A Stolen Life

Since my early college days, I have been an enormous fan of Bette Davis. Sure, she made some clunkers, especially in her later years when she started to do ugly and strange horror films and much later when she was a novelty casting choice, but her early movies always offered something special in my estimation. One of the movies that she made on the trip down from the highest points of her career was called "A Stolen Life".

This movie was produced by Ms. Davis, who often fought with the studio heads who had her under contract for better projects. She never really developed much even after she had the power to do so, and this movie was an inauspicious start. The concept is a take on "The Prince and the Pauper," and Ms. Davis was neither the first nor the last to take the idea of twins and have one replace the other. In the case of this particular movie, one twin married the man that the other twin was in love with. When the married sister dies in a boating accident, the other takes over her life so that she can be with the man she'd always loved. I'd like to say hijinks ensue, but the movie is far darker than that.

This movie has popped into my head on occasion since returning from my 23 years of living in Japan and returning to America. It's important to note, in order to make my situation more clearly understood, that I studied psychology in university and worked as a counselor for two years before marrying my husband - before meeting him for part of my time in the counseling job. I have always had a passion for the topic and have studied it continuously throughout my life. It is equally important to note that my husband has a Bachelor's degree in business with a specialization in finance.

During the years that we were in Japan, I was a teacher, but psychology is not something that stands aside. It applies to nearly everything that one can do and helped me in my work as well as understanding the dynamics of Japanese culture. My husband initially had little more than a cursory interest in psychology, but, as the years wore on, he was drawn more and more to the idea of being a counselor.

One of the things about our teaching was that it wasn't unusual for the lesson to have a tone which was not so different from therapy. Japanese people were free from the oppressive nature of their culture - a culture in which showing feelings is looked down upon and opinion expression is dangerous. In English, and in the presence of a non-Japanese person, they could and would often let things fly that they'd never tell anyone else. I found that I spent as much time showing compassion, support, and understanding as well as helping people cope with their distress as dealing with English in no small number of cases. The same was true for my husband. By the time we'd left Japan, more than a few students had told each of us that we were more like therapists to them than teachers.

Though I have a hunger for psychological study, I am less certain that my future career path will follow that of being a therapist. It's not that I don't have the skills or lack a desire to help people. It's more about a sense of knowing too well about the futility in some cases. I worked with seriously ill people and I grew up around people with neuroses. There are things you can and can't do to help, and I'm not sure that I would be happy to go about my life living in that narrow band of effectiveness. I'm, perhaps, not temperamentally suited. My husband, on the other hand, is.

Since our return, my husband has completed graduate school with a Masters in Psychology. I took two classes with him. Both of them were selected because they were more hardcore in terms of their academic focus and less experiential in content. The two classes were Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse. As someone who has always had an interest in the role the brain plays in behavior, these were both going to be up my alley. Neither, unfortunately, were particularly challenging for me given how much study I already had under my belt, but I was happy to be able to take classes with my husband as well as form a better understanding of the friendships he'd struck up with his classmates. Those friendships are what led me to thinking about "A Stolen Life."

My husband's friends knew him before they knew me. They had heard about his background, but didn't really think about it much. When I entered the picture, various conversations made it clear that they felt that I was the one horning in on his territory. That is, they often seemed to regard my knowledge and interest in psychology as a failure on my part to develop my own interests and treated my intellectual prowess on such topics as inferior to theirs and his. It may seem egotistical to say it, but none of them could hold a candle to what I knew before I even set foot back in the U.S., and not one of them made much headway by going to a graduate school which largely focused on training people to be therapists, not in academic knowledge of psychology.

I've come to be quite annoyed that people are looking at me as if I'm a pathetic also-ran who can't form her own interests or develop her own separate life. I'm the one who has always been in the field. I'm the one who got my husband interested in it. I'm the one who finds the great books on such topics and asks him to read them, but when our mutual friends read my words about them on Facebook and later read his a few months after mine, he's the one they reply to about the book. They act as if he found it and I read it because of him, not the other way around.

Some part of me feels as if my life was "stolen" in a strange way. I have and have had this passion, and, at the risk of sounding childish, I had it first. That isn't the important part of this. I don't really care who is first. I care about being treated as somehow empty and second-rate by people who have formed an inaccurate opinion of me based on the order in which they got to know us. No matter what they are told, they can't see me as a whole person because they assume I stole his passion due to some lack of my own ego integrity. I was not some empty vessel leeching off of his interests. I transformed his interests, but I feel like I simply cannot be seen as a whole being by these people.

Of course, the solution is to find better friends. I need to find people who know me first and can see me as an individual without their need to form some sort of clique with my husband operating on the inside and me on the outside. That is precisely what I'm starting to do, and I've lost no small amount of respect for those who continue to regard me as a pale copy of him because of their need to see me in a diminished fashion - a need that I'm sure is fueled by their sense of "specialness" and arrogance at having gone to the same graduate school.