Sean Logan was a Navy SEAL. He’d grown up in nearby New London, the same town as Charlotte Kramer. His father had been in the navy, and his grandfather had died a decorated marine. He had six siblings, three older and three younger, making him the lost middle child. He was a beautiful man to look at. I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, straight or homosexual, young or old. You could not look at Sean Logan and not be struck by his physical beauty. It was not one thing—his light blue eyes, his thick dark hair, the masculine bone structure of his cheeks and brow. These things together created a perfect canvas. But on that canvas was always painted some kind of emotion. Sean was not able to hide them. His joy, which I did not see until years later, was boundless. His wry sense of humor, infectious. He could make me laugh like no other patient I have ever treated, even in spite of my efforts to remain stoic. The laughter would erupt from my mouth like lava from a volcano. His love was deep and pure. And his pain was intoxicating.
Sean did not go to college, although he had earned a scholarship to Brown University. He was that driven, that smart. But he could not sit still within himself. We are all (most of us) at times overwhelmed by our feelings. Think about the first time you “fell in love.” Or the first moment you saw your newborn baby. Perhaps you experienced profound fear in some kind of near accident, or extreme rage when someone hurt you or your family intentionally. You might go days without eating much, without sleeping through the night, without having control of your thoughts as they fixated on the source of the disruption to normal life. You might think you feel “happy” if the source of this disruption is positive—“falling in love,” for example. But it is not “happiness.” The disruption is created by the fear of not knowing how to assimilate this new situation into normal life, not knowing if it will stay or go. Your brain is actually in a state of adjustment, trying to figure out what it will need to do to accommodate the change in this new emotional environment. Actual “happiness” is when the relationship settles down and becomes stable. When you sleep through the night next to your new love because you know she is here to stay.
Imagine never getting to that settled place after a disruption, and instead feeling that new, powerful emotion all the time. It is not sustainable, and truly quite painful to endure.
We in my profession usually diagnose this affliction as anxiety in one form or another. Sometimes it lends itself to OCD. Other times we just call it generalized anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorders are on a continuum like all mental illness. We must have names for things so we can communicate about what we see, but it is not the same as diagnosing a physical ailment like the flu. There are no little bugs we can see through a microscope. All we have are our observations and, hopefully, intelligent deductions.
I have treated many patients like Sean, though he was an exceptional case. It can be a difficult choice to prescribe these patients with the appropriate medication. I can make them come back down to earth, but there they will remain. While the rest of us flow through normal patterns of these elevated emotions and then the return to normalcy, these patients have to choose. I suppose it’s akin to addiction and the choice to be in recovery. Would you rather live a life of total sobriety or be in a constant state of inebriation? I would certainly choose sobriety.
I did not know Sean before he joined the navy. He was just seventeen years old and, as he describes himself, jumping out of his own skin. He cycled through girlfriends, drank and got high every day, even through school. His mother was overwhelmed. Two of the older siblings had returned home to live, one after graduating from college and the other after dropping out. The younger three were always in need of something, a meal or a ride or a clean shirt. His oldest sister got pregnant at twenty-three, unmarried. She sometimes dropped the baby off with her mother so she could go to her job as an office assistant. What I am trying to convey is that Sean did not know how to help himself, and there was no one else up to the task. After his senior year, he enlisted.
Military life was not a bad option for Sean. The physical demands of his training and the endless opportunities to strain his body afforded him a different kind of medication for his anxiety. Endorphins and adrenaline produced from anaerobic exercise are chemicals that cause the body to feel good. That’s the simplest way to explain it. For someone with anxiety, extreme physical exertion can provide significant relief. Sean excelled, making it through the process in just over eighteen months. He did one tour in Iraq at age eighteen and returned home just after his nineteenth birthday. His parents were proud, his siblings conflicted by pride and envy. But without his regimen, and the constant natural high from being in danger, he was again reeling with his anxiety.
Have you ever done coke, Doc? He asked me this already knowing the answer. He was playful that way. Well, you get real jumpy.
I can still see him sitting on the couch in my office, legs straddled, hands in two fists. He began to shake.
It’s like that. Like you have to keep moving some part of your body to get rid of your nerves. You can’t sleep. You’re not hungry. Could talk for hours about stupid shit.
“That doesn’t sound enjoyable,” I said.
Sean laughed. I know, Doc. Cup of tea and a good book. We can’t all be saints.
“When did you use cocaine?” I asked.
Aw, not since tenth grade. I’m just saying that’s what I felt like all the time. I’d forgotten what it was like before, you know, after being in the desert for so long. I slept like a baby there. Never thought about what was churning in my gut.