Stories
The story of
the Stevenson family
One of my characteristics is that I tend to push myself to the limits. And how do you know where your limits are? It's very simple. You push until you break down, and that point is the limit. Of course, I have also had a tendency to push others to the limit and to break them down, as well, which is something I need to be more careful about.
My suicide attempts in the summer of 1957 were my first breakdown under stress. There would be others throughout my life, but curiously enough, each breakdown under stress involved a different part of my body.
The first breakdown, in 1957, I guess you could say was a breakdown of the head. What was the stress? Difficult to say. But years later with my second divorce, in the hospital for prostate surgery, I had such a strong shame that I felt for the first time in over 50 years the thoughts of suicide and I called for the priest or pastor and got a sympathetic pastor who helped me analyze my shame. For I had spoken French to Lindsay after speaking to Kiki, and I knew that I had hurt her by this. I was so ashamed I wanted to die! Perhaps it was like that with my mother and Vee? In any case, after I met and fell in love with Vee at STS in Washington, I came home and told my mother about it. I can recall to this day sitting across from her at the kitchen table at 324 South Valley Street, and breaking down in tears, as if, by falling in love with Vee, I had betrayed her. It was over the next few months that I became suicidal.
The second breakdown came when I was denied tenure for a second time, and I came down with shingles of the face. It was 1975 and I was studying Russian to go to the Soviet Union, leaving Nina for a semester and the stress was great.
The third breakdown came after Nina and I separated in 1980, and it was a severe back strain, aggravated (caused?) by the serious accident in the middle of the night in Harlem when I totaled the blue Checker with five leaders of the academic left aboard after a meeting in the Bronx. It was also aggravated (caused) by unwise extremes of yoga poses which stretched my back past its natural limits.
The fourth breakdown came after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the CPUSA, in 1991-1992 when I was preparing to go to live in France and work for UNESCO, leaving Lindsay for how long, we did not know. This time it was my digestive system that went haywire with diarrhea to most foods. For almost five years I ate only meat, potatos and rice three meals a day, eventually adding buckwheat (sarasin). Finally, I was able to eat other foods.
The fifth breakdown came after Lindsay and I separated in 2009, and this time it was herpes again, but not herpes zoster, instead genital herpes with high fevers.
And yet another breakdown, the sixth, came after I separated from Margarita in January 2011. The bar broke as I did pull-ups and I fell on my back, breaking three ribs!
Interestingly I have always had the same dynamic with my sport of running, where I run to the limits of breakdown, and it almost always is different. Sometimes the breakdown is achilles tendonitis of one ankle or the other. Sometimes it is tendonitis of the plantar fascia in the foot. Sometimes it is my calf muscle. And sometimes the tendons in my groin. Running to the limit of injury is apparently a common practice among runners, judging by the conversations I have had with runner friends.
I have come to the point now as I write this at the age of 70 that I run only once every two days to try to avoid the overuse that causes breakdowns. But if I am not very careful, I still tend to get hurt when I race...
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme