Looking back, I can see that this was not just a period of loss, but of erasure. I would be ordered by the board to undergo a psychological assessment, and what followed moved forward without curiosity about who I had been, what I had built, or who I had loved. Shutdown doesn’t protest. It goes quiet.
I don’t remember much of this period in sequence. What I have are fragments—isolated scenes, physical sensations, outcomes without process. When I try to reconstruct it now, I’m aware of how much is missing. I sometimes wonder whether shame caused me to leave out details—not consciously, but as a way of surviving what I couldn’t yet hold.
I had already begun to imagine leaving Wilmington. Not as a plan, but as a possibility hovering at the edge of things. I no longer had a car. Someone I had let stay in the house had taken it. Lynn had co-signed, and the guilt of that sat heavily in my chest. I didn’t know how to fix it. I only knew that I couldn’t let it become one more thing she had to carry.
When I was ordered by the board to undergo a psychological assessment, I had to ask for help getting there. Jeff drove me to Chapel Hill. That detail stands out because it stripped away any remaining illusion that I was still functioning normally. I wasn’t arriving under my own power anymore.
The assessment itself is difficult to recall clearly. I remember being asked about my work, about my clients. I remember trying to give context - mentioning John F., the role he had played, the way he had involved himself in clients’ lives without clinical training, without licensure, without supervision. I knew he had no graduate education, no ethical oversight, no professional accountability of any kind. I mentioned him not to deflect responsibility, but because his influence had become impossible to separate from what was being alleged.
Somewhere in that exchange, the tone shifted.
I was asked whether I cared about my clients.
I understood what they were hearing. I understood how any attempt to explain context could sound like avoidance, like blame, like a failure to take responsibility. I also understood that once a question like that is asked, the answer no longer matters. It is no longer an inquiry. It is a conclusion.
What stays with me is not what they said, but what they did not ask.
There was no attempt to understand the larger story of my life.
They did not ask about Lynn—my wife—or about the sudden loss of a spouse, which is widely recognized as one of the most destabilizing life events a person can endure.
They did not ask about the loss of my home.
They did not ask about the collapse of my practice, or about the weeks and months before this assessment, when everything I had built— personally and professionally—was coming apart at the same time.
None of that entered the room.
What also did not enter the room was my history of taking my responsibility seriously. I had been in therapy since my undergraduate years, long before becoming a clinician, precisely because I grew up in an abusive home and did not want unresolved trauma to compromise my ethics or my judgment. I sought supervision. I consulted colleagues. I did not work in isolation. I was president of my local chapter of the Society of Clinical Social Workers. I preserved confidentiality even when doing so limited my ability to defend myself.
I could not report John F. without violating the very ethical standards I was being accused of failing to uphold. What I knew about his conduct came from confidential sessions. I knew that complaints had been made to professional organizations and state authorities, but I could not ethically act on information entrusted to me by clients.
That context did not appear relevant to the assessment.
What mattered, it seemed, was not how carefully I had worked, or how much effort I had put into being accountable, but how easily overwhelm could be mistaken for indifference.
Not long after the assessment, Diane called me. She asked me to come to the house and collect whatever belongings I wanted to keep.
I went without thinking. I arrived as if on autopilot, still believing—at some level—that all I wanted was Lynn.
I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.
Boxes were stacked everywhere. Our home—Lynn’s and mine—was already being taken apart.
Something hit me. The reality of losing our home, our life together, came all at once. It was too much.
I turned and walked into the computer room. I put my back against the wall and slid all the way down to a sitting position, my hands resting on my knees.
I stared ahead at nothing.
I don’t know how long I stayed there. I don’t remember crying. I don’t remember forming thoughts.
I couldn’t process it.
At some point, Diane asked for my mother’s phone number. I gave it to her automatically, reciting it without hesitation, as if reading from a file. I was there, but not there. Only later did I understand how predictable the outcome was. My mother would not have known what to say. Lynn would have known that. Whatever Diane hoped for in that call, it was not something my family could offer.
That realization came later. In the moment, I was only responding to requests, one after another, without the capacity to understand what any of them meant.
After that, time loses its shape again. I stayed in a motel. I pawned my computer to pay for the room, then bought it back, over and over, trying to keep something of my professional life intact.
I went on dates, though “dating” isn’t quite the right word. I didn’t ask anyone out in person. I went online instead—not because of who I was looking for, but because it required less of me. Less risk. Less presence.
The encounters were physical, disconnected. Anesthesia more than companionship. What I noticed later was not what happened during them, but what didn’t.
I had no one to say goodbye to.
Eventually, the last thread holding me in Wilmington broke. The job ended. There was no longer even the pretense of staying. I remembered an offer that had been made weeks earlier—maybe earlier than that. A woman named Qwillpen, married, living in Durham. She had offered me a place to land if I needed to get away from everything.
I called her and asked if the offer was still open.
It was.
I packed what I could fit into the car I had managed to get on my own and left. There was no ceremony to it. No moment of clarity or resolve. Just the quiet understanding that whatever life I had been trying to return to no longer existed, and that staying would not bring it back.
What I didn’t know then was that I wasn’t just leaving a city.
I was entering a long stretch of my life where being unseen would once again become the rule rather than the exception.