Roderick on the Line, Episode 474
“…the psychologist had spent a lot of time saying, ‘Look, as you talk about your childhood and your high school years and the problems you’ve had all along, they’re your failure to thrive in many ways.’”
“Oh, you hate to hear that.”
“Well, no, that’s just me describing it to him. He would never say that about me.”
“Well, that was our number one fear when we had a baby. We didn’t want to become one of those failure to thrive people…finding out retroactively you have late onset failure to thrive.”
“I thought then and I think now of myself as failing to thrive, but I was a kid living his life having all the things that a kid doesn’t have when he’s 22…I wasn’t failing to thrive. I was one of the many people living in that town.”
“Just one shiny thread in a big tapestry.”
“I was just a guy in the background of the scene where these two were hooking up…So in talking to my psychologist and saying ‘Oh, you know, it has always been just like missed connections and a clusterfuck and a dumpster fire.’”
“What they’re saying is, ‘Look, all that failure to thrive may have been a bonus because the other options might had been either that you flame out or burn out or fade away.”
“I’d been taking bipolar medicine and it clearly works, it clearly has kept me out of terrible places, but I’m still not…”
“You’re still failing to thrive, John.”
“I’m still failing to thrive.”
“So in some part of this process I looked around and I was like, ‘Wait a minute. My family is healthy and happy. Everybody’s doing great. I have a house. Every aspect of my life is doing well. I’m doing well. But I am so sad and I have so many things I want to do in life that I can’t do.”