“Oh,” I said.
“You’re at a very vulnerable point in your life. You’ve left home for the first time, you’re feeling challenged and overwhelmed by your schoolwork. And this computer fellow, he’s where—in California?”
“Yeah. He’s visiting graduate schools.”
“He has a girlfriend, he’s graduating, he’s going to California. This is not a fellow who’s going to be there for you. Not in the short run, and not in the long run. From what you’ve described, it sounds as if he barely exists at all. He’s just a voice from behind a computer. Who knows who or what is behind there—behind the computer? He obviously enjoys hiding. And you, too, are hiding behind the computer. This is perfectly understandable. Human beings, all of us, hate to take risks. We all want to hide. And thanks to this e-mail”—he said it like it was a word I had made up—“thanks to this e-mail, you can have a completely idealized relationship. You risk nothing. Behind your computer screen, you’re completely safe. Now, here’s something I’d like you to think about. You don’t actually know a thing about this fellow, do you? It’s possible he doesn’t even exist.”
“Excuse me?”
“This person you’ve been telling me about. It’s possible he doesn’t exist at all.”
I could feel the fabric of reality crumbling around me. I looked closely at the pink face of the child and adolescent psychologist. He didn’t seem to be joking, or speaking metaphorically. “We were in the same class, for a semester,” I said slowly. “I saw him almost every day. We spoke to each other. I—my memory is pretty clear on this.” As I spoke I became more confident. “I really do think he exists. I mean, I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I’m not a hundred percent sure I’m sitting here talking to you, either, you know?”
“But you and I are sitting face-to-face. We’re real people. He isn’t operating on the level of a real person. He isn’t a real person to you. If he was a real person, you would have all kinds of opportunities to see the flaws in the situation—or to see that, as far as you’re concerned, he isn’t really there. Instead, because he exists as a series of messages, he’s always there, every time you turn on the computer. I bet you read those messages over and over, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Of course you do. And he’s the ideal companion, because you get to fill in the blanks. Now I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to just think about it for a moment.” He paused. “What if this computer fellow had . . . bad breath?”
“Excuse me?”
“Just think about it for a moment.”
I thought about it. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I understand the question.”
“What if you got to know this fellow, in person, and he turned out to have bad breath?”
I thought some more. “Well, I guess if it turned out that way, then I would have to take some kind of action at that point,” I said. “But until then, there doesn’t seem to be much point in worrying about it.”
“Exactly! Because he’s not a real person, you don’t have to worry about it. Do you see what I’m saying? He looks like an ideal person, but the real person behind that mask could have all kinds of problems.”
“Oh—like bad breath.”
“Exactly.”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t want to sound like, ‘I’m so cerebral I wouldn’t care what kind of breath he had,’ but I just feel like we could work around it somehow. It’s so rare in the world to meet somebody you connect to. Most people are so awful. In the big picture, bad breath just seems relatively manageable. Like it seems like there are a lot of products designed for that. As opposed to making a person seem interesting and meaningful.”
The psychologist tapped his index fingers together. “I’m interested in your comment that most people are ‘so awful.’ What makes most people awful?”
I told him my theory. Most people, the minute they met you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people—people they could get rid of. That was how Hannah was—she wanted to make an alliance with me against Angela. “Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I’m not going to get knocked off the boat, they are. They’re always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people.”
“Do you see yourself as one of the dispensable people?”
“The point is I don’t want to get involved in that question, and it’s all most people want to talk about. The number of people who want to understand what you’re like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat—it’s really limited.”
“Selin, what I’m hearing is a very simple, very natural thing: fear of competition and fear of rejection by your peers. Obviously you were extremely successful in high school. Then you come to Harvard, and here’s sixteen hundred kids your age who are every bit as successful as you—some of them maybe even more so. In every conversation with your peers, you find a subtext of competition. You worry that now you won’t make the grade, you’ll be rejected.
“I’m afraid our time is up, but I think this was a productive meeting. I’m hearing a lot of contradictory emotions from you. It seems to me that your sense of other people’s awfulness might be compensating for your own sense of inferiority and fear of rejection. You rationalize the rejection of your peers by telling yourself it comes from other people’s deficiencies rather than your own. They can’t understand your philosophy or your ideas.
“All of this leaves you terribly lonely and isolated, which I think explains your susceptibility to this computer fellow. He seems to be offering you just what you want: a noninterpersonal interpersonal relationship. With him, you don’t have to worry about whose side of the room the extension cord is on. But that’s because it isn’t a real intimate relationship. Real life is about discussing these things and coming to terms with them. This explains your anxiety, your sense that you’re going to make some kind of mistake.
“What I want to help you to understand in the next few weeks is that real intimacy is a place where there are no mistakes, at least not in the sense you feel. You don’t just blow everything with one wrong move. A friendship is a space where you’re supported and free to make mistakes. I think when you reach this understanding a lot of things are going to feel better for you.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to say in response to this, so I just nodded and put on my jacket. He said the whole mental health department was moving to a new building soon. He drew a map of the old and new buildings on the back of his card and handed it to me. I put it in my pocket, but I knew I wasn’t going to use it.