Ginger

Patrick was a young ginger man with a freckled face who was adopted by the family of a Korean minister at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Flushing, Queens. He grew up with sermons from both the pulpit and the kitchen table. His parents offered him a home, but he felt excluded from their hearts. They strongly favored his older Korean brother and sister, who were their biological children. For a long time he resented his family for this.

From his eleventh to his fifteenth he lived in South Korea with his uncle who was a missionary in Seoul. He learned to speak English with a Korean accent and became fluent in Korean, which often astonished people who met him. In highschool he was a quiet dilligent student who graduated with honors and great hopes to save people’s souls and make the world a better place.

At eighteen he moved to Chicago where he studied Clinical Psychology at the University of Chicago. As part of his medical program he worked on the Pine Ridge reservation of the Sioux in South Dakota at an addiction treatment program. At Pine Ridge he discovered drinking and marihuana and decided he wanted to enjoy life. One night he went into the desert, drew a circle around him in the sand and expected Satan, but struggled with God.

He lost faith in Christ and forgave his parents. He stopped going to church and started to party, neglecting his studies. He became an adapt of Freud, developed a reborn passion for psychology and graduated. He worked in a Chicago practice for two years, writing some case studies that gained him some recognition. He continued his studies at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis where he specialized in the treatment of anxieties.

Patrick moved to New York and started his own practice on the Upper West Side. Within a few years he managed to pull in a six figure annual income from a class of anxious wives of stressed investors, children of absent trust fund fathers, and regular neurotics. During the recession, he bought a condominium in the West Village and lived a life without worries. He dated beautiful but average women and preferred not to talk about his work. In the evening he loved going to dinners, chat about idle affairs over wine, and was relieved that he did not have to think anything of it.

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