For most of my life I figured I'd just go crazy by the time I turned 42. Sure, my dad was a little younger when he actually lost his shit, but I assumed that I'd make it to 42 by the time I did. I suppose it was because I didn't know my father past that age, and couldn't imagine myself getting past it, either. I'd explode, inevitably. So I've wondered more times I can count:

What will my headline be 

when I go crazy?

Even as I kid, I thought this way. (Did it start when he died, or when he had his "incident" on 8/15/73? I'll have to consult the oracle on that.) In order to counteract that tendency, I slowly and assiduously made myself the picture of stability and responsibility, hoping—unconsciously at first and later with great intention—to mold myself so neatly and precisely that the cracks which destroyed my father would be completely covered over in me. 

It started when I was ten, and didn’t cry at my father’s funeral. I was going to be a tough kid, dammit, and I succeeded; I didn’t let a tear fall from my eyes until I was seventeen. I threw myself into books and films, clawed and wormed my way into a nice, stable job teaching at a university, and along the way turned myself into a man who’s dependable almost to a fault. Who’s considerate of the feelings of others, open to the world, slow to anger, and always willing to swallow that anger and choke on it myself instead so that it won’t be spilled onto others.

Or at least I tried to be those things, so I wouldn’t go crazy at 42. So I wouldn’t have to look back on my life feeling like I’d wasted it, like I’d spent so much time and energy trying to atone for my father’s breakdown, only to suffer my own. Only to write off all my attempts at fixing the cracks I inherited from him in the end, admit that I couldn’t escape the curse of my bad blood, admit that the apple never falls far from the tree and that I, through no fault of my own, had simply come from a bad tree and couldn’t do anything about it.

For decades I lived this way. Holding myself tight so I wouldn’t fuck up, swallowing my anger in an attempt to keep the crack from showing and yet feeling them reach all the way through me, feeling that anyone in the world could see all the way through them and know, long before I did, when those cracks would break the whole statue of me apart. I always thought this would happen when I turned 42. I’d live another version of my father’s life, endlessly striving for things I couldn’t have, and eventually go crazy when I couldn’t get it and lash out at whoever didn’t give it to me.

I don’t worry about that too much anymore, unless I think or write about it too much. (A lot of my fictional characters flirt with insanity, and I've written at least one prose poem about the temptations of going mad.) And now I have kids, the biggest reasons in the world not to think about it. The biggest reason in the world to stop thinking about myself as a statue with cracks that will explode at some pre-determined date and start thinking of myself as nothing but another flesh-and-blood man who lives in the world, who feels the world against the outside of his skin as much as he feels the man he should be pressing against the inside of it.

Because the statue absolutely cannot hold, people. Its destruction—by the self or otherwise—is as inevitable at it is majestic. So I've got to melt it down, even if the only tools I have are a few stray candles and a cigarette lighter.