“Don’t look so danged sourpuss! Mental hygiene is a process of correcting the correctable and adjusting to the inevitable. You’ve got three choices.”
“I didn’t know I had any.”
“Three. You can keep on going into a spin until your mind builds up a fantasy acceptable to your unconscious…a psychotic adjustment, what you would call ‘crazy.’ Or you can muddle along as you are, unhappy and not much use to yourself or your shipmates… and always with the possibility of skidding over the line. Or you can dig into your own mind, get acquainted with it, find out what it really wants, show it what it can’t have and why, and strike a healthy bargain with it on the basis of what is possible. If you’ve got guts and gumption, you’ll try the last one. It won’t be easy.” He waited, looking at me.
“Uh, I guess I’d better try. But how do I do it?”
“Not by moping in your room about might-have-beens, that’s sure.”
“My Uncle Steve-Major Lucas, I mean”-I said slowly, “told me I shouldn’t do that. He wants me to stir around and associate with other people. I guess I should.”
“Surely, surely. But that’s not enough. You can’t chin yourself out of the hole you are in just by pretending to be the life of the party. You have to get acquainted with yourself.”
“Yes, sir. But how?”
“Well, we can’t do it by having you talk about yourself every afternoon while I hold your hand. Mmm … I suggest that you try writing down who you are and where you’ve been and how you got from there to here. You make it thorough enough and maybe you will begin to see ‘why’ as well as ‘how.’ Keep digging and you may find out who you are and what you want and how much of it you can get.”
I must have looked baffled for he said, “Do you keep a diary?”
“Sometimes. I’ve got one along.”
“Use it as an outline. ‘The Life and Times of T. P. Bartlett, Gent.’ Make it complete and try to tell the truth-all the truth.”
I thought that over. Some things you don’t want to tell anybody. “Uh, I suppose you’ll want to read it, Doctor?”
“Me? Heaven forbid! I get too little rest without misguided people. This is for you, son; you’ll be writing to yourself … only write it as if you didn’t know anything about yourself and had to explain everything. Write it as if you expected to lose your memory and wanted to be sure you could pick up the strings again. Put it all down.” He frowned and added grudgingly, “If you feel that you have found out something important and want a second opinion, I suppose I could squeeze in time to read part of it, at least. But I won’t promise. Just write it to yourself-to the one with amnesia.”
So I told him I would try… and I have. I can’t see that it has done any special good (I pulled out of the slump anyhow) and there just isn’t time to do the kind of job he told me to do. I’ve had to hurry over the last part of this because this is the first free evening I’ve had in a month.
But it’s amazing how much you can remember when you really try.
X RELATIONS
There have been a lot of changes around the Elsie. For one thing we are over the hump now and backing down the other side, decelerating as fast as we boosted; we’ll be at Tau Ceti in about six months, ship’s time.
But I am getting ahead of myself. It has been about a year, S-time, since I started this, and about twelve years, Earth time, since we left Earth. But forget E-time; it doesn’t mean anything. We’ve been thirteen months in the ship by S-time and a lot has happened. Pat getting married-no, that didn’t happen in the ship and it’s the wrong place to start.
Maybe the place to start is with another marriage, when Chet Travers married Mei-Ling Jones. It met with wide approval, except on the part of one of the engineers who was sweet on her himself. It caused us freaks and the electron pushers to bury the hatchet to have one of us marry one of them, especially when Commander Frick came down the aisle in the mess room with the bride on his arm, looking as proud and solemn as if she had been his daughter. They were a good match; Chet was not yet thirty and I figure that Mei-Ling is at least twenty-two.