At that appointment, I half-lied about the voices. I heard voices, but they were all versions of my own voice or echoes of voices from my past. Those voices were not, I decided, the ones she was asking about. And I lied when I did not tell her about wanting to burn myself and the cook. I lied when I did not tell her about the door that had opened: The only solution is a permanent solution. My psychiatrist did not ask if there was a seismometer in my midbrain that warned of fissures that would widen into deep chasms and, eventually, into an all-consuming abyss. If she had asked about that, I might have answered honestly. It’s difficult to say.

When our stories require us to pass judgment, to inflict shame on ourselves and others, to set ourselves apart, we cause harm. Bigot, prig, the voice in my head calls me. And, I must answer honestly. I must answer yes. I want to make it not so. I have work to do on myself. I need a new story.

Is anyone listening, out there? Are people simply rushing by? And how much of a difference can it make really, just one story, even all these stories taken together and funneled into the ear of the busy world—a world moving so quickly that voices and sounds Doppler into a rising whine, so distracted that even when your attention snags on the burr of something unusual, you are dragged away before you can see it, uprooting it like a bee’s spent stinger. It is hard for anything to be heard and even if anyone hears it, how much of a difference could it really make, what change could it possibly bring, just these words, just this thing that happened once to one person that the listener does not and will never know. It is just a story. It is only words.

This was the story I wanted to tell without sentiment or cynicism; the one I thought justified speaking hard truths. The flash of insight I’d had—that I could not leave my mother because I’d become my mother—was my wisdom: a tale of psychological embroilment I wanted badly to trace out.

To tell that tale, I soon discovered, I had to find the right tone of voice; the one I habitually lived with wouldn’t do at all: it whined, it grated, it accused; above all, it accused. Then there was the matter of syntax: my own ordinary, everyday sentence—fragmented, interjecting, overriding—also wouldn’t do; it had to be altered, modified, brought under control. And then I could see, this as soon as I began writing, that I needed to pull back—way back—from these people and these events to find the place where the story could draw a deep breath and take its own measure.

A lot of the suffering we will witness in life will be greater than ours. There’s the question of what we can do to help and the different question of what to do when we can’t help. Often one thinks of another’s suffering: my dear friend you have so much life due you, how can this be happening? (I’m at Mass General waiting to see Emily.) For the sake of loyalty we keep in our minds the imagination of their private anguish. We cycle through all the emotions with them but often we also think—or behave as if we think—the abyss is remote for us.