My Masculine Disassociation Disorder; or My Walter Mitty Syndrome

My condition, until now not diagnosed, explains my life. I have wondered why my childhood/adolescent memories are few and unremarkable. My life was consistently peaceful, mildly pleasant, safe, bland, steady, often dull. This applies to my family life, play/friends, schooling, and religion. My Catholic faith was like the air I breathed or the food I ate: normal, plain, unexceptional. I had a quiet, steady sense of being safe, loved, blessed and an implicit sense of gratitude which blossomed into a compassionate urge to help those I came to see as not as fortunate as myself. But I was always fundamentally unsatisfied with my life and especially my self. I was, after all, too skinny, weak, and devoid of sex appeal. I yearned, always, for something greater, more exciting and dramatic, more beautiful and challenging. And so, I disassociated from myself and my life and found satisfaction in fantasy, in alternate realities and identities. I was at different times: Zorro, Davy Crockett, Atticus Finch. I was Gary Cooper with Grace Kelly in High Noon, Charlton Heston with Sophia Loren in Ben Hur, John Wayne with Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man or any number of other pictures. I became something much bigger and better than myself.  Always my script entailed heroism, courage and strength in battle and a beauty waiting to welcome me. More than in movies, I lost my mundane, boring self in books: fiction and non-fiction, history, psychology and theology. For brief periods I found satisfaction vicariously in sports: Mantle and Maris of the Yankees in the late 50s, Nick Workman in Seton Hall U. basketball in the early 60s; but I was so challenged as an athlete that that identification could not stick. In late adolescence this transformed into a more modulated form of disassociation: intellectual study and thinking. I became enamored of ideas, explanations, theories. Such abstractions fascinated me and represented a half-disassociation. And so, in the late 60s I buried myself in the library and feasted on philosophy, theology, and the social sciences. By anyone's reckoning, I should have pursued a career in academics but I seem to have intuited that my fascination with academics was substantially pathological. Providentially, I proceeded to fall passionately in love with a Beauty was fascinating but no fantasy: Mary Lynn still is real, concrete, earthy, and entirely here-and-now. The subsequent, happy challenge of raising children and providing for them through work served its purpose of re-associating me with my identity and my reality. But I continued to be dissatisfied with myself and yearned for something bigger and better and I continued to find comfort in fantasy. But two other things happened. I took on roles that were bigger and better than myself: husband, father, teacher, UPS driver,  and supervisor. My son Paul once observed that he loved to be in uniform: EMT, soldier, lawyer. This clearly is constitutive of the masculine psyche: the desire to take on a role, an identity, that is bigger and better, that involves heroic combat, drama and love. And so it becomes clear that the male, in contrast to the female, lacks interior integrity and needs to be "in-formed" by an exterior role or identity. For example, a man who becomes a priest takes on an entirely new identity that is largely extrinsic: he acts "in persona Christi" and must grow into the role, like a layman becomes a biological father. A woman is inappropriate for such a role because she has her own personality, integrity and identity and does not have the pronounced lack, craving, void that comes with masculinity. Secondly, my faith showed me that Christ our Lord came to fill this longing: to dwell within me and make me into the New Man: courageous, generous, pure, free, truthful, magnanimous. Ignatius of Loyola is a good example of the masculine psyche at work: laying in monotony and pain he rotated back and forth: his romances in which he was a heroic knight and a courtly lover; and then he was one of the saints, humble, generous, faith-filled. Back-and-forth he swung, from the one fantasy to the other. Eventually he was captivated by the more Beautiful, more Courageous, more True, more Noble and Heroic. May all of us who suffer this Walter Mitty Syndrome find the same cure!