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I started writing. I built a chicken coop. I had a few minor fights with Virge. Things happened, but nothing that called me out. There were some visitors and guests, but they were all reasonable, relatives or close friends mostly. No out-of-the-blue wanderers. No superfreaks. No cosmic messengers or extraordinary chess players.

I left saying I’d be back in a couple of months. I knew it wasn’t true and I suspect everyone else knew it too. I wasn’t fleeing painful memories or friends and a way of life that I feared might drive me nuts again. I felt and still feel that without the farm and those friends I would have cracked sooner and healed more slowly than otherwise. I was leaving because I was well.

I felt strong in a way I had never felt before. I was curious about this new strength and there wasn’t enough variety at the farm to give it a thorough testing out.

It seemed that virtue was no longer compulsory. I had spent a lot of my life trying to figure out what “good” was and trying to do it. It had seemed that my state of mind, mental health, was directly tied to how much “good” was in my life, which would have been fine if the process hadn’t been such a progressively demanding, implacable one.

In the beginning I couldn’t take physical violence. In the end I couldn’t cut firewood. I didn’t want to move or breathe for fear of harming microbes. My life became more and more an instant-karma replay. There was no way to be good enough. My friends had gradually become as monstrous as the SS, and the farm as hectic and frightening as New York City. I had had a certain amount of hope in this process. I assumed it was happening to everyone and that, sooner or later, the same feelings that made me incapable of handling rush-hour traffic would render the Air Force incapable of dropping bombs.

I was so convinced of the connection between my mental health and “goodness” that something’s upsetting me was enough to make it evil. The world’s sinfulness and horror matched step with my ever deteriorating shit tolerance.

Looking back at those changes in my life I can now see much more than the “good” I saw at the time. Along with all my new sensitivities and deep concerns came a peculiar immunity to love that my family, friends, and lovers had for me. I thought about, talked about, and needed love very much, but whenever I got it, it touched me less and less. Which led me to assume that it wasn’t really love. If I had ever come to see that Virginia really loved me, which I see very clearly now, I doubtless would have found some excuse to put several thousand miles between us.

Because they made me feel better, trusting nature, letting it be, etc., were all part of being good.

But nature had apparently intended me to spend the rest of my life chained to a wall, or, barring intervention, to rave my brains out and starve to death. Philosophical niceties were swept aside. Biochemistry and these funny men calling themselves orthomolecular psychiatrists were my new buddies. The more the vitamins took hold, the less my mental health depended on being good and the more curious I became about what life out there would be like this way.

I’m pretty sure I could live in a plastic condominium with a wife I didn’t love and lots of bratty kids, drive six hours a day in rush-hour traffic to work at a boring meaningless job, and mutilate cuddly little puppies in my spare time without its putting much of a dent in my mental health. I wouldn’t like it but it wouldn’t drive me nuts.

Before, nearly everything I did was to nurture my mental health. Becoming a religion major, politics, hippiedom, the farm, all made me feel a little less shaky. The ironic thing is that my big theme as a religion major had been the crassness and other drawbacks of morality under threat of damnation. Insightfulness, honesty, etc., under threat of mental illness is much the same game. As much as I value the experiences and lessons of both the mild and decidedly unmild parts