Anne Webster, RN

A SPLIT PERSONALITY

When I was fourteen, my Uncle John—then in his twenties—chased his pert, blonde wife through their neighborhood with an axe. Grandmother explained that he had something called schizophrenia, or a split personality. I imagined the playful, sweet John I knew cut down the center, as with that axe, the nice part off him peeled away from the violent half.

A few years later when I graduated from high school, I thought of John, and wondered if, like him, my two halves would always be at war. In my case, the smart, creative person and the numbingly practical fought to control my future. Despite a desperate yearning for college, where I wanted to follow in the footsteps of one of my two heroes—the impressionist Mary Cassatt or the scientist Marie Curie—my divorced mother, a government stenographer, declared she could barely feed and clothe me, much less pay for college. She suggested instead that I use my typing skills to take a government job as a stenographer in the Forestry Department where she worked.

Continue reading →