Neuroscientist Rita Tavares attempts to analyze her romantic problems with science.

Rita Tavares is a pirate born in the country of Portugal. She crossed the Atlantic ocean to make it to America, where she anchored her ship in New York City after a period in the Pacific waters off of San Francisco. She has a day cover working as a neuroscientist and a poet. In both these activities she keeps a facade of solving the mysteries of the mind scientifically and artfully. In her science job, she discovered that the human brain "sees" our social environment in ways similar to how it encodes physical space. She is now investigating how these processes go awry in patients with psychiatric disorders. In her poetry, she uses her pirate persona to write about her travels and her love of lunatics.

This story originally aired on March 24, 2017.

Story Transcript

I started writing poems when I was eight years old. I didn’t understand by then, but this was a need I had, and I still have.

At fourteen, I also started playing the guitar, and that was another need. But when it became time to go to college, I learned that being a troubadour was not offered as a career in Portugal where I grew up, so I picked sciences.

But to my parents’ dismay, I was not interested in becoming a doctor or an engineer.

I picked research and being a scientist, which is far from practical. But I decided if this whole writing poems and playing the guitar thing that had to do with feelings wasn’t quite working to explain the world, then I would use science and biology in my work.

So I did that for the following fifteen years, and that landed me in San Francisco for my PhD. But I guess that this rational explanation of stuff wasn’t working so well, because I found myself depressed.

I saw a psychiatrist and I started seeing a therapist once a week. So there I go, and the therapist would ask me what all therapists ask: “What do you feel?”

I would reply, “Well, I think, bad,” very rationally, and she would insist, “No, what do you feel?” I would say, “I think,” and back then one thing I thought about a lot was my ex-boyfriend’s psychological troubles.

There was James -- and I switched all the names so no one will get compromised -- but there was James, who was dark and mysterious but somehow was not over his ex.

Then there was Jimmy, who was much more promising in the beginning but then turned out to be afraid of commitment.

My therapist would ask me, “But what does that make you feel?” and I would say, “Well, I think that Jimmy clearly needs a therapist.”

I started getting more and more interested in this whole psychology business then, and I actually started diagnosing all these exes. There was Tommy, another crushing breakup, and I told my therapist, “Tommy definitely has schizoid personality disorder.”

And she would ask me, “How does that make you feel?”

I said, “Well, he has a tinge of attention deficit and currently suicidal ideation.”

And she would insist, “What does that make you feel?” and I just didn’t get it. She kept insisting and I kept reading more about psychology.

Then I had been seeing her for a whole year, and one day I was sitting there -- and like everyone who starts therapy, in the beginning I would say, “My parents were great. I have no problems with my parents.”

But that day I was talking about daddy -- not daddy issues or mommy issues. I was talking about my dad, and suddenly I felt my stomach tighten.

This became a burning sensation on my chest and then it ran up my throat, which tightened too, and then there was heat on my face and I started crying.

This was the first time I cried in therapy after a whole year.

You can imagine the sadistic pleasure of my therapist. Finally, she had made it. There was something like feelings. I must have been a little bit of a masochist because I kept seeing her for another three years.

That was helpful -- I was crying more often and having feelings. I was aware of this whole thing, but then I knew a trick. I was a scientist, so I was going to study this. All this feelings business was in the brain and I was going to study the biological basis of all of this.

Like any good neurotic, I moved to New York City, and I started a postdoc in neuroscience, which is what I’ve been doing since.

When I moved here, of course, I met someone new. This one was Portuguese and he had a very common Portuguese name, John, and John on the first week of the relationship wanted to marry me and have my babies.

I understand that’s called a red flag, but when it came to relationships, I was never very rational.

So yes, I just kept going, but after a few months, clearly, it was not about having babies and getting married anymore and we broke up. It was pretty hard once again, and what did I do?

Well, I found myself a new therapist in New York because I didn’t have my San Francisco one anymore, and unlike other rebound relationships, that one actually worked and I’ve been seeing her since.

While all of this was going on, I was still doing my science and I realized there was something that I was missing that was deeper than my ex-boyfriend, once I started feeling better after that and that was much deeper, and it was about me. I joined a writer’s studio I’ve been going to since as well and I went back to writing poetry.

About a year ago, I also started playing the guitar again, but I needed to keep on with my science activities.

I was writing a grant not too long ago, and what was really interesting after this whole diagnosing thing is that this grant was about depression.

But the funding agency had new guidelines that actually said that we had been doing too many studies comparing healthy people, and it was very healthy in New York at least, with say, depressed people or bipolar people or personality disorder people.

We had to focus on a process, say social interactions, and try to understand what in the brain was behind these things.

I thought that was very inspiring, and around that time, I fell in love again. What happened is that I fell out of love with this person when I learned that he had antisocial personality disorder.

Now, don’t get me wrong, because I’m not interested in diagnosis anymore, but antisocial personality disorder is what Donald Trump has and I really didn’t want to date Donald Trump.

Also, I learned my own diagnosis, which used to be called dysthymia, is now called persistent depressive disorder in this new diagnostic manual.

Anyway, I am done with labels and instead of focusing on this just in my science and with everything else, I’ve been writing more poems.

I wrote a poem to this failed love interest, but then I learned that this poem was not about him as much as it was about me and my own desires. I will finish this story reading this poem. I got it here -- here we go.

I want to have children. I will quit drinking for them

I want to have a child -- all three of his

I want to have more offspring than humanly possible within a year

I want to breed an army of mad men, and I will carry them in my arms until the weight breaks my bones

I will not fail to bring my children home

We jump through walls in our nightmares but not through hoops

We own a ranch in a prairie of dreams

We will braid the hair of our children, which is golden brown, and long and curly

Their heads of hair undulate in the wind like flags in the middle of an open field

Our children have white dresses, both boys and girls; they are genderless

They don’t depend on us

They are all the things we wish we had been and more

When they drink their own whiskey at age 18, they won’t need too much, but they will not stop at too little

At 18, they will know, and they will take the grand tour

Everyone will see they are royal children, something that could have never happened by accident

Like us, the royal children of the mad men house

I am feeding poems to our children, words about money and songs about freedom

I am saving the money to feed them, and I am taking the vitamins and the magic powders that will get me pregnant once a year, and to make an endless supply of milk to feed the tiny pink mouths of our babies

Thank you.