Reading my first entries here, I’m impressed with my bravery. I just strode into the teeth of the storm, didn’t I? If I was to talk that way right now, it would be bravado. My armor is cracked open and my heart is raw and sensitive. I’m open to compassion for those who suffer far worse than I have. I’m open to a kind of deep love I’ve never known before, for my caregivers. I’m open to love and gratitude to my Judy and to all those who have supported me in so many ways and so many places. And I’m open to fear and anxiety, doubt and weepy sentimentality. I feel like a hard-boiled egg with my shell peeled away and only that thin membrane remaining between my feelings and the world. I’m trying to embrace this new condition. I didn’t ask for it, but neither did I ask to be born. But strong forces within me want to, perhaps need to, re-armor.

Part of who I am, part of what has enabled me to survive my circumstances with my independence intact and my mind fairly open, was the armor that I grew out of necessity, growing up in Phoenix, Arizona in the 1950s, a bookish weirdo Jewboy who didn’t play basketball. There’s no need to get into all that. I understand the sad consequences of the way young males in America socialize each other. But it’s no wonder that I have sometimes characterized myself as a martian — at one point, even dressing up like a person from another planet and pretending to be an alien anthropologist. Even among public intellectuals, I’m from left field. Academics allow me to dwell among them, but only temporarily and provisionally. I do see clearly now how the person I’ve become was largely a creation of my own choices; I could have reacted in other ways, become other people, but I did what I did and I am who I am. That’s not the end of it. Apparently I’ve been called to be someone else. Again.

One of the benefits of aging is a growing understanding of why I did the things I did when I was younger, and why I don’t necessarily have to continue doing things that way. I know that Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist and Muslim-Sufi traditions consider the painfully cracked-open heart to be a desirable state. So I’m trying to treat my raw nerves as “the new normal,” and considering the possibility of learning from it. But it hurts, and it’s a kind of pain that I can alleviate by rebuilding the carapace that used to protect me.

I don’t know that I need to communicate this to anyone but myself. I enter it here in case a later me has need of tracing the path I’ve taken since that night in a hotel room in Paris when I crossed the line into a world where everything is different. And I do it publicly, I suppose, as a self-initiation into the new person I’m becoming. Self-construction of identity is a challenge to the world to treat one in a certain way, I suppose.

My life forks on Monday. But doesn’t it fork every day, in every moment? I guess it’s only rare to be so aware of it.