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I lean against the wall and try to breathe calmly, reminding myself this place is only populated by old memories and the occasional homeless person looking for a safe place to be. Sober but happy, we hit it off straight away and talk about our past experiences. But news stories from five months later render the Tann theory unlikely. When she grows up I will explain it all to her.

One challenge psychotherapists do have when meeting new si is making it clear that it is a social connection and not a psychotherapy relationship. She began sleeping in a subway tunnel after transit authorities made her leave her spot in the Herald Square station corridor on 34th Street, dragging her by her feet when she refused to stand up from her mat. And so the day arrives. There would even be success stories. At the time I believed my thoughts were perfectly rational, and it was free mental health dating site after I started taking medication that I saw differently. This is a dark and wild beast inviting you to come closer because nothing will ever be all prime, but she will always be at your side to keep you warm. How open should I be about my mental illness. Jon must have passed out drunk, now, somewhere behind me. I started dating a girl pretty seriously. With my pulse rushing through my caballeros, my face splotchy and beet-red from the blood pounding in my head, I felt totally closed off, trapped, and almost deaf. When it came to writing my profile on Match. Within a few minutes, Mike gets in touch.

Raúl shaves every morning with great care. On the surface, when the patient has been highly selective of the discussion topics, therapy always resembles a friendly get-together. Brooklyn might be the oldest resident of the Riverside Park tunnel.

Single female writer, 31. GSOH, schizophrenic. WLTM similar: The online dating site aimed at adults with mental health concerns - It could have been worse, but I was driving around with a big knife in my car thinking people were trying to kill me and that my parents were members of the Manson family and that the other members of the Manson family were hunting me down.

Leftwich spoke with me about the challenges of running the site and about why he believes forming loving relationships should be recommended more frequently than pills. Why did you create No Longer Lonely? I thought, this is a really logical thing. People with mental illness tend to band together. How did No Longer Lonely start? No Longer Lonely founder Jim Leftwich poses for a portrait in Strand Books in Union Square No Longer Lonely has chat rooms, forums, and places for people to post their art. Why did you design it like that? There are a lot of talented people with mental illness that have great creative potential and I thought that would be an important way to let people connect and share on that level. How many users does No Longer Lonely have? I have over 30,000 users. I do occasional purges to get rid of older profiles. That person might get a message and come back. You must have a mental illness to be on the site. How does that work? I worry about that a lot. I actually got press on a site called. They featured me as one of the most ill-advised dating sites on the web. But the ironic thing is that it gave me a lot of traffic. What are some of the mental illnesses that your users have? I was first hospitalized in 1992. How old were you at this time? That was the halfway point of my life. I was much more inhibited and shy than I am now. What exactly were you afraid of? I think a lot of it was just a negative self-image. Just take your meds. I kind of felt like I had graduated to this specific little world of people that had mental illness. So all of your friends had mental illnesses? It really is a tribe. This was kind of a transition period for me. I started working at a college library, which turned into a full-time position by 2004. Feeling worthy of love is something I really struggle with. But there are certain levels. What is schizoaffective disorder? You have to have a psychotic break, which I did have. I imagined all sorts of crazy things. It could have been worse, but I was driving around with a big knife in my car thinking people were trying to kill me and that my parents were members of the Manson family and that the other members of the Manson family were hunting me down. A psychotic break is a very intoxicating thing. I thought I was the most important person on earth, that all the newspapers were gonna write my story and everything, Peter Jennings would be talking about me at 6:30 on the evening news and stuff. And then I got to a hospital and it started to sink in that like, this is awful. I do have something pretty serious, here. It was in 2003 that you started thinking about this website. I want a girlfriend? My initial impulse was thinking selfishly. She would have to be very high-functioning. On No Longer Lonely, do people have to say on their profile what mental illness they have? I think there is a way to bypass it, if you want. Do people tend to align themselves with others who have similar illnesses? After I was hospitalized, I went to a halfway kind of house. There certainly was a gradation. I think professionals in the field discount the importance of relationships. Go to him regularly. Try to do something meaningful. Connect with people that are experiencing the same thing as you. What are your feelings on treating mental illnesses? Robert Whitaker shows that you need drugs in the short term to medicate somebody and bring them back to reality and stuff, but the long-term use of these things creates chronic conditions. It actually hooks more people. Do you think that people with mental illnesses can only have a true bond with someone else who has a mental illness? I started dating a girl pretty seriously. Do you ever feel like you need to look out for some of your users? Where were most of the couples from? A lot of them started off as long-distance relationships. I think that people with mental illness are less demanding of a partner, generally. Pick someone you like and send them a message. People on here are very nice. There are people that have been on there for years and they use it as a supportive network, going back and forth, meeting up in the chat room. Rubble is scattered along the train tracks, bordered by retaining walls covered in numerous layers of graffiti. This is where it all started. Here by the parkway with the blasting trucks and the roaring cars, near the filigree arches of the Riverside Drive viaduct, here with the gravel crunching under my feet as I run down the railroad into this hollow mouth. This is where they live, deep into the depths of the city, way underground, lying in the dirt. Sure, you know about them. Of course you know about them. Here in the tunnels. Their eyes have adapted to the constant night that cloaks them from the topside world. And one day they will spill outside and burn us all alive, and they will reign over our flatscreen joys and our organic delights. Of course you know about them. The lost ones, the hidden ones. The broken and the ill, the wandering, the gone. Jon has been homeless for more than fifteen years. Like many of the people interviewed for this article, he did not want to give his full name. He has been living here for a while now, in a small space between two support beams that can only be reached with a ladder. A plywood roof protects his hoarded belongings from seeping water. The place is crammed full. There is an old mattress on the floor, and cookware, blankets and electronics stacked on makeshift shelves. He is bipolar and suffers from major substance dependence. He used to be a gang member in the Bronx. He used to be a family man until he got disowned. He was a furniture salesman. The FBI is looking for him. He used to know Donald Trump. His real story has been buried long ago under thick layers of improvised memories that grew more detailed by the years, the man slowly becoming a collage of himself. It makes them feel alive. Like alligators in the sewers. He tells me to stay safe and to watch out for trains when I go back walking into the tunnel. I hear him talk to himself as I go away from the entrance and from the white sky. The smell down here is the one of brake dust and mold. I can see rats scouring for food and drinking from brown puddles in the tracks ballast. EXISTENCE IS FLAWED, a graffiti inscription reads. The city growls over my head — a distant growl muffled by the concrete, almost a snarl, like something cold and foul spreading over the long stretches of stained walls, like a dark and wild beast curling up around me and breathing on my neck. A dark and wild beast silently trailing me. The expansion of extensive sewers and steam pipes systems had brought a newfound fascination with what laid below the streets. A 1990 New York Times by John Tierney was the earliest to outline the phenomenon, looking at people living in an abandoned train tunnel beneath Riverside Park, along the banks of the Hudson River. Collective imagination took over quickly. An instant hit, it chronicled the organization of those underground societies, describing compounds of several thousands where babies were born and regular lives were lived, with elected officials, hot water and even electricity. However, the book was promptly criticized for its inconsistencies. Still, while the essay might have been inflated or romanticized, it was nonetheless true that the homeless begging in the streets of New York were merely the tip of the iceberg. This period is gone. That they spoke their own language. Creepy stuff, straight out of a horror movie… Most was made-up. I personally never witnessed unusual stuff. Written in an abandoned crew room of the F subway line, these words were the reason I ventured into the tunnels in the first place, looking for the invisible, guided by local dwellers along the years to seek foundations of humanity in the foundations of the city. All the stories I had read about the Mole People before descending myself had two things in common. They all showed simple human beings who were in no way comparable to the legends that had been told, and they all included a man named Bernard Isaac. A place to find peace and take a break from the chaos. Isaac was at the very center of the Mole People legend. His BA in journalism and his studies in philosophy had somehow led him to work as a model, then as a TV crew member, then as a tour guide in the Caribbean where he began to the States. The father of two sons with two different women, he never cared much for family life, preferring to spend his smuggling profits on parties thrown at his Upper West Side penthouse. Soon he was broke, friendless and on his own. By the late 1980s, he was sleeping in the Riverside Park tunnel. The tunnel was known by homeless people since its inception in the 1930s, when it was used by trains to bring cattle to the city before the freight operations ended. Its population, limited at first to about three or four individuals, quickly grew at the time Isaac settled in, evolving into small tribes of vagrants who built thriving shantytowns in the newly abandoned space. Few risked getting down into the tunnel. But those who did go down called it home, and it became a haven for the destitute to unwind without fear of getting arrested or. One day, three men asked Isaac for a toll as he came by the 125th Street entrance to the tunnel. Soon interest came from all around the world. In the encampment, the dwellers had a familiar place to be, watch TV, read or smoke. Rules were simple but strictly enforced. Some, like Isaac, were at home in the darkness, and would not have lived anywhere else. Most who lived here did not consider themselves homeless. As word spread of the tunnel, a growing number of graffiti artists came to paint the seemingly endless walls that flanked the train tracks. We dared to be ourselves. Another who attempted to go to the surface was Bob Kalinski, a speed addict known as the fastest cook east of the Mississippi, who could fry twenty eggs at a time when on amphetamines. A heart attack forced him to. He too returned in the following months. The sense of belonging simply was too strong. The tunnel was a better place for him to be alone in freedom. Jon must have passed out drunk, now, somewhere behind me. Every noise is threatening in the tunnel, and I find myself constantly looking over my shoulder, ready to face something too awful to name. Was that a train I heard? The metallic vibration of a dragged chain? It smells like death here. The pungent stench of rotting meat. The smell of death all over now. Are those eyes glowing nearby? I lean against the wall and try to breathe calmly, reminding myself this place is only populated by old memories and the occasional homeless person looking for a safe place to be. The rumbling feels closer. I see rats scurrying by, racing into the obscurity. Then I see the charred remains of an animal in the corner of an alcove — a raccoon maybe, a big rodent with liquefied flesh, burnt fur and missing limbs. I walk away holding my breath. The ground is littered with discarded books and magazines. A broken crack pipe has been left on a cinder block. There is a garden chair, and overturned crates and buckets. A mangled teddy bear. Raúl shaves every morning with great care. His clothes are spotless, regularly washed at a nearby laundromat. Maybe talk to some people. An ex-girlfriend and a kid. He rents an apartment from a friend when his kid comes to visit, a clean studio in a gray Washington Heights building. I hurt a lot of people. I collect cans, it keeps me busy. I do it all week long. Raúl uses a Fairway Market cart to bring empty soda and beer containers to various stores in the neighborhood, where he will redeem them for five cents each. The legal limit of returnable cans is 240 per person per day, so Raúl has to go to several supermarkets to earn more. The streets are full of opportunities if you know where to look. I deal with what I have. Raúl knows the risks. The means accidents are now more frequent than ever, with. In the buildings he helps maintain, he occasionally sells the tenants K2 — a form of synthetic marijuana that recently boomed across the city, especially in East Harlem where a homeless encampment was. This is who I am. Raúl insists we share the cupcakes he found. We both eat in silence. The incentives paid by the Department of Homeless Services to landlords renting out shelter units far exceed the ones given for providing tenants with permanent single room occupancy lodging. In 2014, the average stay was , a homeless shelter on West 95th Street managed by private company Aguila Inc. The city paid Aguila for each 100-square-foot room occupied by a homeless person. Conditions are appalling inside the Freedom House. Garbage piles up in the courtyard for rodents to feed on. Sometimes a , or the police close the street after someone is. The NYPD the place looking for people with outstanding warrants, targeting domestic abusers and failing to arrest the major dealers or car thieves roaming the area. The 23-year-old knows enough about shelters. She will never go back. She was sixteen when she got pregnant with her daughter Alyssa. Jessica was then diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and admitted to transitional housing in Brooklyn. She says that within a month, social services was badgering her to place her three-year-old in foster care. I called my sister and begged her to take care of Alyssa until I found a place of my own. But it was the right thing to do. At least she is with family. When she grows up I will explain it all to her. Once her daughter was in the hands of her sister, Jessica was sent to the Freedom House where she stayed for seven months until Aguila notified her of her imminent relocation. She began sleeping in a subway tunnel after transit authorities made her leave her spot in the Herald Square station corridor on 34th Street, dragging her by her feet when she refused to stand up from her mat. She wrote a long letter to her daughter there. She never sent it. I miss you everyday. I love you so much. Soon she will give them to her daughter. I catch myself wondering if Raúl can hear us from his place, cursing at us for breaking the no-noise rule of the premises. Brooklyn might be the oldest resident of the Riverside Park tunnel. Now fifty-four, she has been living here since 1982, when she discovered the place by following feral cats. Like Bernard Isaac, she appeared in various films and documentaries. She has perfected her story for journalists along the years. Everything she relates is recited like a school lesson. Her stint in the Marines. The death of her parents and the loss of her family house. The kids lighting her cardboard shack on fire in the park. Her boyfriend BK and their issues. The food bowls left at her door for the forty-nine cats she feeds. She is a tough woman who speaks her mind, and she has the unyielding attitude of someone who has trudged through life. Her bandana and dreadlocks make her look younger than she is. Tunnel stew today, a meal made of anything available — chicken soup, microwave mixes or thrown-away vegetables cooked over a crackling wood fire. That would be nice. The stew is surprisingly tasty. You never get used to it. Brooklyn is disappointed when I tell her I have to go. She calls one of her cats as I keep walking to the south end of the tunnel. The whole place feels like a grave. A cathedral for the dead and the fallen. Nothing is left from the former shacks. Even the smallest pieces of debris are gone. A raw, burning power that some, like Isaac, will seek their whole life. Sane immediately sprayed the quote on the wall. A train rushes by, almost silent with its unbearably bright lights, the air swelling around me as the cars dash past. This place is not for anyone to be, I think. I wait for dreams to come. Sleeping in the tunnel is an alien experience, but the sight of rain falling down the ventilation grates and streaking the chiaroscuro light is worth it alone, definite proof that poetry can endure anywhere. This is the final byproduct of the city. This is civilization pushed to its foremost edge, a harsh place if any, dangerous and unforgiving, but a peaceful place at the same time, welcoming in its grimness. This is a dark and wild beast inviting you to come closer because nothing will ever be all right, but she will always be at your side to keep you warm. This first round of evictions wound up largely ineffective and the population quickly grew back to its initial size, as people from up top encampments went straight to the tunnel when they were. Amtrak Police Captain Doris Comb started calling for more enforcement, effectively pushing the homeless out of the active railway. Different times were looming ahead. They feel rejected and decline assistance. Some flatly refused to cooperate and gave up all hope of being granted Section 8 apartments. Margaret Morton would later write in a that this solution had been by far the most economical for the city. There would even be success stories. Then there were the others. One would commit suicide, sitting in front of a running train. Another was found dead in his apartment. Another succumbed to AIDS. Bernard Isaac passed away in late 2014, closing a chapter of an old New York legend. His ashes were sprinkled across a creek in his native Florida. The legend was gone, but homelessness was more real than ever. According to Coalition for the Homeless, , an all-time record since the Great Depression, with numbers increasing for the sixth consecutive year. There were 42,000 homeless children across the five boroughs in 2014. Everything else becomes a symptom. The cause is lack of affordable housing. At the time of his declaration, only five people had been found living in the Riverside Park tunnel, but a different community was already growing on a nearby dead-end street dubbed. His Goya reproduction has been damaged by water. In a few years from now, it will be completely gone, washed away by the elements. Wind gusts make dust rise up in whirlpools. A blue jay flies past a grate. I wake up and New York slowly comes to life. Carlos lives holed up in an old sewer pipe of about six feet high by five feet wide near the south entrance to the Riverside Park tunnel. He is one of the few original dwellers who stayed. His house is small but very practical, entirely concealed by a metal lid he takes great care of pulling on every time he gets inside. His electricity is tapped from an outlet further down the tunnel, allowing him to store his food in a refrigerator and have heat during winter. I read a lot. All kinds of books. I read them and I sell them. Sometimes they try to make me leave. Carlos shows me where a decomposing body was found by Amtrak workers in 2006, months after taggers had discovered it. Two femurs bundled in cargo pants, neatly laid into an old child stroller, with pieces of leathered skin still attached to them, and a skull standing on top of a nearby pole. Inside, a sentence is underlined in blue ink. The streets seem slower than usual. Hurt just makes us hurt. And hurt lives in the land of the lost, and unites them in missing love and broken homes, for five cents a can, 240 cans per day. The few Mole People left today survive in hurt. They are relics of a New York that was, and witnesses of a world so estranged that nobody truly remembers it anymore. Most are too late for the topside life. How easy it would be to go away and never come back. But this is their city. This is their home. These are their minds wandering and their time slipping. Their hopes and their thirsts until the sun goes down. Away — to a place made of birches and wet leaves and blue afternoons and muddy clothes, a place where dark days would be foreign — a place for them and all the unseen, warm as liquor, where hurt would be sweet and love would be real. An outfielder for the South Bend Blue Sox — a team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League A. The hotel was likely decorated with muted colors in the modernist style of the previous decade. All available supplies needed to go toward the war effort. The story was similar in baseball. With most of the Major League Baseball players deployed, executives decided to fill the gap with female players, paving the way for the A. Members of the Fort Wayne Daisies baseball team, 1948. Photo courtesy State Archives of Florida Players had to attend charm school and wear lipstick on the field. Their uniforms had skirts instead of pants — not great for sliding, but deemed appropriately feminine by league owner Philip K. Though it was never explicitly stated, historians and players alike say the rules were in place, in part, to prevent the women from being perceived as lesbians. The two women hit it off, keeping in touch when Donahue moved back to the U. The next day was her birthday. Right, Peoria Redwings team photo in 1947 — the year she met Pat Henschel. Donahue played in the team from 1946 to 1949. For seven decades the two told almost everyone, aside from their inner circle, that they were best friends. For 70 years theirs has been a love story, originating in a time when the only love stories we were allowed to tell were those between a man and a woman. Try to ask most former players about the issue and they clam up. The players could have lost more than just their baseball careers if they had been open about their queerness. They could have lost their families, occupations, and reputations, too. She was the first to start an N. She then played for the independent, otherwise all-male St. Paul Saints and Duluth-Superior Dukes. Indeed, that same year, the book SportsDykes: Stories From On and Off the Field was also published. She understands today that talking about being a gay athlete is a double-edged sword, in a way. But this stereotype existed long before Borders was even born. Cahn in her book Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth Century Sports. Photo courtesy State Archives of Florida It was this perception of female athletes as unfeminine and unfeminine women as lesbians that led Wrigley, a chewing gum manufacturer and president of the Chicago Cubs, to insist that his players be appropriately feminine in appearance. When the affair was between teammates, chaperones would refuse to let the suspected couple room together and gauge the reaction of the players to confirm their hunch. In one case, the suspected lovers were so angry about being barred from becoming roommates that team manager Johnny Gottselig considered it proof of the affair. In another case, a married player was rumored to have fallen for one of her teammates. Another time, Leo said that a married player was discovered to be in a relationship with a woman who was unassociated with the league. Leo claimed he notified her husband, who came and took her home. They often arrived from small towns or rural areas and were quite young when they left home. As a result, it was not uncommon for new or younger players to be completely blindsided by the relationships between their teammates. Dorothy Hunter entered the League in 1943, when she was 27. Well, I just thought they were giving me the gears because I was a green Canadian. If straight players were married, many of their husbands were off at war or were left back at home on farms or in factories. It was in many ways the perfect environment for gay women to become involved with each other. But in some cases, the near-inability to date was a welcome reality. It made staying in the closet easier, because there was no time for dating and so there was no need to make excuses. This was something that Borders discovered, too, when she was playing ball in the 1990s. One of those women was Dot Wilkinson, often regarded as the greatest softball player of her time — and perhaps all time. Wilkinson was a hard-playing catcher for the Phoenix Ramblers. She joined the American Softball Association A. I never thought about anything else. She also knew that the league was actively discouraging players from being perceived as exactly what Wilkinson was — gay. But she had another love, too. Wilkinson and Caito played together for two seasons, until the A. The most telling evidence is often in veiled language or titles that are open to interpretation. She attended the mass tryout at Wrigley Field, becoming one of the original members of the league in 1943. During the season, she was traded to the Kenosha Comets. Her contract was not renewed in 1944, forcing her to try out again. After leaving the league, she became a physical education teacher. She is rumored to have impressed Babe Ruth with how far she could hit a softball, and it is said he squeezed the biceps on her arm when he posed with her for a photo. In 1944 the Brooklyn Dodgers invited Deegan and two other women to their spring training camp. If she were a man, she no doubt would have been a Dodger. According to the now-defunct NJ Divas Fastpitch site, Deegan and Nusse were partners for almost 50 years. The two shared their passion for softball: Deegan was the coach for the Linden, New Jersey, Arians and Nusse was the manager. Nusse passed away just six months after Deegan died, at age 85. June Peppas was a pitcher and first baseman from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who played in the A. She was the first chairperson of the Players Association Board and two-time A. Photo courtesy State Archives of Florida One of the best pitchers to ever play in the A. The girl from Rockford, Illinois, played 10 seasons in the league. In that time she threw three no hitters, had three 20-win seasons, and had an unassisted triple play — something that has only happened 15 times in Major League Baseball since 1909. Cione spent her rookie year in 1947 with the Rockford Peaches and finished with an astonishing 1. It was a treat to watch a game with her. She analyzed every play. Their obituaries, which are historical documents, offer us glimpses into their lives and are open for us to interpret. In their younger days, they look like they could be sisters as they pose in front of a Christmas tree in a picture that might have been taken in the 1960s. They each sport short, dark hairstyles and wear sleeveless turtleneck shirts. In another, they are perhaps in their 60s and they dance together in front of a fireplace. They are both laughing. Their hairstyles have not changed in the decades between the two photos except to turn from brown to gray. Members of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and an umpire, 1948. Photo courtesy State Archives of Florida They are ready to tell the world the truth about their relationship. Their eyes are closed. But they hid this truth for as long as they did because, for most of their lives, they had too much to lose by coming out. She had ascended to a level that no woman ever had before. And then, she quit. Borders looks out onto the field of women whose uniforms are streaked with dirt. My entire body feels tense, not ideal for the setting. I try to relax, but the plush leather couch crumples under me when I shift, making the movements extraordinary. Of course it has. On the surface, when the patient has been highly selective of the discussion topics, therapy always resembles a friendly get-together. She quickly and convincingly pointed out that I work rather hard and am, ultimately, paying my bills on time, that I have friends, an appreciation for arts and culture, and so on. I was too insecure and too single to handle such a compliment from a beautiful woman. I shrugged my shoulders, only half looking up. Do you bend me over and take me from behind? I take a second to let the red flow out of my face, and ponder what she said. So I go home, incredibly turned on and completely unashamed. In treatment I came to realize that all people have contradictions to their personalities. In my case, my extreme sensitivity can make me feel fabulous about the aspects of myself that I somehow know are good my artistic tastes and cause deep hatred of those traits I happen to loathe the thirty pounds I could stand to lose. My next session with Lori is productive. One constant is that I put crudely high expectations on others, mirroring those thrown upon me as a kid. Then, a week later, Lori mentions it, and I become tense again. There were two ways to find out: 1 Discontinue the therapy, wait for her outside her office every day, follow her to a hypothetical happy hour and ask her out, or 2 Keep going to therapy. We both know the answer to that question. All I can do is stare back. I see what she means. When our sessions finally resumed, I could not wait to tell her about my budding relationship with Shauna. Plans happened magically without anxiety-inducing, twenty-four-hour waits between texts. Her quick wit kept me entertained, and I could tell by the way she so seriously spoke about dancing, her chosen profession, that she is passionate about the art form and mighty talented too. Shauna is beautiful, with flawless hazel eyes and straight dark hair, spunky bangs and a bob that matches her always-upbeat character. She is a snazzy dresser and enjoys a glass of whiskey with a side of fried pickles and good conversation as much as I do. So upon the precipice of my return to therapy I told Shauna about Lori, and admitted to having mixed feelings about what I was getting back into. The first two sessions of my therapeutic reboot had gone great. Lori appeared genuinely thrilled that I was dating Shauna and could see how happy I was. I stuff the cat food back into the Tupperware and toss it into the refrigerator. I make my way into the living room, angry at myself for not changing the settings on my new iPhone to disallow text previews on the locked screen. I can tell she regrets looking at my phone without my permission, but I completely understand her feelings. On my walk home, instead of being angry at Lori, I understand her thinking behind the text. A patient may in turn contemplate that a love is blossoming between them, and, in fact, it sort of is. This takes genuine care and acceptance on their part. In employing countertransference — indicating that she had feelings for me — she was keeping me from feeling rejected and despising my own thoughts and urges. Atlas explains that there are certain boundaries that cannot be crossed between therapist and patient under any circumstances — like having sex with them, obviously. Do you deny it? Do you talk about it? How do you talk about it without seducing the patient and with keeping your professional ability to think and to reflect? Atlas quickly points out that emotional intimacy — though not necessarily that of the sexual brand — is almost inevitable and required. Atlas says this topic speaks to every facet of the therapeutic relationship, regardless of gender or even sexual orientation, because intimacy reveals emotional baggage that both the patient and therapist carry with them into the session. In order to be able to be vulnerable, both parties have to feel safe. Atlas steadfastly says she does not want to judge too harshly why and how everything came to pass in my therapy. In order for Lori to advance in her field as a social worker, she has to attend 3,000 conference hours with another professional to go over casework — kind of like therapy quality control. We talk about all of this during one of my scheduled sessions, for the entire hour — and go over by a few minutes, too. It can become a cycle of behavior that Lori seeks to break. I refer back to the time when, unprovoked, she brought up my attraction to her. There was no in between. Lori noticed that I was frustrated with myself and wanted me to know that an attraction to a therapist is so normal and happens so frequently that there are technical terms for it. I turn my attention towards the presence of countertransference in our session. She says she liked the fact that I was wearing a blazer and a tie on a first date. She adds that I was a little shorter than she anticipated, but was content with the two of us at least being the same exact height. It seems my emotional workouts in erotic transference were just beginning to produce results. But, so you have a full understanding of how this works, we can date. The difference this time is the answer I want to give is on par with all of my involuntary urges. Would she ever see me as a lover, a partner, an equal, and not a patient? Could I ever reveal a detail about myself, or even just a shitty day of work, without wondering if she was picking it apart and analyzing it? Frankly, all those questions could be answered in the positive. Work payments that were past due are finally finding their way into my bank account. As it turns out, my short-term money troubles were not an indication that I had no business being a writer, or that my life changeup was as irresponsible as unprotected sex at fourteen years old. I took a mental step back from my current situation and realized that in spite of my recent hardships, I was succeeding. Our editors did too, voting it one of our 20 best untold tales! To this day she is the subject of one of the oldest unsolved cases recorded by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Her search was one of the largest for a child since the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping six years earlier. If she is, she may yet celebrate her 85th birthday next month. After the much-publicized Adam Walsh abduction, parents became more , and government agencies instituted safety programs including to keep on file. The dangers Depression-era vagrants, illicit adoption rings were just different. Bradford enjoyed its own rush for liquid gold a dozen years later, providing a steady living for families like the Wests — Shirley was an assistant engineer at Kendall Refining, located just a few blocks from his home. After church, the Wests drove 13 miles along Highway 219 to a clearing in the Allegheny Forest that was popular with hunters and fishermen. They joined family friends, Mr. Cecilia headed to the road to rest in the car. Her husband, Shirley, prepared to go trout fishing in the stream with Lloyd. The girls, Dorothea and Marjorie, wanted to pick wildflowers. Shirley warned them to watch for rattlesnakes behind the boulder nearby. The girls gathered a bouquet of violets. Dorothea headed to the car to deliver them to their mother. When she turned around, her sister was gone. The family drove to the nearest phone seven miles away to contact police in the town of Kane. What followed was a grueling search that spanned months and saw more than 3,000 local people hunting for Marjorie, with countless others locked into the national newspaper coverage. As darkness fell, oilmen brought headlamps. The effort slowed when a cold rain fell at one a. On Monday, the search party grew to 500. They waded through the stream and stood 25 yards apart in a mile-long line, ultimately combing four square miles. Police interviewed motorists across an area spanning 300 square miles. By Tuesday, May 10, police brought bloodhounds from New York State. That evening, they found clues, but accounts vary. Nothing of interest was found inside. Many people believed in 1938, as they do now, that Marjorie was picked up at the road. Witnesses told police of three cars that had passed through the area around three p. The drivers of two were identified by Tuesday night. The third — whom witnesses said was a man — was seen fleeing in his Plymouth sedan so fast an oncoming motorist told police he had to pull into a ditch. Newspaper clipping from the Bradford Era on May 11, 1938, showing the search for West. Photo courtesy the Bradford Era The search was praised for its organization, thanks in part to the men who, like Shirley, had served in the Great War. By the end of the week, the search had covered 35 square miles with Marjorie still out of sight. There were discoveries: a swath of lace near the boulder, and a fresh hole a few miles away. He ate his evening meal at home and then returned. Cecilia West stayed at home so as not to miss a phone call. On May 13, 1938, State Police Commissioner P. Newspapers covering the disappearance linked it with a 1910 mystery in which two boys vanished near the forest within a few hours of each other. The boys ran, but when the group stopped, Eddie was gone. Thirteen miles away, in the town of Ludlow, Michael Steffan, seven, fished with a friend. Walking home, the other boy looked back and Michael had vanished. Newspapers at the time reported that a Mr. But Harry returned a week later with no knowledge of the boys, police said. In fact, The Era reported on Sept. The story said the woodsman had been questioned about Marjorie at one point, but was released. If Marjorie was snatched, it could have been for profit. During the Great Depression, child kidnappings became a popular, low-tech way to make a buck. Still, many of those who believed Marjorie was abducted thought it was not for ransom, but for a different type of moneymaking enterprise. Reward poster for any information on the disappearance of West. Photo courtesy McKean County Cold Cases On Sept. Tann died three days after the investigation became public. Many of the children never knew their birth parents including famed professional , born in 1949, who wrote of the circumstance in his autobiography. The Tann theory was bolstered by a clue. Could they have been stopping midway to Tennessee? But news stories from five months later render the Tann theory unlikely. In October 1938, Pennsylvania state police tracked down merchant Conrad Fridley of Ridgely, West Virginia. He said that on that evening, he and daughter Lois, five, were returning home from a visit to Parsons, West Virginia, and had to stop because of fog. Lois became frustrated and cried. They left the hotel early the next morning to open his shop. During the trip, two men from the Civil Conservation Corps discussed their search, as youths, for Marjorie. After the Olean, New York, , Dittman got a call from another elderly man, now blind, who had searched as well. Yet she believes the most likely explanation is that Marjorie was kidnapped. My grandmother held on to her feeling of responsibility until her passing two years ago. However, they did , compelling the state police, unable to find old records, to start a new case file. State Police Corporal Mary Gausman says that in 2012 police. Unfortunately, they produced no clues. But both agencies get tips. Gausman says that in 2014, an employee of a hospital in Rochester, New York, read about the case online and called to say they had a patient named Marjorie who rarely had visitors. However, one Bradford native believes he knows the answer to the mystery. He included up-to-date photos of Dorothea, figuring Marjorie would resemble her. The nurse did look like Dorothea, but denied being Marjorie. Around 2005, Beck says, he heard from her again and went to meet her. By then she had returned to her childhood farm in North Carolina. Come spring, it was time to return to his crops. He was afraid she was dead. He and his wife had lost their only daughter that winter. The man brought Marjorie to the farm and raised her there. A few years later, he lost an arm on board an aircraft carrier in World War II, Beck says. After World War II, her parents had four more children, according to Beck. The nurse died about a decade ago. Beck kept his promise and self-published Finding Marjorie West in 2010. Portrait of 4-year-old Marjorie West. One family is dead, and the other has been living under a set of circumstances they believe to be true. The mother and father were considered good people in the community. Beck says he understands why people are frustrated, particularly those involved in the search. He notes the case is the third-oldest in their files. But the story begs questions: How were two people able to keep the secret so long? Perhaps the tale is just too good to be true. But according to an article from October 1938, the police and Wests went to meet Conrad Fridley, the merchant who said he was there. Beck dismissed the newspaper accounts, saying he stands by his story. Where did she go? One cannot discount the rough terrain in the woods. In 1962, two boys died while exploring an abandoned clay mine in Western Pennsylvania, prompting Bradford officials to finally start closing all old mines, caves, and wells. Responding to recent newspaper essays in the last few years about parents becoming overprotective due to modern media coverage of tragedies, their parents became more protective after the Lindbergh Baby case. There was a similar effect in Western Pennsylvania in 1938. Tammy Dittman, the Bradford teacher, says kids should be wary and vigilant. Because your life depends on it. As I threaded my sneakers and prepared to keep my promise by jogging home to the apartment I shared with four other Yale grad students, I remembered another deal, the one that started this whole mess. The one I had made about a decade earlier with my high school boyfriend. A deal about sex, running and the Mormon Church. I fell for my first boyfriend when I was 15, arriving home from church on one of those sticky, Upstate New York, summer afternoons. After a morning of trying to be a good Latter-day Saint by skipping breakfast, putting on a dress, and spending three hours reading scripture and singing songs about how my body is a temple and the only person I should ever let inside it was my wedded husband , all I could think about was peeling off my sweaty pantyhose and stuffing my face with Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Then I saw him, running by my house. Up until that moment, I had ignored this boy, who had moved to our neighborhood the year before from Maine. But what I was seeing as I felt my stomach growl and my nylons riding down my crotch was a puberty miracle. He had transformed from a skinny, seemingly weak, invisible kid to a lithe, powerful athlete who ran with the joy and abandon of Pheidippides and the irresistible style and charisma of Prefontaine. I was a goner. His natural, fluid, effortless laps over the rolling hills surrounding our neighborhood awed me. At that point I was getting clobbered as a field hockey fullback, desperately defending the goal against an onslaught of veteran hoss players. I was in the lineup because the team was short-handed that year and took anyone who would wear a skirt and hold a stick. Unlike my new crush, who ran for love of the sport, I used athletics as an outlet — a way to deal with the teenage sexual energy I urgently needed to suppress. I was skinny, muscular and scrappy, but this never translated to excellence in any of my athletic pursuits. By my teen years, I had bounced around, a few seasons here and there, on every team imaginable: basketball, softball, soccer, gymnastics, volleyball, even one tragically desperate year in cheerleading. The insta-crush I had on my neighbor was mutual, and we quickly became obsessed with each other. I learned that, aside from running, my new boyfriend loved jazz and kissing. He taught me to french while listening to hours and hours of John Lee Hooker records. I remember lying on his bed, stiff and resistant, a hair-trigger of curiosity, puberty and guilty self-loathing. His first lick — barely touching the inside of my lips and the tip of my teeth — was infused with the knowledge, beyond his years, that his only job was to keep me from bolting, to stay, and want just a little more. I settled for his armpits — the only other place, besides his mouth, I could possibly justify as not being explicitly forbidden, and the one spot I could reach without actually undressing him. Taking his shirt off felt too wrong, so I pulled and stretched the collar of his v-neck t-shirt down to access what I wanted, chafing his neck and strangling him a little in the process. We swam in Lake Ontario every chance we got because it was the one permissible activity that allowed us to gaze at and lie next to each other with the least amount of clothing on our bodies as possible. Though he continued to win races, and I aced my AP courses, we cared about little else than the next time we could wear our mouths out on each other. The two of us, together, mattered more than food. But what can matter more than sex? The first time my boyfriend tried to lift my shirt, asking me if he could just touch the places my modest one-piece bathing suit concealed, I shut him down and explained the rules governing my morality and chastity. I had to explain that, as a true believer and follower of the faith, I was 100 percent committed to: no drinking, no smoking, no coffee, no tea, church for three hours every Sunday, and, of course, no premarital sex. Or below my collarbone. And are you saying like…even no…premarital fingering? No going down action at all? He was devastated and incredulous. The only rules about sex his hippie parents had taught him to live by were to always give a girl more pleasure first than he ever expected to get in return; never give her any reason to fear or distrust him; and, most importantly, take every means necessary to avoid STDs and pregnancy. But my boyfriend somehow loved and cared about me more than he loved sex, so he respected my rules. He just could not confine his competitive streak to running — he wanted to win my body over so bad. His creativity paid off. I began to cross my own boundaries, and try things my church had never explicitly stated were wrong, but felt so good I knew they must be. I was thrilled to discover dry humping — how had my bishop not thought to scream from the pulpit that this was basically sex and should be totally forbidden?! But these momentary, forbidden pleasures always morphed into aching guilt. My boyfriend started to see how tortured I was, getting excited, then disconnecting and withdrawing, over and over and over again. We started to fight. Why are you putting yourself through this suffering and denial of every urge and instinct? Why do you shut the juices down just as they are getting going?! What kind of crazy, dogmatic, cultish system would make you want to do such a thing? I told him we should break up. That he would never understand. But instead of breaking up, he made me a deal: He would learn about my religion, if I would learn about running. Running was his church, the dogma behind his discipline, self-sacrifice and denial. He promised to try to understand Mormonism if I would learn to run. It was one of the few teams I had never tried; running was the hardest, least enjoyable part of every other sport I had played. An athletic activity consisting solely of running felt like suffering, distilled to its most concentrated form. And unlike the mostly mediocre-with-random-lucky-moments-of-stellar-performance I managed in other sports, I was a terrible runner. Practices were torture sessions. Unlike almost everyone else on my team who had been doing this crazy shit since junior high, I had never run for more than a mile in my entire life. During the usual seven-milers we cranked out each day after school, my heart beat so hard I thought it would explode. Though the girls on my team ran together in a tight unit, making sure to pace so that no one was left behind, my experience was not of comradery, but of loneliness. With my pulse rushing through my ears, my face splotchy and beet-red from the blood pounding in my head, I felt totally closed off, trapped, and almost deaf. When I raced, I always crossed the finish line at the end of the pack, usually dead last. I barfed afterward several times. It took me days to recover from each competition. The real deal I had made with my boyfriend was to be tortured and publicly humiliated by the worst sport ever invented. I had started running because of a boy, youthful naivety, and religious zeal — a self-torture trifecta. Self-will and mental determination ruled this sport. If I believed I could put one foot in front of the other, just one more time, and one more time after that, I would. Over a period of a few years, I watched his disdain and barely-masked tolerance of the woo-woo ways of Mormonism turn into tentative respect, and then full-fledged, brainwashed belief. Many fateful stars aligned. Though he went to a Catholic university in the Midwest on a running scholarship, his academic mentor, the chair of the geology department, happened to be Mormon. My boyfriend was contacted by some amazingly handsome and charismatic Latter-day Saints missionaries. The local congregation surrounding his college became a welcoming and supportive family structure during the long, desolate Midwestern winters. Eventually, he got baptized and left his running prospects behind to go on a two-year proselytizing mission to Thailand. When he came back, he was a completely different person — a boring, judgmental, and self-righteous young man. He gave away all his jazz records. The parasites he got on his mission ruined him for running forever. Our relationship, which had transformed over the years from high-school infatuation to deep adult love, did not survive the years of separation. We had both changed too much. While he was off baptizing in Thailand, I went to college in Utah and became very depressed. Running became my lifeline. I ran alone in the foothills of the high Uinta Mountains as a physical means of out-running the psychic and spiritual crisis of my everyday existence. It was a way to stave off the pain and doubt underlying my efforts to keep believing the mantra I had been hearing my entire life: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only true church upon the face of the Earth. The race course wove through the desert surrounding the majestic Colorado River, and seemed like the perfect place for a respite from the hordes of happy Mormons surrounding me on a daily basis. The vast, unpeopled landscape suggested a world into which I might escape. The race was a disaster. I felt like shit after the first five miles, and started to realize I was in real trouble about mile ten. During the last few miles, I could feel my legs seizing up, but I was determined to finish. Twenty years later, I cried and peed through the entire last mile of the 1993 Moab Half Marathon; my chafed thighs burned more fiercely than the humiliation of urinating in front of my entire class while paying for tater-tots. Ironically, while trying to ace courses in how to protect the bodies and minds of everyone else on the planet, I failed to take care of my own. I was also plagued by debilitating self-loathing: I had come to hate my body and the forbidden things it wanted. I hated myself for that weakness too. Looking out the window of the ambulance that drove me straight from the student counseling center to in-patient psych, I watched students on the sidewalk walking briskly, some breaking out in a trot, anxious to get somewhere they wanted to be, on time. My only consolation was that my roommate had some brain chemistry problems that were actually worse than mine. Anything was better than watching a hospital orderly hand my roommate a diaper, and trying not to watch what was going to happen next. And so, when they discharged me from the psych ward, a very wise but somewhat manipulative therapist preyed on my tenacious respect for God and promises, making me swear to take my Prozac and run every day. I agreed to the Prozac because I was desperate, but I balked at the idea that 20 minutes of running would do anything at all for me. It seemed like he was trying to decide if he should scare me, appeal to my sense of reason, or maybe lie to me about why I should do what he was asking. He had bigger problems, like my diaper-wearing roommate, to deal with. I ran all winter in that wet, stinging, snow that Connecticut winters spit down. Sometimes I jogged in my jeans and Birkenstocks, too depressed to muster the strength to change into workout gear. But I did it. I took the pills. I ran the daily 20. My brain chemistry slowly recovered. The prescription healed me. I have been running, 20 minutes every day, for over 15 years because that therapist was right: I made it 11 months and three days before I felt like I needed to feel the suffering of real life again. But like anyone who has reached the edge and gone over it, I live with a nagging, constant fear that my next breakdown is never far away. This desperation to titrate the delicate balance of serotonin, endorphins, dopamine and glutamate that my brain needs keeps me putting on my shoes and hitting the pavement or the treadmill. I never manage a Zen-like meditative state, not even for a few seconds. I really need a bikini wax. I should stop getting them altogether. But so is feeling disgusting when I put on a bathing suit. It also hurts like a MOTHERFUCKER. I could go right after this, but I think I am getting my period, like right now. And those poor Asian ladies have seen my bloody underpants too many times. There are days I just know that if I go into my bedroom after work to find a sports bra, change into sweatpants, and sit on my bed, just for a few minutes, I might not make it up and out again. You late for something?