The metaphor is the message

I sometimes think I’m done. Eight years with the same individual therapist, hundreds of hours spent emoting and exculpating, and I am finished, polished, complete. After all, things are going pretty well compared to eight years ago. I’m a licensed therapist myself now, engaged in the world, professional and (generally) successful, so different from the isolated, depressed stay-at-home parent I was when I started. I am more self-accepting and grounded, able to ride out the occasional depressive patch.

But four a.m. wakeups eat away at me. Worries about inadequacy erode my self-respect. This job requires my absolute attention. Metabolizing and containing the emotions of others leaves little emotional space for socializing. Family time, already altered by the boy’s teen life, suffers. The responsibility of it all, keeping not only clients’ psyches in mind but often their families’ psyches as well, is an impossibly delicate business. Being a grounded psychotherapist means being comfortable with ambiguity and imperfection. That can be tough on this insecure perfectionist.

Therapy is an art informed by science. Most of the time, I feel good at it, both skilled and intuitive, and love the work, ambiguities and all. But things happen. A potential client declines to work with me, someone disappears, a complicated and murky situation becomes even more fraught. I become overwhelmed with responsibility. Sometimes I feel like an absolute fraud, a public, obvious failure. Combine this insecurity with episodic insomnia and an overscheduled professional life and, on occasion, thoughts of the sweet relief of non-existence emerge.

It is one of my strengths that I can tolerate these thoughts and the feelings around them. I am comfortable occupying this place, a stuffy, dimly lit room that smells of alcoholic sweat and unwanted tears. These thoughts and feelings do not require action. They are a shout out from a place without language, heat emanating from a furnace of uncontained, disavowed need. Still, giving these feelings a voice, indulging them in words, feels like a potentially dangerous business. Take this knotted mess inside of me, give a pull to one end of the tangle, and what will happen?

A stultifying room, a consumptive need, a knotted mess. . . all I have to make sense of these feelings are metaphors. Maybe that’s enough. Life is doubt and ache, surety and song. Nothing is absolute. I tread carefully along my mossy path, feeling my way through the gloaming, through the fog. I stumble and slip. Look lively! Be careful. Stumbling is to be expected. There will be blood and bruises. There will be discovery and joy. I get up. I fall down. I get up again. Today I write to you from the forest floor. But tomorrow? Who knows.

Invisible girl

If you weren’t there or if you didn’t read about it after the fact in the early days of the blog, let me tell you: those were desperate, terrifying, lonely times. They are long over now, as in the past as the past can be. Through writing, enlisting witnesses, and lots of (ongoing) therapy, I came to a kind of acceptance. These things happened. They marked, but did not destroy, me. This is my life and I am strong.

In a recent message exchange with someone who was there at the time, a direct witness, I alluded obliquely to my “difficult” adolescence. They questioned this understatement:  Difficult? You were the coolest person I knew.

Wait. What? Cue record scratch.

It took me a few moments to process my disbelief. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding, a confusion of what I experienced (the blood, the body, the neglect, the blame) with who I was then (admittedly “difficult,” which is not to say uncool). But what was the point of clarifying a now-stranger’s muddied memory? As we continued to send messages, parts of my history collapsed, crumbled like a California cliffside into the depths of unshared memory. I was left to carry it alone.

Later, during a visit with a kind, loving, and entertaining person who has some large blind spots, a person who has known me almost as long as my mother, I again felt the lonely pang of erasure, the void of not being seen. The spreading darkness impeded my ability to think and feel. Recognizing and containing that darkness and letting it dissipate took a toll. Thank goodness for my husband, who listened as I figured it out.

Why do I tell you this? I write it out because I have to. I am compelled. But I also want to mark the shifts in myself. Ten years ago, these experiences would have enraged me. Five years ago, they would still induce anger, perhaps some sadness and shame, a turn to a glass of wine or two for succor. Today, I just try to make sense of it and feel compassion for those who cannot, for whatever reason, see.

It’s progress, sometimes of a lonely kind. But even when I feel lonely, I know I am not alone.

The sum of all things?

Hollywood Beach, the summer of 1977. Window units filter air thick and cloying as honey into a thin and bracing breeze. A half mile down the street, the Elk River, its water the consistency and color of lukewarm coffee with cream, is dotted with children and well-oiled ladies on rafts. I am old enough now to walk down to the beach by myself. My family knows everyone, and everyone knows me. There are always watchful eyes.

Wafts of cigarette smoke and mildewed, asthmatic nights intersperse with the soothing grassiness of chamomile tea on ice and the warm burst of cherry tomatoes from the garden. My mother’s ‘70s health food staples of wheat germ and carob and my grandmother’s McDonald’s hamburgers chased with Coca-Cola both make me, flesh and bone. Dining table readings of Gertrude Stein at one house intermingle with The Price is Right and Abbot and Costello at another.

Very few of these associations have anything directly to do with the picture that inspired them. My grandfather was a ubiquitous presence. He allowed me to live with him when I was a teen, when it seemed no one else could tolerate me. My feelings about him are complicated and my grandmother has always been primary, even after her 1979 death. I could probably write more comfortably (and with more authority) about the paneling in this photo than about my grandfather. Guilt by association? Make of it what you will. I may never know the whole of it.

Sometimes I wonder how this early stew of my life, with its contradictions and mixed moods, fits into who I am now. Often it feels like there is no communication, no correspondence. What happened to those parts of me, the parts in which I am the only remaining witness?

This morning I woke up from a dream. I had never cleaned out my grad school apartment, the one from the in-between time of my early 20s, when I started to build the internal structures necessary to live in the world despite my history, my knowledge of who I really was. I went back to the building, where every unit was being renovated except for mine. Inside there were soaring ceilings, a gas fireplace fully lit. Stuff—clothes, trash, papers—was piled everywhere, my furniture was intact, and the walls were lined with artwork I had long forgotten about. It was a homecoming.

The time has come to integrate these disavowed parts of myself, to embody the contradictions and accept—and take—responsibility.

I was here

I’m not supposed to think about this anymore.
And mostly I don’t.

But when I do

I remember

hot wax between my fingers
the sour tang of Johnny Walker Red and Coke
the feeling that I had no choice
blood on my hands and piss in the bucket.

And the weight
the weight
the weight of it.

Left to carry for the rest of my life.

———

I’ve been toying with the idea of working with old photos in some sort of way (here, in a separate online space, or perhaps in a physical way), another outlet for processing what can’t be completely processed and connecting to parts of me that are sometimes shut off. Watch this space—maybe—for more.

The ever-present aftermath

Let me build a framework of remembrances and self, a series of connecting, interlocking stories that explain who I am and have become, stories that protect me from the darker parts of myself, scaffolding for what is good within.

I woke up from a dream about high school. I had to go back, but there was no place for me. The girls had become football players, heavily muscled tackling machines with wide shoulders and tapered waists, steroid-injected caricatures of meathead manhood. I no longer had anything in common with my friends—or with anyone. Why did I have to go through this again? I didn’t. What a relief. But I did not wake up relieved.

Let me identify the tributaries to this dream and its aftermath of heavy grief, self-blame, and worry, the flows in and out: a surface reconnection with my first boyfriend, leading to a sadness about the lost-world quality of my early life; a boy about to head off to ninth grade; a realization that something of my childhood and adolescent trauma, which gelled in high school, will always be with me; the stirrings of a depressive episode that may or may not be fordable, which makes connection difficult and my mood thorny and jagged. 

A framework for sanity and self-acceptance rebuilt upon the saturated alluvial plain of trauma and self-blame. . . I build a trap to catch the thoughts that eat away at me, self-directed harpoons, remnants of what can’t be explained. I don’t know whether to hide these sharp things away or polish them for display, wall hangings that directly remind me that survival comes with scars.

Survival at any cost. But I am here, am I not? What to accept, what to change? For I was permanently altered and am capable of so much.