" I knew that my remaining "preoccupation"...was not normal. I tried to fix it, and I couldn't. At the same time, I believed someday I would fix it and that fixing it would fix everything, would be the transformation that would lead to all other transformations, to wisdom, generosity, maturity. That's what I thought even through the writing of this book. That's what I thought until I met J.

...I was telling her the metaphor I had for the...stuff, which is something from sound editing: The...stuff was a track that ran in my brain under all the other tracks. Sometimes it would get so loud that it would drown out all the other tracks; sometimes I could lower the volume, but I was never able to remove the track from the session. Deleting the track was the wrong idea, J said; lowering the volume was good, but the main thing was to boost the other tracks. Develop other strengths and ways to cope; raise the signal on all I'd neglected. This had seriously never occurred to me...it wasn't subtraction that I needed; it was addition.

How could I raise the signal on the other tracks?
"Who's the engineer?" J. said. It was just the right question. "

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