities.”  I guess I should feel honored to have a syndrome that only the highly qualified possess.  In fact the competitive part of me – the dominant part – would like to think that my pain is worse than anyone else’s.   The pain has been intense enough to keep me from school for two months, lying on a couch all day at home, and bad enough that half a dozen previous doctors had prescribed me a whole pharmacy of drugs. 

Dr. Kravitz is comparing my head to a soda bottle in a deep ocean.  “To cure the headache, “ he tells me, “you have to equalize the pressure in your head with the pressures of society.”

 “How do you do that?”

 “You have to learn to accept your limitations.  Be able to let go of your struggles.  You have to try not to try.”

Try not to try?  Who is this guy?  All my life I have been trying.  That’s who I am.  Trying has already earned me 40 Boy Scout merit badges, among other things. 
            He leaves, and I return to the struggle.  My brow furrows, my eyebrows twist, and my hands clench the chair arms.  Red, the color of blood, the color of anger and frustration looms on the screen.  Green !  Turn green!

Dr Kravitz told me that my headache probably started with a virus, but that other, external factors contributed a lot to it.  My dad moved the family from our home in New Hampshire to Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I had spent all my childhood up till then on our 11 acres that rested on the base of a mountain.  The Appalachian Trail went through our back yard, past the reservoir where we fished for carp.  My best friend lived just up the dirt road from me.  We moved to the high desert, where my parents home schooled my sister and me.  A year and a half later, we moved once again, this time to noisy, crowded Fairfield County, Connecticut.  I had to attend a middle school of 600 students.  On one side, an Amtrak commuter train rattled by every half an hour, and on the other side, trucks roared past on I-95.  

I look up from the computer screen, and through my tears I see a picture on the wall.  It’s painted with big, broad, brush strokes of soft green fields.  An oak tree bends leafy branches over a shepherd’s old stone hut.  A breeze strokes the stalks of grass. 

Something draws me back to the computer.  One bar has turned green. 

How could it do that?  I didn’t do anything.  Nothing comes this easily. I spent two years in speech therapy just so people could understand me; I couldn’t tie my shoes until I was eight.  How can that bar be green?  The painting must be the key.  I try to imagine putting myself under the tree.  I see an awkward boy with thick, blond, cow-licked hair, and hunched shoulders.

I look back at the screen.  All the bars are red.  Why me?  What did I do to deserve this?

I think of Job, my dad’s favorite character from the Bible.  God and all the angels, including Satan, meet in Heaven.  God brags about Job, saying his servant was unreservedly faithful.  That’s because you’re kind to him, Satan says.  Try being mean to him and he’ll curse your name.  So God challenges Job’s faith by giving Job boils all over his body, killing his family, and taking all his worldly goods.  All first Job complains loudly, but in the end he accepts his fate “I know that you can do all things.”  God immediately puts everything back to rights, restoring possessions, family, and clear skin. 

What if I acted like Job?  Would my life come back?  Maybe this is what trying not to try is like.  Instead of putting myself in the field, what if I simply let the field be the field?

One bar goes green.

OK, one bar is green.  I’m starting to get what the doctor is saying, but I don’t really like it.  Will this be one of life’s limitations, spending the rest of my life trying not to try?  Will I have to change who I am?  The world has expanded for me and I am no longer the center.  Sure: I can’t change everything.  And there is the crux of the whole thing: I’ll always be hard headed and stubborn.  Still, as I look at the painting it comforts me.  It’s perfect and peaceful without me.  It’s beautiful all on its own.  I don’t have to do anything.  Accepting things that are beyond me, being comforted by something that exists regardless of what I do: is this what faith is?

All the bars turn green. 

© George Heinrichs. All rights reserved. To request permission to publish, contact Jay Heinrichs at jayheinrichs.com.