Chapter 1: The Bridge

The concrete was cold against my forearms as I leaned over the railing, staring down at the Mississippi River forty feet below. Cars rushed past behind me on the Washington Avenue Bridge, their drivers oblivious to the twenty-two-year-old having what I now recognize was a moment of profound clarity about just how fucked up everything had become.

It wasn't dramatic. No tears, no shaking hands, no final phone calls. Just a calm, almost businesslike consideration of whether the fall would be quick enough to beat the cold water. I'd been having these conversations with myself for months—casual negotiations with death that felt more reasonable than anything my therapist or the little orange bottles in my medicine cabinet had offered.

The irony wasn't lost on me. I was supposed to be one of the success stories. Dean's list student at the University of Minnesota. Pre-med track because, naturally, I was going to follow my father and grandfather into medicine—three generations of healers in the Moen family. I had everything figured out, at least on paper. Perfect grades, leadership positions, a clear path to medical school.

But standing on that bridge, I could feel the gap between who I was supposed to be and who I actually was widening like a chasm. The more I achieved, the emptier I felt. The more I excelled, the more convinced I became that I was fundamentally broken.

What brought me to the bridge that day wasn't a single catastrophic event. It was the accumulation of months of trying to fix myself through the conventional approaches and somehow feeling worse with each attempt. The endless cycle of analyzing what was wrong with me, trying to optimize my thoughts and behaviors, only to leave each session feeling more pathologized and less human.

I'd started seeing a therapist during my sophomore year after what my father diplomatically called "a rough patch." I was crying on my parents' living room floor, finally admitting that the perfect facade was cracking. My father, a man who'd spent his career saving lives in emergency rooms, knelt beside me with genuine concern in his eyes.

"Adam, we love you, you are so special to us. If you are hurting we'll absolutely get you some help. You are probably going through a phase, but we'll get you some help if you need it."

I heard "You are probably going through a phase" and something inside me shut down. Not because he didn't care—I know now he was terrified that he'd somehow failed as a father—but because even my family couldn't quite bring themselves to acknowledge that this might be real.

So I did what I was supposed to do: I went to therapy. I answered the questionnaires. I followed the protocols. And month by month, I felt myself disappearing.

The therapist was kind enough, a middle-aged woman who nodded sympathetically as I described my feelings of worthlessness and inability to find joy in anything that used to matter to me. She diagnosed me with depression and anxiety, as if giving my suffering a medical name would somehow contain it. She prescribed cognitive behavioral therapy techniques and homework assignments to restructure my thinking.

The treatment approach was systematic. Weekly sessions to review my progress, run through diagnostic questionnaires, and adjust my therapeutic homework. "It takes time to see real changes," she explained, already pulling out worksheets for the next assignment. "We might need to try different techniques if this approach doesn't work."

She didn't mention that I might feel worse before I felt better. She didn't question whether the "chemical imbalance" theory she casually referenced as the cause of my depression might be oversimplified. She certainly didn't suggest that my suffering might serve a purpose, or that the path through it might require something other than clinical intervention.

For months, I waited to feel better. Instead, I felt increasingly disconnected, like I was experiencing my life through thick glass. My emotions were muted, but not in a peaceful way—more like someone had turned down the volume on everything that used to make me feel alive. When I reported this, we tried different therapeutic approaches. "Sometimes it takes multiple modalities to find what works," she said optimistically.

Each new technique was presented as fine-tuning, as if my mind were a machine that just needed the right therapeutic protocol to function properly. Cognitive restructuring, mindfulness exercises, behavioral modification—all designed to fix what was supposedly broken in my thinking.

But I wasn't feeling more like myself. I was feeling less like myself with each attempt. The person I'd been before—even the depressed, anxious version—was disappearing under layers of therapeutic intervention. I started to wonder if the cure was becoming worse than the disease.

Standing on that bridge in my junior year, I didn't yet understand that I was experiencing firsthand what millions of Americans go through every year: a system that profits from managing symptoms rather than addressing causes, that turns normal human suffering into chronic medical conditions, and that has somehow convinced us that we're broken when we're actually responding normally to a broken world.

What I did understand, with startling clarity, was that I needed to find another way.

I stepped back from the railing.

Not because I'd found hope in some grand sense, but because I'd finally found the right question: What if everything I'd been told about fixing myself was designed to keep me sick?

The journey begins with a simple, radical idea: your suffering is not a malfunction. It's information. And the sooner we stop trying to medicate it away, the sooner we can learn what it's trying to teach us.