This one is harder to share. It touches on a lot of the things that made me who I am today. It is, by necessity, more personal. I want to do it justice. Both for myself and for those I met during this time. For what the experience was like for a divergent mind like mine. Ah, start from the beginning, Dave.
I was twelve going on thirteen when my best friend of the last several years moved away. We had been closer than brothers since the second grade. This was something that happened with pretty much every close friend I had as a kid. Caribou Maine was… well, not booming. As the economy shrunk, many families moved on to greener pastures. The population shrunk a great deal, in large part because Loring Airforce Base (in the nearby town of Limestone) closed. What mills and factories were left followed. Then a lot of local stores, restaurants, and so on and so forth. The 90s were… hmm, in some ways, a time of great optimism. In others, they were when more rural America began to feel the weight of a vastly, quickly changing economy. The internet boom, trade deals and so on.
I was in the early fall of my Eighth grade year when, well, I decided to run away from home. Mostly because, for me, school felt like a prison. To borrow from a film, “In a hostile environment, surrounded by people who probably wanna kick my ass.” (Jonny Cage — Mortal Kombat)
I can’t recall fully, what it felt like. I just remember running, miles from home, on the highway. Of course, as kids often do, I had forgotten certain essentials. Like needing a restroom. Fortunately, a friendly police officer spotted me and wondered why I wasn’t in school. Unfortunately, he then gently delivered me there. Students were, well, surprised… to see me show up at school in a police car. Probably one of the most exciting things they’d seen all week.
Without getting too deep into the counseling and therapy that followed… my Grandfather passed at around this same time. He left his home to my Mother, his daughter — at a place called Madawaska Lake. My family debated and voted (three kids and the parents at the time) whether to move. We did. Roughly thirty miles away. This was my first experience with a small town school — in the tiny town of Stockholm, Maine. It was… so much better. No one knew me. No one knew my history, what a social pariah I had been, how different, how strange. There was no reputation for being the quiet weird kid. Surprisingly, I made friends. Surprisingly, I even started to enjoy school a little. Not so much the academic work, more the social environment. People I could talk to, hang out with, who didn’t want to kick my ass — well, probably.
Things went well until near the end of the year. That was when I had my first real experience of clinical depression. I don’t know why, not for certain. I don’t know how. I just know it happened. There was a dark cloud following me wherever I went. A constant drain of my energy, a feeling of… emptiness, of misery, that no matter what I tried, I could not make go away. So, naturally, therapy. Deeper and deeper it went, the diagnosis was something like general anxiety and clinical depression. The medication started then — zoloft — I still take it at 41.
So, I missed most of the end of my eighth grade year, not really a big deal, they graduated me not because I earned the grades for it — but because the teacher thought I was smart. Perhaps I was… but that and a token, I often say, will get me a ride on the subway. Intelligence is a force without polarity. It is what we do with it that matters. I had no clue what to do with mine, however great or small it actually was.
Enter high school. The smaller schools of my county merge with larger high schools. For me, it was a return to the tiny city of Caribou, of years gone by. The friends I had made in the eighth grade became, well, distant. They had their own friends now. And I was back in a place where people knew me. The weird kid. The quiet one. The one who would turn red in the face when anyone talked to him. No one seemed able to meet my eyes, and I rarely attempted to meet theirs. My first day of high school… I recall walking through the cafeteria, lunch tray in hand, looking for a place where I could sit alone. For whatever reason, as I passed by the “popular” table, I looked up. This led to a full round of “The fag isn’t sitting by me”, and similar comments. To the person I am today… not a big deal. To the child I was then, it was devastating. Anyway, I found a spot to sit alone.
Going home that night, I told my parents that if they made me go back to high school, that was it. There would be no letter, I would simply… end myself.
So, naturally, this led to a lot more therapy. A stay in a child crisis center, an attempt at “alternative education” that didn’t really work out. My parents, at the end of their rope with me, I think, finally decided to set up Switched-On Schoolhouse — home schooling. I, uh, quickly figured out my mother’s password and gave myself grades of 100 for everything. They figured it out eventually. And… from there, things drifted. They’d tried everything within reason — and the truant officer didn’t care enough to make a thirty mile drive every day to make me go to school.
This was when I discovered the internet. Text based games like Gemstone 3 and Dragon Realms (the Simutronics universe) and, well, they became my new reality. My escape. Roleplaying in text, to which I was native, someone who was constantly reading everything. There, I could be who I wanted to be. To make a very long story much shorter, it was my escape for years. It was how I carried on, how I managed the depression, the anxiety that followed. It was how I met my first girlfriend, who became the mother of my son. I was… well, fifteen, and she was twenty-one. My feelings about that are more complicated than they once were. But, let’s skip ahead to the important parts.
I went to Loring Job Corps and earned a GED at 17. Took me about three months. High scores in everything but math, which has always been my Achilles heel. After that… I got my first job at a call center. Around the same time, my girlfriend and her four year old daughter moved in with me. We rented our own place. A few months later, she was pregnant with our son. I was bouncing between jobs, unable to hold on to anything stable. I washed dishes, I made phone calls to sell accidental death and dismemberment insurance to complete strangers. I played around online with MLM (multi-level-marketing) programs. Nothing really worked for me, financially speaking.
I was eighteen when my son was born. It was, I think, the most magical, happiest day of my life. I threw my cigarettes in the trash, and walked around the hospital telling strangers that I was a father, that I had a son. I had so many grand ideas, high ideals, noble goals. But I was neither mature enough nor wise enough to follow through with them. My mind was truly different from that of the average person. A few months after my son was born, I began to have severe panic attacks, on top of severe depression. I couldn’t handle it. Ended up going to the ER and telling the receptionist, “I don’t want to live. I think that’s a problem. And I don’t know what to do about it.”
What happened next, Dave?
Well, you might have guessed: a lot more therapy. A stay at Acadia Psychiatric hospital in Bangor. I was… I think, broken, in mind. I was scared out of my wits when I got to the hospital, the psych ward. Something I had only ever seen on television, or read about in books. Generally though… with a couple exceptions, the people I met were not so different from me. And then I met a young woman, a few years older than me. Beautiful, graceful, soulful. For the purposes of this story, I’ll call her Maura, which is not her real name. Maura was adopted from Seoul, South Korea, by an American family, as an infant. She was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. And for some reason, she seemed to like me. She kicked my butt at chess, taught me some new moves (that I have long since forgotten) and sat with me at lunch time. We became close… well, as close as two people in a psych ward can get within five days. More than anything, it was she who helped me to recover enough to be… well, a little bit better. Enough that I felt ready to go back to the outside world. I wrote her a long letter, on the day that I left, telling her how much I admired her, how deeply beautiful she was to me, and thanking her, for everything. She gave me a big hug… and a Garfield comic that she absolutely loved. And, well, then I went home with my parents.
A small thing, some might think. To me, it meant the world. Maura and I stayed in touch through email for a while, and eventually she stopped responding. I thought it was because of something I had said or done. It took me a year to work up the courage to actually look her up and call her. She was… very kind. But she was also very uncomfortable. She knew she had been at the psych ward. She had no memory of it. Electric shock therapy wipes out the memory base. That was the treatment she received. So I apologized, and we wished each other well… and that was it.
There are no proper words for what that felt like. For the person who had… in a very real way, saved me from myself… for her to lose all memory of ever having met me. Did I love her? Yes, I did. I still love her in memory.
As this website and its pages continue to grow, you will see that I talk about memory a great deal. This is how and why it started.
David Flagg — 2/22/2026
Images by Auri Amarin