Do I always think in terms of loss? Why is my response to this story so much more emotional than the reponse expressed by the narrator?
From this week's NY Times Magazine "Lives" essay:
When we saw the specialist, we found out that I was carrying identical twins and a stand alone. My doctors thought the stand alone was three days older. There was something psychologically comforting about that, since I wanted to have just one. Before the procedure, I was focused on relaxing. But Peter was staring at the sonogram screen thinking: Oh, my gosh, there are three heartbeats. I can't believe we're about to make two disappear. The doctor came in, and then Peter was asked to leave. I said, ''Can Peter stay?'' The doctor said no. I know Peter was offended by that.At every "but" in the last two paragraphs ("But I had a recurring feeling that…"; "But thinking about…"), I expected the narrator to express grief over the lost twins.Two days after the procedure, smells no longer set me off and I no longer wanted to eat nothing but sour-apple gum. I went on to have a pretty seamless pregnancy. But I had a recurring feeling that this was going to come back and haunt me. Was I going to have a stillbirth or miscarry late in my pregnancy?
I had a boy, and everything is fine. But thinking about becoming pregnant again is terrifying. Am I going to have quintuplets? I would do the same thing if I had triplets again, but if I had twins, I would probably have twins. Then again, I don't know.
And, reading the essay, I was haunted by an article I read many years ago which suggested that left-handed people often, in the womb, have a twin — and that if, growing up as a non-multiple, they feel a nagging lack or emptiness, it might be the unconscious memory of a past sibling.
Would the narrator's baby boy have a similar, inexplicable, sense of grief? And what if one of the twins had been chosen? Would the existence of one twin be a continual reminder of the lost twin? How could these answers come easily? Or, maybe the question is why these are the questions I've chosen. Why do I want to mourn, and impose on life, such fragility — permenant dents in a life's texture?
Yesterday, I went to a friend's birthday party, and the party's main event was a "mouse race" — four live mice let loose on an obstacle course with bread crumbs at the finish line. Afterwards, the mice, who were marked by the pet store for snake food, were set free in a bush, and party-goers left slices of birthday cake at the bush's edge. They watched the mice reemerge from the bush and nibble at the cake, and congratulated each other on giving the mice a new and better life. But I watched the mice and wondered if cake was good for them, if they would die from so much refined sugar, if predators might be drawn to the cake and then prey on the mice, and if pet store mice would be able to find food and fend for themselves… But when I was asked why watching the mice made me sad, I couldn't explain myself. I felt crazy, thinking about the dangers sugar posed to mice; I knew my sadness didn't have so much to do with the mice as it did my own propensity for sadness and, more precisely, pity.
In my fiction, I've written a lot about pity. On one hand, I try to remind myself that a person's life is experienced very differently from the inside than it is from the outside, and what can trigger pity in an outside observor may have little correlation to the observed person's internal reality. Someone may pity me for my depression, but I don't feel self-pity. On the other hand, perhaps it's only from the outside that a life is whole enough for its tragedy to be understood. Pity requires a sense of scope that conflicts with the fluidity and (in my opinion) perpetual self-distraction of self-consciousness. And then, I wonder, if pity is always self-pity in denial — what could I be feeling pity for but my sad conception of life's workings?
What qualifies me for this blog might also disqualify me. Others have routines; I have my moods, and they similarly dictate my daily activities, even if to occlude them. But, like routines, my moods are, at least in retrospect, predictable; and, like a workday, they cycle me between productivity and leisure, though on a scale of weeks or months instead of days.
Two weeks ago, I kept waking at sunrise after two to three hours of restless, thin sleep. Even if the morning's sunlight made me dizzy, even if I got out of my bed by falling off it, even if my body wanted to vomit itself across my sheets to stay in bed, I viewed my insomnia as a gift.
I've always been a heavy sleeper. Usually, sleep drugs me, paralyzes my arms in the morning so I fall back into it. I can sleep twelve, fourteen, twenty hours, more — and days blur; the calendar's boxes, as if submerged in water, loosen and dissolve. I sleep through my scheduled meds, and withdrawal is instant and unforgiving; I cold-sweat through my sheets; my sweat freezes me inside my dreams. And The Dreams: before I went on my meds, they were already deformed, cruel, vivid, but the past two years they've become more real, and more thematically consistent, than my waking life. (Veins are made of blue thread that, pulled, unravel innards; moles grow into nipples; parents attack me; my brother tries to seduce me; even if I'm not depressed during the day, in my dreams I'm mourning, inexplicably desperate, devastated, hopeless.)
If I can escape sleep, I will. Insomnia's a friend. But it also gives me false confidence — I'll eventually crash, but I forget that. I might also "forget" to take my pills. (1. Last week, I remembered a time last summer when I was out of meds and didn't have a ready refill. For three days, I took half my dosage; and it was as if an overcast sky sailed in; my thoughts sombered, gained heft, and I felt grounded by their dark weight. Last week, I missed that more substantial self. 2. Habits can become so regular they turn invisible. Did I just smoke that cigarette? I don't remember. Or, each repetition of routine is an infinite return, a moment of no time in time. The pill bottle is open on my desk; did I take my pills while reading? Everyday, I take two, and I know the routine without having any memories of it.) So, I think I skipped half a dose twice last week.
If I miss my pills completely, my nerves feel like boiling water, frenetic and violent for attention. It's a bodily sensation that no other type of self-destruction achieves. But if I lower my dosage, the effect is, at first, strictly psychological. It feels like a mixed episode — my thoughts turn strange and sad, but the act of thinking feels Romantic. At the end of last week, in this very self-important mood, I sat on a bench in my town's public square and listened to music while drawing passers-by and writing down thoughts. In my notebook are things like,
Sadness pulls life to it … a forgotten realism.Angsty and cartoonishly sad as those thoughts may be, writing them energized me. I felt I was a conduit for someone else, maybe a pre-medicated self — and rather than worry me, the thoughts seemed like bright insights into the mind of a character —one more desperate than myself — I might store away for a story.
I long for people, but always turn the longing into a strict lesson: how to be consoled by, content with, my own company.
I'm always on the verge of crying. My throat is a salt lick.
I look up and a homeless man who's staring at me pantomimes a sad face to show me mine.
I can feel the sadness thumbing my face like clay — pushing my cheeks lower; firming my brows' muscles, but underneath that tensing, carving a hollow stare.
When I got off the bench, the sun was setting. By the time I got back home, it was set. My sleep schedule is usually vampiric, but only because nighttime, on some level, scares me, and I don't feel safe falling asleep until the sun's mopped up my bedroom's shadows. Or, maybe I shouldn't say night "scares" me. It traps me, sequesters me from comfort; it grows black walls over my windows. I want to be there when the walls fall, to make sure they do.
So, that night, my perverse joy in my own sadness gave way to frantic, confused, helpless depression. I call these worst nights my "episodes." Everything changes. I can't talk or read. I'll huddle in fetal positions around my apartment, sobbing with the certainty that something's deeply wrong with me. I feel like a poorly anesthetized patient who wakes up during surgery but, paralyzed, can only wait and wait and wait though a terror that feels longer, deeper, larger, than time. If I manage to distract myself, it's with plans to die. No method appeals to me, and I don't want to slash or crush or jam my body with my mind's desperation. But thinking about dying calms me, gives me direction. When I'm crying on my apartment's unvacuumed carpet, I only feel paralyzing vertigo: no energy to change positions, my thoughts not even looping but spinning.
The next day, after heavy sleep, I'll feel better but exhausted, as if I ran a marathon. My body: sore and weary. My thoughts: drab and wrung dry. But the exhaustion feels wholesome, like my body's mistaken the previous night's episode for sun-blessed, toxin-sweating labor.
I may slip downward at sunset, down into the night's drain again. But, if I'm writing, I'm hopeful. I'm not romanticizing sadness but hacking its arch into words.
I don't know if my postings will ever be regular, but if depression keeps me away, it also brings me back again.
I often experience depression as regression, a return to my high school self. Andrew Solomon wrote in The Noonday Demon,
"There's a sudden point when you can feel your chemistry going," Mark Weiss, a depressive friend, once said to me. "My breathing changes and my breath stinks. My piss smells disgusting. My face comes apart in the mirror. I know when it's there."When I'm depressed, my braces rematerialize, my breasts shrink, my hair goes a little frizzy. I fear I'll turn 14 again.
I'm unfairly prejudiced towards my high school years. I tend to use them as a container, stuffing my worst traits and qualities into them, and then sealing the lid so they can't contiminate my life. So, when social anxiety or depression or physical insecurities creep in, I feel like the lid's popped open. A younger self's infecting me.
I know my high school self has more dimensions, and a much greater range of moods, than I assign her. I had ups and downs then, like I do now. And back then, I had more friends and my depression was, at least, productive (which I wouldn't call it now). But, my high school self also experienced a type of daily, physical and social, discomfort that age has brought me far from. My self-consciousness was heavy and awkward, like an honor student's backpack -- bending my spine, making it easier to look at the floor than make eye contact with people.
Even nowadays, images of unattractive but happy teenagers make me cringe. The picture on the left, for example, inspires in me more emotion, and more narrative involvement, than it warrants. It appeared in the Sunday edition of the NY Times, accompanying an article on the improving relationships between teens and their parents; somewhere in the article was this passage about the mother and daughter pictured:
Alexis XXXX, 15, can relate to mother-as-fashion-muse. On a Saturday shopping excursion in Manhattan, Alexis looked to her mother, Susan, 48, for approval before selecting a pair of pink Hardtail pants at G. C. Williams on Madison Avenue. Susan XXXX is a personal shopper who takes clients to Paris. "Because of her business she's really into shopping and fashion, and that makes her a lot of fun," Alexis said.Alexis sounds happy, but while her mother looks poised (albeit, in a bitchy, overly-coifed way), the daughter looks lumpy, incohate. She may turn out to be very attractive, but she's at the age when features haven't settled into the correct angles and proportions, and, despite her mother's shopping know-how, she wears the wrong clothes and glasses for her frame. Pop culture tells us that teenage girls are hot and fun, but Alexis's mother, Susan, is the looker (at least, in comparison), and has the confidence her daughter, at 15, hasn't developed. Susan has a flouncy skirt, and fluffy hair, and a puffed-out chest; her daughter, on the other hand, is curling her face into her chest, as if she doesn't really know she has the right to take up space.
And, while Alexis, like I said, seems happy, her posture reminds me of the experience of depression -- when I don't want to take up space, and awkwardness contracts my body. To my mind, bad posture can, like depression, posit a certain relationship between the self and the world: the world wants as much of the body's space as it can have, and I can't, or won't, fight its (anthropomorphized) wishes.
Skip a dosage, and your apartment sinks underground. … You want to say never again. But you only get so many opportunities to travel.
—from "Starting From N," written in 2002
At 1 am, I was alone at a park, swinging. If I looked up, risking nausea, I could watch a star jump free from a tree and then, with the rhythm of a yo-yo, retreat behind the branches.
When I was young, my mother told me she was scared of swings and I decided I was, too.
A swing’s creak foretold disaster: a future moment when the bar finally releases the swing, and I lose the illusion of control; my swing and I fly into an uncharted arch, and I remember — from somewhere, where? —that life is suppressed terror. I fly into the loss opened by this thought, and might never touch the ground again.
Tonight, I ignored the swing’s creak and pumped hard. Even when my legs began to hurt, I kept swinging, because I was fine here, and hadn’t been fine anywhere.
I fell asleep yesterday — I’d meant to nap — at noon, and woke up today at 7 pm. My shirt was cold and wet, and when I tried to walk to my bathroom, I stumbled and let myself fall against a wall. In the bathroom, I looked in the mirror, though I knew better; when I miss a dose of Effexor, my eyes go wild, and my mirrored eyes meet mine with the intent of hunting; I’m prey.
If I’m awake during withdrawal, my nerves go kamikaze and electrocute themselves; I shake and spasm. If I’m asleep, I sweat ice, and dream such painful dreams, waking doesn’t stop them. My dreams are more vivid than life, and span more years than I’ve lived. I marry adulterous husbands; give birth to disfigured babies with small faces as numerous as freckles on their blue-ish bodies; I pilot a helicopter without windows; and I read violent novels about psychic sisters.
After waking up at 7, I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t type. I tried to read, but my body was buzzing and my brain was scrambling words. I took my pills, and drank water. I tried to wash a pot so I could cook myself food, but I couldn’t coordinate the scrubbing. Eventually, I decided to wait for my body to reabsorb reality while listening to music and staring at the ceiling on my back. And, after a while of this, I called my boyfriend -- but my mouth was too slow to pronounce most words, and, when I did speak, I didn’t recognize my intonations.
I watched television, but didn’t enjoy it. I listened to more music, and felt manic. I wanted to go out, but my nerves still felt electric, and when I sang along to songs, I started laughing and the laughing quickly became crying. How long would waiting this out take? I had incapacitated myself.
At around midnight, I went for a walk, tripping on my own feet and swerving a little like a drunk. I called my boyfriend again as I walked to the park. I hadn’t told him I was worried about myself, and now I wanted to, but his voice was thickly overlaid with static, and all I could make out was that he had friends over and wanted to get back to them.
I called several in-town friends, hoping the reality of another person might ground me. No one picked up. At the park, I began to feel that sadness might be nicer company if I indulged it, and I began swinging; the sudden drops and rises in perspective made playground objects move, and I often mistook them for people approaching, maybe people I knew, people who could help me. And then, vision corrected itself, and my loneliness felt warm and maternal, even if the night was cold and my thoughts were empty or disjointed. Loneliness, at least, was familiar, and I could stay on the swing as long as I wanted.
are located here. Here's a selection from those journals:
"…4.11.01: hysterical with self consciousness … 5.4.01: Sixteen in Paris, with a fan to sing me asleep …"
I've always been a slow writer and tend to call my slowness the cost of careful writing. But, as often as slowness is a choice, it isn't. Towards the end of my sophomore year in college, I got too sick to finish three of my four classes and spent the summer working on the resulting Incompletes. And, though I did nothing but work that summer, I worked at such a slow and painful rate, I still had two Incompletes left in September.
My thoughts keep returning to that summer, trying to name what went wrong. I went home to recover and work, mostly in my bedroom's attached office, where, in high school, I spent the hours after school learning to write fiction. (Having a space just for writing made me feel, even at 13 or 14, like a real writer; as long as I was in it, my thoughts and phrasings mattered.)
At the start of summer, sitting in my office, I felt optimistic. I wrote myself a list of deadlines, and tried to divide my time between my Incompletes and fiction writing. But my optimism began to wane in the first month; I had trouble concentrating; most days, I could barely read fifty pages. The second and third months, I began writing papers, and it's those months, really, that I think back on most often, believing my increasingly pained relationship to writing, if properly described, might also be an accurate description of the relationship between thought and language.
During those two months, I forgot how to write. It felt, at once, like stupidity and brilliance; I couldn't write, but I couldn't write because I'd become too sensitive to language -- to the ability of each word and comma to alter meaning. Most of the summer, I was working on papers for a class on critical theory; the papers were short, but only to encourage a style so dense that, removed from comprehensible meaning as its sentences might seem to someone not familiar with the discipline's vocabulary, it required a great carefullness -- so great as to make writing, for me, temporarily impossible.
If my writing process was previously like playing dominos, making sure each new sentence continued the logic of the previous sentence and also added something new, my writing process that summer recalled "sqaures," a game in which sqaures with different half-shapes on each side are matched up to compose a larger sqaure. And that larger sqaure, for me, wasn't the essay, but each sentence -- with an assembly time of one to four hours.
In September, I went back to school, in good health but with no confidence. Reading and writing had become too difficult, and, over the Fall semester, I dropped three classes, including a remaining Incomplete. I'd learned my ability to write, contrary to past experiences, was not a given --and that, when it's lost, it seems like a miracle to have ever had it. How do we assume the right to language, and language's assertions? What guarantees that a thought will ever be simple or tidy enough for a sentence, progressing left to right and not spiraling outward with amendments?
More recent cycles of "writer's block" have added other questions: How does grammar become instinct? How do we learn and recall words? Where does a thought start and stop, or does it not do either?
Over the past year, words, and not sentences or paragraphs, have become the real challenge. I stopped being able to recall simple words and phrases-- "window drapes," "insinuations," "clasps," "barters" -- and more specific words that I used to call my favorites -- "teleology," "heuristics," "sublimation." When I complained to my boyfriend that I was losing my vocabulary, he asked if I wasn't idealizing and distorting a past self and its abilities.
But, about a month ago, I was diagnosed with ADD and started taking Adderall. My vocabulary returned. Language, like a manic wife, was sweet again (Not needing to rely on a theasarus anymore was like getting sex after a long and joyless regimen of porn and masturbation.).
"She" abandons me, loves me, locks me out, lets me in, soothes me, keeps me up too late too often, ignores me after fights -- and the more I need her, the more aware I am of her fickleness and faults. Why become a writer when it means marrying her? From a spouse, I want consistency, fidelity, and compassion. I can't will that from language. But, it's not just that I love her; it's that I don't know if I can love myself without her.
-P. 33 of Milan Kundera's Ignorance reads,
During the twenty years of Odysseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing.
We can comprehend this curious contradiction if we realize that for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Émigrés gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena and Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot. For nostalgia does not heighten memory's activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else.
-Before I'd ever heard of Derrida, I suspected that repetition was alteration. I'm not thinking of the embellishments or white lies we sometimes throw into anecdotes to amuse an audience. I'm thinking of memoirs, diaries, autobiographies: the writing of memory. When I write about the past, I don't preserve it; I lose it; I experience autobiography as sacrifice. Each written memory is rewritten; its writing requires alterations, details to be discarded or created; and after its writing, I never access the memory as it existed before language. Language covers the memory and hardens around it like a cast: it keeps the memory's shape , but also, until we confuse the cast with what it covers, hides it from view.
-In the quoted passage, Kundera explains how nostalgia can coexist with a shambled memory of nostalgia's object. But it also hints at a relationship between nostalgia and memory: "During the twenty years of Odysseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing." The passage, though, only explains nostalgia's inability to "awaken recollections," and doesn't propose a logic by which to understand memory and nostalgia's incompability.
-When I was younger, and tests were, in the soap opera of my life, a cast regular, I memorized things easily. As long as I'd read the right chapters, even if I only read them during lunch the day of the test, I'd do fine. (I noticed that my smartest friends also learned the material as it was being taught in class, but I could never keep myself focused on a lecture. My attention easily got snagged on large spirals of thoughts: stories I was working on, or body aches from sleep deprivation, or recurring daydreams about crushes. And at some point in high school I decided to allow myself to disengage instead of trying to concentrate, but always failing.) I never forgot anything I read, and if I'd (on a rare occasion) read a text twice, I could recite it. But my memory for things I'd read was strictly short-term; I had trouble recalling the names of books I'd read six months before, or what my thesis had been for papers I'd written in the previous schoolyear. On the other hand, while I could never focus long enough on a lecture to really "hear" it, my long-term memory for conversations was, and still is, quite good. I can't remember names or places, but I usually remember every phrasing and idea.
-When we talk, my ex tells me that he misses me. But, even if my life were different enough to accomodate romantic feelings for him, he'd know better than to expect me to say those words back to him. My ex and I dated for three years; for two of those years, we dated long-distance, and during that time we both realized that I have what could be called "emotional amnesia." I rarely miss people, even the people I love; I only feel nostalgia for the seasons; and when my current, also long-distance, boyfriend commented the other day that he fears, when we're apart, my love for him becomes a(n albeit happy) commitment rather than a feeling, he was partly right. My emotions for a person far away quickly turn abstract, more a collection of facts than feelings. I've known this about myself for a while, but am still saddened by it; I spend most of my time alone in my apartment, adrift in a present tense, with the past I departed from appearing as mirage.
-My ex has a horrible memory for conversations, but misses people strongly. So how is it that I so rarely can recall my feelings for people, despite recalling so much more about them? Does nostalgia, as Kundera suggested, inhibit memory? And can clear recollection preclude nostalgia?
-In a sense, I do feel nostalgia for more than the seasons: I feel nostalgia for all I can't remember.
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UPDATE (April 24, 2004): blog.onemonkey.org summarizes and comments on Susan Engel's Context is Everything: The Nature of Memory. Quoting from the post:
We change our stories depending on our audience, and our internal 'veridicial' version is a patchwork of associations to other locations and events, scripted by common schemas and recurring highly stylised storylines and characters who turn into stereotypes, all of it overlayed by certain ineffable emotional traces and scents.In my post's second paragraph, I didn't mean to suggest that a memory is ever undistorted or "authentic." But I do think writing makes the distortion painfully visible. When I try to access a memory I've written about, my memory is colored by the writing; so, I can't ever entertain the pleasing notion that memory is a window onto the past, instead of a drawing cut to the window's dimensions and pasted over it.
Everytime we think we are remembering a certain episode, we are actually rewriting our autobiographies to suit our present. So we should be wary of making our memory the foundation stone of our personal narrative and we should be even more wary of therapy that reaches back into our childhoods to find the cures for our neuroses. Certainly we can find evidence and enlightenment of our present mental states in our stories of the past, but we cannot find its causes, the cures. And laying the blame on ghosts will only continue the hauntings.
I had my first therapy appointment in almost a year this morning. For months, I've been thinking of what to say, how to organize my hundred thoughts into simpler categories; and I've been writing journals and letters as if they were preparation for therapy: little exercises in articulation and communication.
A reduction had to occur: my daily, minute-by-minute, reassessment of my self-understanding had to be translated into only one hour of therapy per week. And so I've been stirring my thoughts, hoping the heat (of my need for help) is hot enough to reduce them.
My first appointment was this morning. The therapist, Colleen, had that strange soft-and-sharp look common to women in their sixties: she had a round figure and face, and soft white hair, but the hair was cut short and spiked with gel, and her makeup was overly precise: thinly drawn eyebrows, and a hot pink, almost lipless, geometric, mouth.
She laid out the possible exceptions to therapist-patient confidentiality: child abuse, abuse of a dependent, suicidal thoughts or the possibility of self-harm. And I made sure to nod and smile in a way that indicated I wasn't abusing children, and wasn't (this week, at least) suicidal. She talked slowly, with a rolling sing-song, but her voice seemed nervous rather than calm; I didn't allow myself these kinds of thoughts at first -- I was optimistic and proud of myself for finally having made an appointment -- but, looking back, I think I'm right in my description. She had the demeanor of a substitute elementary school teacher, anxious but trying to appear certain, and dependent on the lesson plan to a degree that seemed almost religious (as if it were a bible, and any lack of veneration on the students' part was expressed as mortifying).
Colleen didn't know anything about me, though I'd been told by the staff psychiatrist that the results from my diagnostic tests would be passed along to her. So, I mentioned the psychiatrist's assessment and tried to explain my problems. I talked about my irresponsibility -- from brushing my teeth to paying my bills to attending class -- and, similarly, my disorganization and my ever-changing sleep schedule. I tried to describe the trouble I have transitioning from one activity to the other -- going to bed, or going outside, or even going offline. I described that once I'd made the transition, I often enjoyed or got used to the new activity, and yet, despite knowing that, my fear of switching activities persisted.
She said, "So you have a problem with change?"
"Change" isn't a word I'd use, because I love some types of change: moving to new apartments or states or countries. But it was easier to say, "Yes, I think so."
"So, on a scale of 1 to 100," she said, and opened her arms to show the range, "how much do you want to change? Really want to."
The question felt wrong, but I tried to answer. "Intellectually," I said, immediately embarrassed by the word, though pretension mostly occurs when I'm struggling, "I think change is required. I've thought, so many times, that I don't want to go on living like this. But, on the other hand, my anxiety and disorganization is what I'm used to, and I've wondered if I've sometimes feared that, if I felt less anxious, I wouldn't recognize my life -- it wouldn't feel familiar, if that makes sense."
She nodded. "So: anxious," she said, and wrote it down.
We continued talking, her repeating words I said and then asking me questions I found bewildering. I tried to answer in a way that felt honest, but it seemed she only heard words with pop psychology resonance.
I explained again my inability to get anything done, and how I've been missing my classes.
"Well, what would your ideal program be, then?" she said.
"The thing is, there's no right program for me. It feels like I can't get anything done -- the problem is me, really, not my program."
"So, you feel out of place?"
"I guess I'm saying, I don't think the place matters. I mean, even if I tried to create the ideal program, a program just for me, I'd start it and wouldn't be able to follow through."
"So you have a problem with follow through." She wrote that down. "Let me ask you a different question," she said. "Are you a perfectionist?"
What the hell? I thought. But I answered: "When I was younger, I think my perfectionism went along with being artistic -- sorry if that sounds vain, or --wanting to do something creative. Anything artistic, if you want it to be good, at least, requires an attention to details. But, nowadays, I place more trust in the revision process, not expecting myself to get things right the first time. I'm more realistic now, … But, going back" --here, I let myself frown because I'm under the impression that frowns look confused rather than frustrated --"I didn't mean 'follow through' in the way that it's used when talking about perfectionism or ADD. I meant, like, getting out of bed everyday at time where I can make it to class. I meant, organization, too, and …" I paused, and then thought, why not tell her what I'm really thinking?
"I have to be honest. I'm supposed to be as honest as possible, right?" I looked up from my hands to her face, and she was nodding. I continued, "I feel like communication between us is very one-way right now. I've read enough psychology books that I understand your vocabulary, but the way I'm using words is probably more personal, idiosyncratic. And so I feel like I'm doing elaborate translations rather than just talking, communicating. I mean, I mean -- I think, sometimes, you hear me use a word that has a strict meaning in psychology, and you don't take into account its context, the sentence I'm using it in. I feel like you're reacting to familiar words, rather than ideas."
"Oh," she said. "Well, I've never heard that before. That's interesting." Then: "Nat(h)alie, I'd like to ask, do you know what schemas are?"
"Um," I said. I was annoyed because, no, I'd never read books on CBT, but if I said I didn't know the word, which sounded very CBT, would she think I'd been dishonest in saying I'd read so many psychology books? But CBT: gross. So I said, "I know how the word's defined in the dictionary."
"Well, schemas are ways we think about the world. Interesting, huh? And we all have schemas, or ideas. Sometimes, our schemas help us in childhood, but not when we're adults. Perfectionism, for example, can be helpful when we're little, because children are still learning things. But, you know, it's not very helpful in adulthood. So, that's why I asked about perfectionism. Schemas are important, and what we'll be doing in our therapy together is figuring out your schemas. Does that sound good?"
No. I said nothing. No. I realized she talked like a grade school teacher not to be condescending, but because she liked clarity, and when she made her ideas clear, they were too simple and short for a normal adult tone. She didn't mean to talk down to her patients; she reduced my ideas for her own benefit. (I had spent so long reducing my ideas in preparation for this appointment, but, for her, reduction was measured in degrees of similarity between my ideas and the ideas she'd learned. And perhaps that explains a grade school teacher's singular and memorable voice: it sounds maternal and flexible, to compromise for how inflexible the speech-content is.) So, No. And again: No. "This is hard for me," I said, "but I'm not feeling very comfortable. I think we may not be a good match, and I wonder if you could recommend other therapists at Psychiatric Affiliates I could…"
"Well," she said. She was crossing and uncrossing her ankles quickly. "Okay?"
"Obviously, this is hard for me to say, even though I know the dynamics here are different than they are in the outside world" -- I still struggled to be as tactful, polite, as possible.
"What you may not know" she said, "is that, as therapists, we're trained not to take things personally."
I thought what I'd just said indicated that I knew that. Nodding: "Oh, I kno--"
"But," she said, "I usually encourage my patients to have a couple more appointments with me before they make that kind of decision."
"I just, I just really need to start the process as quickly as possible, because I won't have health insurance soon. So, I'd prefer if you could recommend someone else."
"Well, there's other options. We can have another appointment, too. What would you prefer?"
"I'd prefer to try another therapist here, and, compare, and you know --"
"Okay," she said. "I don't take that personally. Our appointment's over, so why don't we go walk over to the desk and schedule you an appointment with someone else, and we'll see, well, if you come back. Like I said, it's your choice."
"Thank you," I said. "Thank you for your help."
"It's my job," she smiled.
"Oh, but," I trailed off.
At the desk, she announced her presence with a fake cough. "Pam, we need to schedule an appointment for Natalie. An appointment with Shelly, ok?" And she said Shelly very loudly, with raised eyebrows. I wondered, was I misreading the situation? She really did seem offended.
"Well, thank you again," I said, and smiled, and we shook hands. Her hand was limp and she recalled it quickly.
A client had just cancelled her 2 pm appointment with Shelly, so I signed up for the empty slot, walked home, and three hours later, walked back. The appointment went well: Kelly was in her 70s, with a calm, reserved, way of speaking. She asked questions that made sense to me, and was patient with my answers. I didn't, for a moment, regret my honesty with Colleen. All my life, I've felt so unassertive as to be sub-human: spineless, collapsible. More helpful than all the thinking I can do about myself is the realization that I can, very simply, say what I think.