How
Herbie the Love Bug Is Saving My Life
If
you work in the mental health field
for long enough, eventually you'll hear
the word "mindfulness" so
often that, one day, you'll be sitting
in a treatment team meeting or at a
continuing education conference somewhere
and someone will say it and you'll just
start vomiting uncontrollably and you'll
never stop. But at least you'll be doing
so mindfully. Mental
health is no different than any other
field - all professions latch onto abbreviations,
tropes, or fads - we're all very susceptible
to buzzwords and trends. Mental Health
First Aid is thing now. "Trauma-informed
care" is another one. Everything
has to be "trauma-informed."
It's not enough to do yoga with hospitalized
psychiatric patients - it has to be
"trauma-informed yoga." The
art on the walls has to be "trauma-sensitive."
So does the paint on those walls. And
the plants in the corner.
If
I sound cynical, it's because I am.
For five years, I worked in an inpatient
psychiatric hospital and that, I suppose,
will do a number on you if you're not
careful - and even if you are. When
started, I was wide-eyed, innocent,
and nice. A bright-eyed, warmhearted,
angelic colleague of mine, early on
in my inpatient adventure, said to me
in a quiet moment in the nurses' station,
"I'm so glad that you work here.
You're very good for this place."
I was touched by that comment, because
I felt the same way about her. By the
time I left, though, this woman no longer
worked there, and I'm not sure that
she would have said the same thing to
me if she'd known me, five years in
and about to make my own exit. In the
words of another colleague, I had gone
from "green, to brown, to black.
And that's okay," he assured me,
"you have to do that if you want
to survive here." But I didn't
want to survive there; I wanted to get
the hell out. Just like the patients.
I was burnt out, and I was angry that
I was burnt out, which didn't help.
I was angry at myself because I had
let things - like the same patients
getting readmitted constantly, getting
assaulted, being around depressed colleagues,
responding to frightening emergencies
- get to me, when there were folks who
had endured far worse and were still
clocking in and out after twenty-five
or thirty years. I allowed my inner-monologue
to joyfully and constantly berate me.
You loser. You phony. You disgraceful
coward.
That
was in 2015. I foundered around in the
darkness of depression, anxiety, sleeplessness
and, probably, PTSD from the things
I had seen and done and experienced
at the psych hospital. I took a job
at a theater company in downtown Philly
and resigned after three weeks. I handed
my dazed supervisor the key to the theater
door on the sidewalk and apologized
profusely. She hugged me. I took another
job, and stayed for a year. I started
to feel better, more confident. Then
Trump got elected, and my wife's mental
health took a nosedive, too, along with
a good portion of the country's. I was
mindful of what was going on around
me and in my head and in my house. Despair
and fear had settled in and had gotten
comfortable on the couch next to the
basset hound once again. I had to do
something. So
I did what any stable, former mental
health professional, father-of-two in
his mid-thirties would do in that particular
situation: I convinced my wife that
it was the right time to buy a white,
1963 Volkswagen Beetle and turn it into
Herbie: the Love Bug.
Surprisingly,
my wife, who is typically fiscally conservative
and hyper-rational, did not require
any inordinate amount of cajoling or
convincing to allow this momentous purchase
to take place. She, too, was mindful
of her emotional state and was ready
to acknowledge that it was time for
some joy to be injected into not only
our lives, but the lives of random people
in the neighborhood out walking their
dogs or taking their children to school.
It was time for their muddled and negative
internal monologues to be interrupted
by the roaring, rhythmic sounds of a
1600cc air-cooled engine approaching,
time to turn their heads and see a black
"53" in a white circle, some
red, white, and blue stripes, and two
innocent, round headlights coming down
the street. Time to take a spin down
Memory Lane, in Herbie.
There
are lots of different kinds of smiles
- there is a wry smile when your brain
processes the punch-line of an off-color
joke, there is a pure, Jesus-ray smile
when you hear your baby laugh for the
first time, there is a post-coital smile
and a post-midterms smile. There is
also Herbie Smile, and it's unmistakable
and, for me, it has a narcotic effect.
The more of them I see, the more I want.
When it's beautiful out, I'll take an
hour and drive him up and down the main
drag of this town or that town. If people
give me a Herbie Smile, they get two
quick toots of his endearing little
horn; that's the transaction, though
it's far from transactional. It's more
transcendent.
Herbie
is good for people, and he is good for
me. For my mental health. You can't
hide from people when you're noodling
around in The Love Bug, and why would
you want to anyway? When I'm not driving
Herbie, the part of me that wants desperately
to be invisible dominates. My head is
kept down. I avoid meeting people's
eyes. I stumble through routine social
interactions and small-talk while sweat
trickles down the center of my back.
When I get behind that ivory-colored
steering wheel and settle into that
squishy, vinyl-covered driver's seat,
though, another part of me wins out.
I don't know if it's a child part of
me, or an exhibitionist part of me,
an attention-seeking or impish part
of me but, whatever it is, I can feel
it in my chest and in my hands as I
let down the parking brake, push down
on the clutch, and gently move the gearshift
lever up into First. Prepare for takeoff."Okay,
Herb," I saw, giving the steering
wheel a pat, "let's go to work."
The job of making merry. We take it
very seriously.
Driving
a 54-year-old movie star on wheels is
a singular experience for many reasons,
and there is so much that we miss, puttering
around in our Subarus and Toyotas, and
I try to be mindful of every single
thought that passes through my mind
when I'm in Herbie. I try to soak in
and imprint ever Herbie Smile I see,
every thumbs-up - the guy who bowed
down on the sidewalk as he was about
to get into his Mazda and his world
just stopped when he saw us coming.
Me and my little boy.
Around
a month ago, a police officer from a
neighboring town stopped Herbie and
I as we were parking at a supermarket.
I thought I had done something wrong,
but he just wanted to talk about the
car, about how happy it made him. We
ended up talking in that parking lot
for an hour, while his Chipotle lunch
went cold and ignored on the passenger
seat of his patrol car. We talked about
parenting, about politics, about the
perceptions of policing in America -
about mental health, about PTSD, and
trauma. He told me that he'd shot and
killed someone last year who was trying
to commit suicide-by-cop. He'd exited
his patrol car, the guy was coming at
him with a knife, and he killed him
- the whole thing took fifteen seconds.
Herbie and I listened as this officer
talked - he talked and talked. He needed
to talk. As he talked, I remembered
some of the things I had tried to forget
about the psych hospital. Patients trying
to kill themselves on the unit. Patients
attacking my friends - people I loved.
Staff members screaming at each other
over scandals created by borderline
patients; experts at splitting and dividing
and creating chaos. Tackles, restraints,
injections, the floor - rolling around
on the floor, trying to subdue, dodging
blows or bites.
Everybody's
seen things and done things and said
things in their lives that have caused
pain. I'm mindful of that. And I'm mindful,
too, of how, sometimes, in a small way,
a small, round Volkswagen with a Hollywood
pedigree can help you forget, can help
you heal, can help you begin again.
Gabriel
Nathan
