Sorry it has been a while. I had some stuff to do. Very little of it was throwing up, but still, it's been busy.
My therapist says...BAM! What you just heard was the sound of me, dropping yet another plank from my platform.
I have always had some level of, if not distrust, then leeriness, of therapy and therapists. A large portion of this comes from the empirical data collected over the years that the children of therapists are exceedingly often the most fucked-up people you will ever come across, hands down.
Some of this comes from a therapist I was sent to as a youth because of difficulties in school, who took a lot of my parents' money and wasted a good number of afternoons to come to the conclusion that "You, young man, think your shit shouldn't stink."
I assume she wasn't speaking literally.
I could have saved everyone involved time and money by copping to that from the get-go. That was never in question. My control-issues, and desire to be there for people, and be someone others cold look up to, and to be attractive, or charming, or in any number of ways worthwhile: that was all an open faced sandwich for anyone who was curious. She coulda just asked me, and we would have been at Baskin Robbins on Charles Street within ten minutes, two scoops to the wind and no parent the poorer.
So that's where my lack of awe with the profession probably started.
Granted, I think I was 12, but some lessons just stick.
Now, for a set of significantly weightier reasons than not getting the best grades my intellect implied I could have, I am once again on a couch.
It actually is a couch, this time. I sit upright, but still. The last hack just sat me down in the sunroom at her house near Towson. Cheapskate.
Where was I? Oh, right, the present.
I have documented pretty clearly here my weak moments. The welcome-home freakout. The 'shortness of breath; episode, the 'if I tell you why I don't want Ativan I'll cry' monologue. I've tried to be honest and faithful to my failings and my victories against both the disease and the cure so far.
So now, here N and I are, a very convenient three blocks from our home, getting to know a therapist. I apologize in advance for using what may be incorrect terms; she could be a licensed social worker, she could be a psychologist, she could be a sheep-shearer with a very good cover story. I do not mean any disrespect, I only mean to show my ignorance of the details.
N started it...and, as is more often than not the case, she was right. She knows some head-shrinky types and asked around for cancer-specific mind-benders, and a couple names came up and this one was, as mentioned, right around the corner. And, I sigh and add, extremely well recommended by people in the Cancer Community--which would be a horrid name for a new housing development outside of Cleveland.
I have had two, christ, do I have to call them sessions? Sheesh. OK, I have had two sessions. The first with N to make sure we got the time-line of sickness and recovery and freakout and everything correct--left to my own devices I am as likely to confuse four weeks on prednisone with eight hours in the ER two months later: time has to stay elastic for me or the drudgery and the sloth and sickness and the pain would overwhelm. N was pleased with our hour, and had questions answered, as did I. An introductory session, but a good one.
Then I went back on my own, bravely climbing her outlandishly steep stairs and at least feeling justified at being short of breath.
And you know what? It has been a good thing. I will say that, and I will acknowledge that I am taking myself down a peg in my own system of things by saying that.
My position on big D Depression, and mood-altering drugs and dependence thereon, and Therapy, and all off it, come from within a fortified, blessed tunnel.
I made it from mid-February, 1972, to April 15 2010--tax and diagnosis day--through my share of unpleasantness, but nothing more or less than millions of others. But, for some reason, I was the type of person with the type of psyche that could find a coping mechanism to slot my little devastations into--little cubbyholes--and then spend time over time making sense of them, growing immune to them, accepting them, and/or in many ways making them the central column of who I am.
And one thing that hadn't occurred to me, until very recently--thank you very much, cancer--is that the longer you stay not-dead, the more you take in, the more you learn, the more grey areas you understand to be the basic template for life, the less equipped you are to self-protect.
When you are a kid, bad is bad and good makes it better. There's a Zen, a certainty, to the more elegant workings of the young mind.
When you get older and begin to tread in the complexities of it all, it becomes harder and harder to just react as a child might, shrink back to the hiding places: you realize you don't fit in them any more. Hide behind a tree, then look down and see that your chest is visible from the front, and your ass is hanging out the back.
I have yet to break down in a session. I am not sure that's the point. I seriously doubt this woman will roll me up in a mattress and have me reenact my birth, or ask a sock puppet I have named Holter 2 why I gave myself cancer. If she asks me to finger-paint, I will ask for a discount.
But I am accepting that, well, to take all the fun out of creating ones own catchphrases and blazing new paths of prose...shit happens.
Shit happens, and even when you are strong and have an amazing support group and even when you were so strong even weeks before that you could have run a marathon, and even though you know yourself pretty goddamn well, some shit you just need to spread out a bit. You might have to take a pill so you can stop throwing up. You might have to take a pill so you stop eating only tears for breakfast. You might have to talk to a trained stranger about...well...we haven't gotten to too much of that yet.
And taking those steps may very well be defeats to the person you were before you got sick.
When I was writing the therapist a check--paying for two sessions in advance, probably as some form of control, I paused at the 'memo' line.
Coulda written her name.
Coulda written 'medical appt.'
Coulda written anything.
I wrote "Therapist."
And I felt defeated.
And I also felt...
Brave.
The hideous cliche about courage is that you are just as shit-scared as the next person, but you do it anyway.
I am shit-scared. I have gotten closer to accepting the happy pills as nausea pills, but the terror that they are eating me surges through sometimes.
I am shit-scared. I see that my numbers are reacting just as the Drs think they should, but every once in a while "Die In Your Sleep!!" flies on bat-wings through my darkened skull.
I am shit-scared. I let my wife and my mother and my friends help me when I need it, and searing flashes of me unable to help others, unable to say 'here, lemme get that' ever again, concuss behind my eyes; migraines of fear.
But you do it anyway.
Since my last post I have gotten a lot of emails with headings like "the voice in your head is a dick" and "just stop it" and "you are still you."
But one extremely observant young woman wrote:
"So if you'll take some advice from a teenage climbing instructor: keep three anchors on the wall (only move one limb at a time), climb with your legs because they are the strongest, don't look down--eyes on the prize--and if you need help, your belay team can take up the slack and lift you up one more inch, so you can get a good hold."
I'm getting a good hold. I am doing it anyway. It is changing me, dammit. And I'll handle that, too.
