Believe: My Struggle to (believe that I can) Change Negative Self-Talk

by Gabriel Nathan

Listen to Executive Director Gabriel Nathan read this post aloud:

In November of 2024, I drove down to Baltimore to spend a little time with Kyle Secor. I had never met Kyle, but I grew up watching him play Detective Tim Bayliss on the NBC television show “Homicide: Life on the Street” (“the best show on TV you’re not watching” quipped TV Guide at the time—remember TV Guide? Well; I do. I’m TV Guide years old.)

Anyway, that November, Kyle was back in Baltimore, where the show was filmed from 1993-2000, for a cast and crew reunion over the weekend. That Monday, he would be spending time with the FreshFly gang, who shoot and produce all our Recovery Diaries films, to make a documentary about Kyle’s addiction and recovery. If you haven’t seen it, it’s called “Stomping Grounds,” and it’s wonderful. Watch it. I don’t tag along on film shoots, but Kyle suggested that we should “break bread” together and talk. I was reluctant, because I felt like a fangirl, a geek, a weirdo. But my wife helped me unpack that neurotic baggage and convinced me that it would probably be a lovely time, and that I would most likely regret it if I didn’t go.

So I went. I drove my ‘89 Toyota Camry (“Bayliss”, named for Kyle’s character on the show—(yeesh) down 95 on an absolutely gorgeous autumn day, over the Millard E. Tydings Memorial Bridge, which offers stunning views of the Susquehanna River no matter where you look or point your phone to take video that you shouldn’t be doing because that’s crazy and dangerous.

I like to know who bridges, roads, tunnels, etc are named for, so I looked it up just now. Tydings was a busy beaver when he was alive; attorney, author, soldier, legislator and, fortunately, a Democrat. He was also a pretty snappy dresser, favoring broadcloth, tweed three-piece suits. In his portraits, he rather looks like he should be reciting the Stage Manager’s opening monologue from Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”.

Anyway, Kyle was just flying in from LA and he suggested that we meet in the lobby of the Marriott in Baltimore. Because I’m me, I arrived comfortably and unreasonably early, parked Bayliss in a street spot right by the hotel entrance, and sat down in a lobby seat positioned across from the front doors so I wouldn’t be able to miss his entrance. Time went by. I people-watched. I texted Kay. I scrolled. My eyes were constantly, furtively scanning the lobby. Time… went by.

An exhausted-looking couple with two kids and a lot of baggage (I mean, the literal kind, but probably the emotional kind, too) plopped down in the lobby in front of me, and the slightly beleaguered father told them he was going to check them in. The kids entertained themselves by raiding the snacks in one of the travel bags—apple slices and Pirate’s Booty; sensible snacking win. The mother looked like she already regretted the vacation. I wondered where they were from; taking a trip in Baltimore… As soon as the father came back; I knew two things from the look on his face:

They were at the wrong hotel; and so was I.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, “it’s the wrong Marriott.”

The wrong Marriott.

Of course it was. Of course YOU went to the wrong Marriott; because you’re an idiot. You’re an imbecile. You ALWAYS do this. You’re a child. You don’t know anything. You cannot function in the world. You belong in a zoo.

Now; this is the internal monologue of a man who lives with mental illness—just so that’s clear to everyone. These are the mental musings of someone who’s been through the mill, who sees self-abuse as correct, appropriate, reasonable, warranted, justified, logical, and right. Maybe even helpful. Maybe, if the abuse is nasty enough, cutting enough, searing enough, it will finally have an impact, maybe you will finally learn.

I can, and do, make any situation fit the narrative that I am a wreck and a mess. Forget the fact that this family made the same mistake that I did; right in front of me. I had the evidence that it isn’t just me, right in front of me—but it didn’t matter. I had empathy for the family; but could find only vitriolic, poisonous loathing for myself. Even when I went up to a lady at an information table and confirmed my mistake and she said, “happens all the time” I didn’t hear her. I mean, actually, I did, but I twisted what she said, “happens all the time; to people like you” or that she was lying, to make me feel better. Telling me a story.

I know, eight months removed from the situation, that it’s me who’s the one telling stories. Telling stories that reinforce a deeply entrenched negative view of myself as incapable, haphazard, a waster of other people’s time, a deeply and hopelessly stupid person who somehow made it through public education, college, grad school on showmanship, charisma, and lies and has somehow collapsed onto the adult world in a massive belly-flop on a pool covered by the thinnest glass.

A short time later, after peeling out of my parking spot and racing towards “the right Marriott” (absurdly, less than a mile-and-a-half from the wrong one), I was sitting across from Kyle at a table at Sweet Green, the way he had once sat across the table from Andre Braugher in the break-room over styrofoam cups of coffee. We were talking about Recovery Diaries and I told him about how I felt like a child, incapable of doing anything, barely capable of basic levels of functioning. And he looked bewildered. “Wow,” he said, “that’s fascinating, because that’s not how I see you at all.”

But it isn’t about that, of course. How other people see you. It’s nice to hear; but what about the mirror? Am I dysmorphic? About my face and my body and my brain? Where did it start? Is it the ceaseless, brutal anxiety and fear I live in all the time—that is trying to protect me from… I don’t even know what it’s trying to protect me from; getting hurt, maybe?—that tells these stories of incapability and ineptitude, in case someone else calls me out on it? Did I internalize everything my bullies tried to teach me about myself? Instead of resisting all that pain, was I just nodding along with it?

I have been in therapy since 2010. That’s a long time spent trying to untie a knot. Well, many knots. Maybe I have only really succeeded in making more knots inside that office. Maybe I’m all tied up in knots. I thought I would be better at 45; maybe I am and I just don’t know it.

I am the Executive Director of this mental health publication. I oversee the creation and dissemination of personal essays, documentary films, and a podcast about mental health recovery; stories meant to de-stigmatize, to give hope, to help people understand, feel, and believe that change is possible.

And I do. I believe.

It’s so, so hard to change; to change behaviors, patterns, prejudices, thoughts. It is. I know it. But I will keep going, keep trying, keep at it. The people in our Recovery Diaries community are; so I must.

Believe.

​EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR / EDITOR: Gabriel Nathan | DESIGN: Leah Alexandra Goldstein | SITE ORIGINATOR: Bud Clayman