If there’s one character trait to live by it would be this; always stay true to yourself. Follow your own path. Live your own dreams, not others.
Case in point. During the late 1990s, I was introduced to a lady through a mutual friend. On the surface she seemed to have it all. She was married to a doctor. The doctor would never say much. His facial expressions showed a rather grumpy disposition.
One day the mutual friend and I visited this upscale couple in their Greenpoint apartment. This was in 1999, in the infant stages of Brooklyn gentrification. An hour in our visit, the doctor unexpectedly turns to me, and decides to be candid. He confessed about not wanting to be a doctor. His own dream was to be a musician. Had he followed own path, he would’ve been a drummer. During his youth, he was a fan of many English ‘new wave’ bands such as The Jam. However, this did not sit well with his parents. He caved in and became a doctor. He was living his parents’ dream but not his own. This made him miserable.
Fast forward to the early 2000s. The doctor’s facade finally breaks when he discovers the rapper Enimen. Living vicariously through Slim Shady, the doctor’s slightly aggressive behavior was making everyone uncomfortable. Particularly since the doctor was a white middle-aged man. My mutual friend was visiting the couple. This same mutual friend called me on my Y2K era cellphone, while I was en-route to Montreal. Begging me to detour back to NYC so I could save him from this toxic absurdity. I was thirty minutes from crossing the Canadian border. My gratitude to the French Canadians was more than just traveling.
His wife in the meantime smiled as if nothing was wrong, but little did the doctor know, that marriage was also a sham. She only married him for mobility’s sake. They couldn’t even live in the same house together. For a while she had a small apartment in Manhattan while he lived in some Long Island town. During his residency at some Brooklyn hospital, she was patronizing the underground swingers' clubs. That little sublet of debaucheries might as well be a substitute for the loveless bond she entered with her own amateur rapper aka MC Doctor Disaster. How do I know all this information? Hmmm, this mutual friend was also sleeping with the doctor’s wife.
Eventually those two, the doctor and his wife got their act together and moved to Texas. That’s right, Texas, where American dreams continue to go horribly wrong. It was far removed from the wife’s AA meetings, where she had yet another sordid affair with a fellow recovering alcoholic. In Texas they had two children in-vitro because in the wife’s words “have kids just to get it over and done with.” The last image I have of them was in the year 2011. The doctor and his wife along with the in-vitro kids posed for the obligatory family photo, plastered on Facebook. The smiles displayed were so fake, but most telling was the unconscious body language. Doctor Dysfunctional and the Missus were smiling, but facing two different directions.
So, before this story becomes a Lifetime Movie of The Week, let it known why you should always be true to yourself. Live your own dreams. Live your own life. If there was a character trait to live by, this would be it. Ask yourself is it worth putting up the facade of the perfect nuclear family, or is it worth it to honor your own true path.
To be fair though, I would like to thank the doctor and his wife for providing me with some reality show entertainment. Thank you for showing me how not to indulge in such toxicity.
Michele B.
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