Where do I even begin? It’s important for me to be honest with you. I have been well and unwell all at once. Would you like the good or bad news first? Always hated that question. I think we weigh bad more than good, so it doesn’t really matter which I start with. The illusion of choice, a paradox.
It’s like going down a water slide at a theme park. During those 15 seconds of exhilaration you forget you stood in line for close to 20 minutes to feel alive for a small fraction of the time invested. The sun beats down on you from above while you wonder how long the family of five in front of you will continue fighting about who gets the double-tube. The teenage couple behind you is in the throes of anxious love and can’t keep their braces apart from one another. You find it annoying and you are hungry, but you can also see the end of the line and start to feel the rush of adrenaline build as you notice other riders taking their 15 second turns.
Why are we willing to wait forever to experience a calculated version of fun? Most likely there is a congregation of old white men, among them is most certainly a man named Stan, sitting in a stuffy room discussing how to cut costs on slide renovations and ketchup packets, while they profit on our willingness to wait in earnest patience.
And then we start to ask ourselves the stranger question – is it fun because we waited? Is that part of it? And what a silly thing, life being fun because we wait our whole lives for the end.
Ahh, but here I am being dishonest. Beating around the bush and not getting to the point. That’s what you came for, right? A story about something. Truth is, you should never trust someone who prefaces words with claims of honesty. Instead of my version of facts, I’ll tell you what my therapist said instead. An objective source. Does that sound good to you? Alright then, let’s get into it.
She’s a lovely woman really, my therapist. Talks in metaphors and has not an ounce of pretentiousness about her. However, I do think there’s something wrong with her. You see, she is always late. I, on the other hand, have the exact time recorded in my calendar, 8am every Thursday. I wake up early and enjoy sitting on the couch to sip my coffee and to read a good book recommended by my therapist for an hour or so before I reluctantly remove myself from the couch to paint spearmint on my teeth. It’s unsettling no matter how many times I do it, the getting up and starting part. But I do it anyway, because I do not, under any circumstance, want to be late to my appointment.
What would it say about me if I entered the virtual therapy chatroom after the designated start time had ticked all the way to now? Nothing good I imagine. No, I prefer prompt. While I sit there with fresh breath and slightly combed hair, the chat room mocks me with a message to say my “virtual session is in progress.” Lies, absolute lies. I am staring at the photobooth screen in a separate window to make sure I don’t look crazy for my therapist, so I know it is not in session at all. I even check the time to make sure I haven’t messed up my days of the week. Can’t trust a robot anyway!
After 8 minutes of utter despair, I hear a ping to say she’s inviting me to therapy chat. I accept, of course, and she apologizes for being a few minutes late. I do everything in my power to show I am at ease with the lateness. I was never truly worried. Nope, not one bit.
Here I am talking about myself again when I was supposed to be giving you her diagnosis of me. Because of the dreams I was having, she asked me to write out everything I was angry about on a piece of paper and then to burn the parchment all-together. I wrote out every word like she requested, but I haven’t brought myself to light the damn thing on fire yet. When exactly is an appropriate time to burn something? I haven’t a clue, so the words sit waiting to die in the back of my journal.
She thinks I need to detach the past from my present, and she is most likely right. Then I think about that documentary where one twin gets in an accident as a child and loses all of his memories and forgets that he and his brother were molested by their mother of all people. His twin brother lied to him about their childhood, so he had a brain full of false happy memories growing up! No, no, no. The only thing worse than real bad memories are untrue joyful ones.
Then again, I suppose my therapist doesn’t mean to actually forget my past. I imagine it’s more like a suitcase you can set down and empty at the end of a long vacation. I unpack it reluctantly, putting everything in its rightful place and the suitcase remains in-tact, ready and waiting for new memories to be packed in. I’m comparing my brain to a suitcase now. You see why I am in therapy?
I had a choice when deciding on my therapist. Did I want an older person or a younger one? A male or a female? Experience in depression or suicidal depression? Trauma or addiction? Like picking ice cream flavors really. “How do you want to invade your own brain?” Tall, fat, or skinny, doesn’t matter to me, so long as it’s precise.
Most of our sessions are a version of me somersaulting over my history. I tell her also about recent events like when I visited my dead mother’s old house and captured a last name that sits unknowingly on a plaque outside placed perfectly centered on the stucco. Don’t worry, I didn’t go inside. I wasn’t going to tell them how my mother died there. That would be crazy. Instead I sat in the driveway and breathed in every detail of what appeared to be the happiest home. A rocking chair stood on the front porch, and I thought of a well-read elderly couple sitting drinking tea while they talked about the meaning of things in a shared silence.
I made a 16 point turn to leave the house up on the hill, worry not, I have a hybrid so it was almost silent. I took one last glance back and I noticed a small dog watching me with curious eyes. A look that suggested he’d be letting them know I had stopped by.
I did not tell my therapist about how I googled their last name and found out the woman is a writer. I also did not see the point in informing her that I ordered one of her books and that it arrived in less than a week from Amazon. No, I didn’t tell her that. The past should be left in the past, don’t you think?