Reprocessing the Past Scale by Scale
From Gettysburg to EMDR and a new world of being (and healing)
I’m in the beginning stages of EMDR therapy to reprocess the past.
My past, mind you, but also this country’s past while I’m at it, now that everyone else is busy reprocessing it too, from Tulsi Gabbard, who claimed Obama was involved in Russiagate, to Lin-Manuel Miranda, who compared Alexander Hamilton to "an immigrant.” And those are just the two examples I left as bullet points in the draft of this post!
In the Age of Context Collapse, information is produced like it’s going out of style but most of it’s totally worthless—a phenomenon I referred to recently as peak textual history.
But I digress.
When my therapist, Jason, told me that EMDR is for “reprocessing the past,” a final lightbulb went off in my head. I didn’t think “Eureka!”—I don’t have any more “eurekas” to give—but my alchemical California journey was complete.
I had no idea when I was appointed a postdoc in faculty diversity at Gettysburg College late in the summer of 2019 that I’d close the circle six years later in the mental-health division of the Los Angeles LGBT Center in Hollywood. But I adopted the double number 33 during the pandemic out of intuition and for a specific reason as well: Michael Jordan would never have been Michael Jordan without Scottie Pippen.
Many days I dip into a biography of Foucault I keep handy. It’s filled with inspiration and direction. “Madness, death, sexuality, crime—these are the subjects that attract most of my attention,” he said in an interview in 1978 (not coincidentally the year I was born).
Quelle surprise! As it turns out—again, no coincidence—those happen to be the very same subjects that also attract most of my attention.
Take my tenure at Gettysburg College, which, alongside my relationship with Arthur and my professional and political guidance from Christina, served as my threshold into a new world of being. (My longtime hairdresser and lifestyle mentor, B. Paul, was instrumental too.)
That second August, when I returned to campus for the first time since everything shut down the previous March, I was heckled by a maskless white boy in a passing car as I waited to cross Washington Street on my way to the English department.
I don’t recall his precise words, but after a lifetime of dealing with similar abuse—whether in middle-school shop class in suburban Virginia or walking to a bar in Midtown Manhattan after a day of grad school—I knew the kid was singling me out because I was gay. He could’ve called me “faggot”; he could’ve called me a girl; he could’ve been more descriptive than either of the two previous options.
But what I recall specifically is thinking things had changed. Through some combination of the pandemic’s upheaval; the intense racial tensions of the moment—indeed, Trump was threatening to deliver his nomination speech at the battlefield that month—and my own raised profile on campus after a year in the college’s employ, it seemed I was targeted for precisely the attributes the students I actually worked with said they liked: my status and tenure as a New Yorker, my sense of fashion and art, and my critical attention to matters of difference, inequality, and harm reduction. Altogether, those signs must have added up to “gay” in the young man’s head—a part of my aspect that many students actually liked (especially the LGBTQ ones).
Not that I performed such an intellectual calculation in the moment. To the contrary: I shouted something prideful in response and kept it moving, a pro tip I learned from Christina and Arthur as well as from one of my Graduate Center confidants, Dadland, who was always catching flak for being unapologetically himself.
It was already late in the day; I had driven from Philly more than two hours; and classes began in the morning. I wasn’t going to let a stupid co-ed delay me from all the tasks I still had to complete.
But as I marveled at how much things had changed on campus in just a few months, I was also struck by how—exactly two decades after I graduated from another homophobic Southern academic institution (Gettysburg is just 9.7 miles inside the Union from the Mason-Dixon Line)—so little had changed.
Sure enough, as I learned from one of my new students, no one was openly gay on campus—at least none of the guys. That didn’t stop them from going on Grindr, where they were all anonymous, but their inability to be authentically themselves underscored how unsafe the campus was for anyone who bucked the norms—sexual, racial, or gender-wise.
As someone who wore cowboy boots for a straight year after getting them for the Houston rodeo on his first and only visit, I accepted the challenge with aplomb.
I recall specifically thinking things had changed. Through some combination of the pandemic’s upheaval; the intense racial tensions of the moment—indeed, Trump was threatening to deliver his nomination speech at the battlefield that month—and my own raised profile on campus after a year in the college’s employ, it seemed I was targeted for precisely the attributes the students I actually worked with said they liked: my status and tenure as a New Yorker, my sense of fashion and art, and my critical attention to matters of difference, inequality, and harm reduction.
Brain Break
I discovered Amen Dunes (real name: Damon McMahon) through Spotify or Pitchfork when the album featuring this track, Freedom, was released in 2018. (His next and final two albums, Death Jokes and Death Jokes II, are highly compelling discoveries I just made.)
And I saw him live on a double bill at Brooklyn Steel with U.S. Girls in June of that year, a show I attended with my then-partner Scott after he asked to join me. I’d been going to concerts by myself so that I could see acts I wanted to without having to coordinate with anyone else, but I also enjoyed the freedom of doing my own thing and feeling like I was living a different kind of life than I was. The restlessness and ennui in McMahon’s vocal and physical performance resonated with my own. My being was starting to change.
Booking It
It’s rare I read a whole book these days rather than bits and pieces for research or context but I did just that with Amy Odell’s 2022 biography of Anna Wintour, ahead of her new biography (out now) about Gwyneth Paltrow.
As it happens, both public figures were touchstones for my Hollywood journey in different ways—Anna for the behind-the-scenes influence and Gwyneth for the on-camera impact most obviously—but they converge on one simple point, or many: It’s all in the details. And that’s why I liked Amy’s book: The factoids are fast and furious and together create a holistic picture that still leaves much to be pondered.
For instance, I’d no idea that Anna’s parents met one another through Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.—and they were married on 13 February 1940, or sixty years to the day before I successfully defended my dissertation in New York with my Arthur posing as that Arthur. That Arthur was a different Kennedy’s adviser, and I picked the 13th solely because it was the best time for my dissertation committee and me to meet. (Also because it was a Thursday and Arthur and I could go out of town afterward and celebrate both my defense and our love.)
Meanwhile, the EMDR therapy is helping me enormously with the clarity and confidence I need for the drafting of my book manuscript, the proposal for which I plan to sell by the end of this year. As such, I’m going to keep this newsletter on the back burner for now so that most of my writing can go to the work-in-progress.
Ciao for now,
Sean M. P.
