therapy

All that fakey-fake middle-class faux-enlightenment inspirational bumf (cf. Oprah, Lululemon, Starbucks) says that you should do one thing every day that scares you.*

I am a creature of habit. I rarely do things that scare me. Unless you consider ordering the special omelette at brunch a scary activity.

Unless you consider saying yes to too many things.

Here in Ottawa, spring has sprung. I haven't had a whole evening at home by myself since last Sunday, and won't until this Wednesday. An evening I will spend holed up writing a book review to send in just under the wire for Shelley.

Wow.

I just went through the list of things that I need to do, people I want to see, commitments I've made, in the next week and I can actually feel the stress coalescing just under my sternum. My chest is feeling tight, my diaphragm has contracted up. It's like a slowly twirling ball of TV static, throwing sparks off down my nerves.

One of the things that is freaking me out is the workshop I signed myself up to give tomorrow. Giving a yoga workshop seemed like a good idea when I offered, but though I know yoga, and I know giving workshops, I've never put the two together and I'm pretty freaked out that it's going to go badly.

And did I mention the reading? On May 3rd? For which I don't have anything new written and my time to write is being slowly eaten up by other things I've said yes to and are really important to me to do? Yeah. That.

Also, and. That my grandmother is sick in the hospital? Apparently okay, but she broke her teeth when she was hallucinating during a fever on Friday? I'm going home on the 8th to visit.

And perhaps I said something about buying a house? Which is a good decision but a big decision and I think it's finally sinking in now that the busy running around schedule shifting part of it is done.

And also maybe did I say that I'm dating again even though I still sometimes cry when I think about Eric and how much I loved him and how fucking much it hurt when he told me he felt like he hadn't been a very good boyfriend and intimated that he couldn't do better, not right then, not for me? And that I'd picked the wrong person, again? When I was sure that I hadn't?

And one of these things is something that I'm going to fuck up, and something awful is going to happen. I'll look like a fool, someone will get hurt. Possibly badly. I'll drop the ball and that ball will have been made of glass and we'll all get sliced up.

Wow. Okay. You know, I just wrote myself into a complete gasping crying trembling panic attack.

If I say no to you in the next few days, my pounding heart is why.

Put that on a cup-sleeve and drink it.

*With apologies to Eleanor Roosevelt who said it first, but didn't think to slap it on a $50 yoga bag or $4 cup of coffee. Sucker.

The first sign that I am a born librarian probably came during my OAC year, which would be the old Grade 13 to those of you who didn't know teenagers in Ontario in the 90s and early aughts.

My mom was a student at York U, and so every once in a while, I'd go to school with her and do research in the library while she was in class. The first time I did this, I tried searching something by subject, and the subjects didn't make any sense. And then I noticed the series of giant red books on the table by the computers, with LIBRARY OF CONGRESS SUBJECT HEADINGS emblazoned in gold on the spine.

I dug in. Took me a while to figure out even the basics, but I was hooked.

A couple years later I was in therapy for the first time, at York U. My therapist and I were trying to figure out some practical ways for me to escape some pretty damaging behaviours.

During one of our weekly sessions, Karen said "You need to find a way to stop taking on things that you can't do anything about. Other people's problems are not your problem. How can you get rid of them?"

"What, you mean like filing them away and forgetting about them?"

Indeed. We created the Not My Problem file, and I have found it invaluable since then. I don't have to use it so much anymore, because after a while things that are Not My Problem just naturally file themselves neatly away. But for a long time, it was a mental effort to catch myself in the middle of obsessing over something I couldn't control and mentally file it away.

Every now and again, I add another file. Fuck People is the most recent one. Not specific people. But Them, you know, the people of "But people will think bladdity blah blah, if yadda and yadda yadda and ya-." No. Filed under Fuck People.

Perhaps the full title of this folder could be "Fuck People : There Is No Such Thing As People."

I've developed other files before, and none of them has ever stuck around as long as Not My Problem. I'm not sure how Fuck People is going to work with what my brain is currently chewing on, or if it will at all. But the worst that can happen is that things unfile themselves until you can find the subject heading that will shush them.

Last week, as I mentioned, ended up being a very sad week. I have been back and forth on whether or not to blog about why, but in the end, I do not. Or not now. Maybe when it is not so fresh. Maybe never. It is hard to say if when it is not so fresh it seems like something worth announcing on the interweb.

This week is better.

And, thank fucking god, my therapist is back from vacation.

One tic I have, one steeped in a rich broth of fuckwittery, is that I have a hard time knowing what the truth is. It's probably a natural tendency I have anyway, just one of those people who can generally see both sides, all sides, of a story, and believe each one in turn has its own shred of truth. It can be an asset, I think, but it has been used against me with some vigor, with both external and internal force.

My therapist has no such tic. Though she does not tell me what to do, she does have an obvious and decided sense of what is right and what is wrong, what is just, and what is fair. From what I have gathered from her advice, I think that her views of these things line up with my own somewhat blurrier visions of these concepts. Talking with her makes me feel more solid and I come away from the appointments calmer and often quite happy. It's like she gives me a break from the parts of myself I find exhausting.

A couple of sessions ago, we finally got down to some brass tacks. I finished bawling, pulled my head up from between my knees, and said "For chrissakes. Daddy issues. So fucking boring." It made her laugh. I blew my nose and smiled wanly in return.

This week, we figured out that there's a bit of a hole where the loving myself is supposed to go, so I can be too dependent on other people's opinion of me, which makes me dislike myself more for needing it, and gets me wound up and fretty and worried and blah blah blah fucking blah.

If it weren't so funny that I've spent god knows how many hours and how much money to come up with "daddy issues" and "lack of self-regard," I'd be kind of disgusted with myself for being so damn ordinary. Instead I just snort, roll my eyes, and book the next appointment.

I almost cancelled the appointment I had with my Very Wise Therapist earlier this evening.

When I went to her a few weeks ago, she, of course, asked me why I had come back. I allowed as how there were two issues, one acute and one chronic. We spent most of the hour talking about the acute problem, which she felled by distilling into an easy aphorism that makes me feel better when I say it.* The crazy anxiety that had been buffeting my sternum was quelled calm almost immediately.

Last week, feeling calm and normal, I thought, hmm, maybe I should cancel and save my money. What am I going to talk about? But I didn't cancel, mostly because I don't have her email address. The phone is not my favourite mode of communication.

So there I was, in her very comfortable therapy room, its walls painted the same colour as my living room, my one leg stretched out on her couch that is almost the same colour as my couch, the other leg crooked back to the side.** At the beginning of the session, she brought in the clock and a box of kleenex. The second item surprised me at first: figuring, I suppose, that she should have picked up on my telepathic brain waves of calm. Then I thought, well, she probably can't read minds, not really. Maybe my allergies will act up.

Since I ended the session with several wet and ragged balled up kleenexes in various pants pockets, and feeling pretty wet ragged and balled up myself, she maybe probably can read minds. I haven't cried like that since the time of the whale.

It was the same sad from the same deep well, one I dug as a child; just touched in a different manner. Pointed, yes, but not quite so cutting.

*Yeah, uh, no. I'm not telling. Girl's got to have some boundaries.
**Thank you, bikram yoga.