Therapy

Last Friday I saw my therapist.  I managed to fit this in amidst a sea of other stuff I had to do:  Physical therapy for my knee, meetings for my job, an emergency visit to the doctor late in the day to meet my wife and her literally demented mother who was in the midst of a bout of confusion which left her not knowing who her daughter was.

He asked, as he always does,what’s on my mind.  I imagine this is his standard opener with everyone and that he’s practiced it — I imagine there was a point in his career, not too long ago, maybe five or six years ago when he was just starting out, when he was more unsure of himself and didn’t have a routinized line that he could use to begin a session.   He might have started with a less formal “Hey howareya!  What’s shakin?” before deciding, weeks later, that he wanted to set a more dignified, professorial tone.

I said what was on my mind was that I didn’t want to be in therapy and I wasn’t sure what good it was doing.  We’ve been at it for three months or so now.  He’s getting rich off of me.  It’s four meetings a month, $25 in co-pays per visit, $100 a month — he makes $300 a session, paid out by my insurance company.  For what?  To listen to me complain about my life.  Sometimes I think I should just buy one of those old tape recorders, hit the red button on it, and speak to it.

It’s the first time I’d seen him since before Thanksgiving.  He asked me if I had been doing the journal thing like we’d talked about.  Yes, I said.

Every day?

No, not every day.  But maybe four out of seven.  

How much are you writing?

A lot actually.  I think I average a thousand words an entry.  A good twenty minutes of writing, just dumping shit out of my brain.

What are you finding yourself writing about?

I started writing about my obligations and how they tire me out.  You know, like, all the shit I have to do every day that I just do because I have to get it done but it’s boring and I often feel like I don’t have the energy, that kind of stuff.  

What else?

Well, there are recurring themes.  Physical issues come up a lot.  The tedium and pointlessness of work surfaces, too.  So do my adventures in In Vitro Fertilization with my wife.  The hopes, the dreams, my attitudes about it, the difficulties and challenges managing my wife’s emotions.

Right, we’ve talked about a lot of those things.  Anything we haven’t talked about?

I had to think about it for a minute.  I realized I can express myself better when I’m writing — that I get more philosophical.  I told him about the IVF numbers and how they’ve taken on an almost mythical quality for me.  On our fifth cycle of IVF, after four rounds of failure, my wife produced thirteen eggs.

Do you think thirteen is significant?

Not really.  And then, also, yes.  I’m not very religious.  At times in my life if you’d asked me what I believed, I would have just said I’m an Athiest and left it at that.  Maybe I still am an Athiest.  But there might be a god — might be many gods — might be higher powers or spiritual forces in the world.  There’s a lot about the universe that we don’t know or understand.  Science can’t answer all questions.  I live my life as if there isn’t a God.  But there remains the definite possibility that there is something.  And for some reason this thirteen business… I started thinking about songs that have thirteen in them.  The Megadeth song 13, for example, the 13th track off their 13th album.  And the lead singer talks about his terrible, unlucky life, but then bangs out this chorus:  13 has been lucky for me.  And I got shivers.  I listened to it over and over.  Maybe this is the cycle where it happens.  Maybe there is something to all of this.  Maybe we’ll have a kid, and the kid will change my life, help me feel less depressed, restore some sense of wonder and beauty in the world.

What happens if the embryo you have doesn’t take?

I don’t know.  I go back to being an Athiest.  I console my wife.  We talk about doing another cycle, or donor eggs.  We make practical decisions on where to go next.  

I heard you say you are depressed in there.  Are you finally acknowledging you are depressed?

Yes.  

OK.  So that’s another thing we hadn’t talked about.  You’re depressed.  What else?

I found myself writing about my childhood, and my dad a little bit, and my brother.  My family basically.  Exploring my family, my past.  I mean I think about this stuff a fair amount but it’s different to write about it — I have to dredge up the old thoughts, the history, and present it in a way that might make sense to a stranger.

Do you enjoy it, the writing?

Oh fuck no.  And also yes.  It seems pointless to me just like almost everything else in life — the writing does.  I mean how much can I navel gaze  — I’m already paying you for therapy and blathering on and on about me.  Then I’m also supposed to write and reflect for twenty minutes a day in this stupid diary?  When will it be enough?  But then when I’m done I also feel calmer.  Like I just took an enormous mental shit.  And I like some of the phrases, some of the conclusions I draw.  It probably reads like a hot mess to anyone else but I have re-read a few of my journal entries and they make me feel more settled and solid as a person, like I am chiseling out parts of my own identity from marble.  

For a brief moment, I can even make believe that I am really writing.

What do you mean?

Well this is one of those other common themes that I talked about.  Obligations, family, philosophy — and writing.  I wish I did it more, I wish I could have found a way to write professionally.  It hurts sometimes to think about.

What hurts?

My lost dreams.  And how I’m living a life that is — well, quite comfortable.  But also, at the same time, something that feels hollow, empty.  Maybe something I don’t deserve.  Sometimes I think I deserve to be dead.

We talk about that for a while and conclude that I have bad self esteem because my father beat me physically and picked on me verbally — my Dad could not come to terms with the fact that I hated all jock-like activities, and my Dad wanted, more than anything, to have a little jock for a son, a popular and muscular boy who was good with the ladies, that kind of thing.  And then the family disruptions — the divorce, my brother’s role as abuser in my life, his suicide attempts, my mother’s depression — they made me feel further isolated from people at school, ostracized me, made me feel alone and misunderstood — none of these things were good for my esteem.  I feel in many ways like adulthood has been a long climb to build esteem in myself — and my new esteem has largely come through the acquisition of money, stuff (house, etc) and work/job status.   But a lot of these things are external.  I haven’t done anything to fix the internal belief that I am worthless.

He concludes that writing journal entries is helping me, for now, and I should keep it up.

Time’s up, he says.  Next week, same time?

Yeah I guess so, I tell him.  Do you want to read anything I’m writing?

No, he says.  Let’s just keep talking during our sessions.

As I’m closing the browser windows for our online session I wonder if I should stop posting on opendiary.  I thought that he wanted me to post on this site (which was his recommendation) so that he could occasionally read something I’ve written.  If that’s not his intent, maybe I’d be better off just dumping journal entries off into files on my PC.

—

Anyway.  Today I’m going to donate a bunch of stuff to charity — books, clothes.  Give a couple of hundred to a homeless shelter for underwear/socks and gloves for the upcoming winter.  Jennie and I may go to Costco and buy some food for the week.  I’ll try to hit the gym after that.  Luckily we don’t have to see her sick and old parents today — her brother is checking in on them so that we don’t have to.  Her mom is recovering from a UTI and her mental faculties are coming back online OK.  She still has dementia and alzheimers but hey, she at least recognizes people in her life again.

I suppose that’s a win that we’ll take.