A college affair turns coming of age into coming apart.
Not long after I became my professor’s research assistant, I told him that I sometimes threw up what I ate. A junior at Cornell, I had just turned twenty. X, as I’ll call him, had hired me in conjunction with the “work-study” program, which was available to students who received financial aid. He was almost a decade and a half my senior. He was also married, but his wife was teaching and living elsewhere. X himself was on leave from another élite university. It was 1990. George H. W. Bush was in the White House. And you could still smoke cigarettes anywhere you wanted to.
Sometimes, when I visited X in his office on the top floor of a Victorian building near the Arts Quad, as I began to do after class, he’d ask if he could have one of my Marlboro Lights. I had started smoking a year before as a way of dealing with the nagging questions of what to do with my hands, how to suppress my appetite, and, above all, how to give myself the appearance of someone who stood aloof from the petty squabbles of everyday life—though nothing could have been further from the truth.
I remember following up my confession with a question: “Do you think I’m pathetic?”
“Do you want me to think you’re pathetic?” In the manner of a therapist (or Socrates), X often replied to my questions with other questions.
“No.” I recall laughing to break the suddenly sombre mood—also with relief that he didn’t seem to have judged me.
After a smoke-filled pause, he told me that someone he knew was making a film about the topic.
I never found out who the filmmaker was, but the idea that an associate of his regarded the topic as worthy of further inquiry made me feel a little less ashamed.
Why, after lengthy deliberation, I’d decided to disclose such a closely held secret to someone who was neither a trusted friend nor a mental-health professional was a more complicated question. On account of his age and perceived authority, I suppose I saw X as a substitute parental figure, especially since confiding in my own parents had proved to be a fraught activity. I think I had the idea that, if I could get X to worry about me, he’d want to take care of me. Which was the fantasy that underpinned all my other fantasies, even as I lived in fear of appearing needy….
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-adventures-in-deconstruction
After the truth-shower 