I remember when I was a tween... maybe 12... and going to see what I now understand to have been a childhood psychiatrist. At the time I thought I was so cool and important, the way I felt cool when I got braces for the first time or when I got my glasses that I wore all around even though I didn't need to. My mom took me in because I'd been having stomach issues (bad gallbladder) and the doctors were thinking maybe it was in my head. So we got there and I thought there was going to be some miracle thing around fixing me, but there wasn't. The guy chatted with me, I tried not to exaggerate my life up-to-then, and then we left.
I said I didn't want to go back because ultimately, it was a disappointing experience. No cure? Get lost.
Launching forward another 12 years, I started seeing a couples counselor with Ken. We had gone through a couple cheating scandals/affairs, and I said that if I was going to stay, then he needed to get us counseling to try and work through whatever it was that we were going through. I can remember sitting down with this lady, someone that was paid for through Ken's work, and her asking "so why are you both here?" And he looked at me with eyes that said "your story, you tell her," and that was therapy.
It was me talking, waxing poetic, artfully crying, attempting to get her on MY side, and trying for a limited four sessions to fix whatever "love" meant to me at that point. In hindsight it was sham. I wasn't taking it seriously because in my heart of hearts, I knew we were toast. And I think in his heart of hearts, he was doing it because it was just what you should do to not rock the boat anymore than you already have. And then of course in her heart of hearts I think she was just getting a paycheck. Can't fault her, really.
And that was what I maintained was therapy for a long time after, just kind of a ruse where you could go and chat and say you were better and then scoot along and be allegedly better for it. Maybe other people got more from it than I did, and maybe not. My own experiences had been poop.
In 2017, after another relationship ended in cheating, I was left once again looking at the broken pieces of a life I had held publicly in high regard, but in reality had grown to resent for the mirage that it was. I say this because it was a life of Instagram posts and witty blogs to show everyone how happy I was and how great my world was, and aren't you jealous? Don't you wish you could be here WITH me to experience it all? But it was a trick of the light... a figment of a reality that didn't exist. When I realized this, I also realized I needed help. Depression is a funny thing in how it hides so cleverly below the surface, waiting for a chance to dig its claws in and drag you under. I was going under.
I had mentioned in the summer at a doctor visit that I wasn't doing well with my own happiness, and it was suggested that I reach out to a therapist for help within the hospital network. I said yeah, that would be great, but I left it there and never intended to act on it. Luckily some doctors take that sort of thing seriously, because had they not submitted me to whatever system they operate in, I never would have received a call a few weeks later from the scheduling team. They had a therapist ready for me, and I just needed to agree to an appointment.
And so I met Kelsey.
She was newer to the field, having recently graduated from school, and everything we talked about needed to be gone over with her supervisor (or at least, that was how I understood it). I remember sitting in her small office that had a little... loveseat?... against the wall, a couple lamps, a couple pieces of artwork, and her desk. Oh, and two desk chairs. I always chose one of the desk chairs, my back to the door, and I stared a lot at one of the images on the wall. It was of a dam, if I remember correctly, and the shadows of the cables running in the air above were cast on the dam wall.
When she asked me what brought me in, I realized in that moment it was my chance to drop the bullshit. In that instant, my chance had presented itself to shed the past like the dead weight it had actually become. I had no partner in the room to point the finger at, I had no parent with me to stop me from sharing possibly too much, it was just us. And I was 31, so really, the jig was up. I started talking. And I talked and I talked and I cried. I was heartbroken over my relationship ending, first and foremost. I was devastated and embarrassed, and in some ways to this day, I still am. I've had three great loves in my life and Derek was one of them, the one that was perhaps the most consistent with no breaks during and no scandals until the very end.
Why I would still feel some sort of devastation and embarrassment, I don't think I could tell you. It's not a big part of me, yet it lingers in the dark sometimes. You put too much focus on it, you give it too much weight, and it can come out of the shadows for a visit. However brief.
In the beginning I was seeing Kelsey weekly, and after the first month, it moved to bi-weekly. We graduated from talking about Derek and Ken to talking about other things. Family dynamics, my relationships with my parents as a whole, my mom and dad separately, and the same with my siblings. We worked on the issues I had there, issues I never knew I had, because I'd not brought them up before to focus on and I'd also never been asked the... right questions? Or maybe the right follow-up questions? I don't know. We moved into work issues, friend issues. I addressed the at times crippling anxiety that I deal with. The phobias I handle seemingly with ease. How I can be controlling, neurotic, and perhaps too head-strong.
By the spring of 2018, Kelsey felt like my friend. I don't know if that's the point of therapy, I assume it's not to pay for a friendship, but there we were. I trusted her. She occasionally gave an opinion but never one of "this is what you should do." It was more of "I hear what you're saying, and I understand why you say it. What do you feel when you're in this situation?" It was a constant flow of addressing my feelings and seeking to understand them. At this point I was only seeing her once a month.
So I bought the Manor, my first house, and we had a session that June where I told her I felt like I didn't need to be in therapy anymore. Weirdly it felt like breaking up, y'know? We weren't going to talk anymore, not outside of that office, because that crosses some sort of boundary that I didn't go to school to understand. I just knew it was a non-negotiable and best not to ask. She was having a baby that fall, her first, so I knew the time limit had sort of been established anyway on when we would be sunsetting our chats. My last appointment would be in July, and when it came, she had to reschedule it due to maybe a doctors appointment or something popping up on her end. I took it as a sign not to reschedule, that it was the universe telling me I was good to go.
I worked on my house for a year, and I focused on bettering myself for ME, not for someone or anyone else, and it worked. After being single a year and a half, I dated again that winter, my lovely Jonathan, aka Mursula Gandalf O'Brien. Ultimately it did not work out with him, but it was the first time I in my adult life had been able to sit down with someone and explain why it wasn't working out. Odd how three years later and he is undoubtedly one of the best friends I've ever had. Anywho, hey girl.
I met Andrew in 2019, a year to the day after buying the house. Nine months later I lost Andrew when he left me, citing reasons that dealt largely with his mental health. I was so flabbergasted, to put it lightly, over what happened with us, and I was so fucking MAD at myself for having let go of all the work I had done to become the guy he had originally been attracted to. It felt like punishment for thinking I could have bettered myself, and this was the universe's way of smacking me with reality. I was a mess, doubled over with my own issues as Covid spread and turned everything familiar upside down. Social interactions that could have helped me move forward were ripped away. Being out in public and writing, like I am right now, was not an option.
There was a lot of shame that came upon me when Andrew and I first broke up. Pure shame that I had lost myself so willingly and so blindly to a love I had felt like no other before it. And that sucked. When we had a brief quarrel that spring, I used therapy as if it were a weapon, telling him I'd been forced to go back to it because of him, as if that were a bad thing. It was also a lie, because of course I had not gone back. I thought about it, sure, but I never pursued it. In hindsight I'm not sure why I thought saying I had gone back to therapy was a bad thing... maybe my mindset was on "you hurt me bad enough that I can't cope by myself"? I don't know.
When we inevitably got back together a year later, there was the small voice in the back of my mind telling me not to do it. I felt like I was setting myself up for more pain, and yes, eventually I was, but at the time the pros outweighed the cons.
Ultimately by the time winter came around this past year, I was not doing well. There were a lot of reasons why, most of them had to do with my relationship and what was going on within it. I could not easily find Kelsey, either. I knew her first and last name, but not if she was even working there any longer. I probably could've called but that would mean stepping out of my comfort zone and we certainly couldn't have that. So I hunted her down through the hospital directory, eventually found her, and eventually was able to make an appointment.
Therapy started back up in January this year.
It's funny, but I can't really even describe what that first meeting was like with her. It had been nearly four years since we last spoke and there was a lot to catch her up on, but ultimately it was this incredible, all encompassing relief that I had found her and could talk to her. She'd been with me before... she still had the notes from before. It was almost as if no time at all had passed.
Eventually I started seeing an additional therapist to work through another kind of trauma that I was grappling with, which was expensive and on the side and something that I learned from but don't need to participate in again. That was for two months and not something I'll get into here.
When Kelsey and I reconnected, she had by then welcomed two children into her life and a third was on the way this August. That gave me a time limit, as it were (and as I assigned), to work through my shit. I didn't want to come back with a no-end-in-sight mentality around therapy, because that's not how I operate in general. What's the problem, why is it a problem, and how can I fix it? The sessions were all going to be remote and through zoom, something I was nervous about at first but ultimately came to enjoy. It was quicker, easier, and there was no lost connection between us despite not being in the same room.
Sometimes it was hard having these sessions when Andrew was home. He would lock himself away in his office with his noise cancelling headphones on, but I felt like I needed to be guarded and careful about what I said in the off chance he would hear me. After all, the bulk of our conversation was around him, me, and what was going on. I'm pretty open in this forum about my life, the blog forum, and with Andrew I was pretty open as well, but what Kelsey and I talked about was between us. They were my darkest, most desperate thoughts, and sharing those with anyone else just didn't compute. He would ask me after my sessions if I wanted to talk about anything we had discussed, and I rarely if ever did. Sometimes it annoyed me that he would ask, made me angry, because I was trying to get it in my mind that I was doing this to better myself. I was not trying to better him, because largely at that point I had given up trying to do so. Our agreement had been that he would go to therapy as well on his own, and after two sessions he stopped. There was a lot of fury in me towards him for that, because to me, it just looked like he had given up on himself, and thus our life together. I had to be in it for myself and no one else.
I never voiced that to him, not until now of course if he's reading this, and it is what it is.
When we broke up, I had resigned myself to reality and accepted it for face value. I could no longer try to look deeper in him, I could no longer make excuses, I just had to give up. And for me, giving up is a very hard thing to do. Maybe because I'm stubborn and a control freak, though the latter is something I'm not supposed to say about myself. Kelsey once phrased it as "oh we don't say that, we like to say persistently with our choices." It was a laugh.
In July, after Andrew had moved out, we determined I needed to figure out how to be a generator of my own happiness again. What does it take to be a generator? We ended a call one day and I went and grabbed a huge sketchbook, writing in great big bold letters across the top "HOW TO BECOME A GENERATOR." I filled out three columns beneath that, What's the problem? Why tho? and What's the solution? I then took my time filling the columns out, coming up with 15 things in my life that bother me, what exactly the reason is behind them bothering me, and then what the ways are in which I could hopefully resolve them. The effect was pretty immediate, seeing all of the swirling thoughts that had bombarded my mind for months, neatly put onto paper. Organized thoughtfully, carefully, and in a way that I could take action on them. Some I already have.
Yesterday was my last day of therapy with Kelsey as she prepares for maternity leave next week. I had felt that after Andrew moved out, I put the pedal to the metal to get myself together. That meant compartmentalizing some things in a way, and it also meant setting plans into motion in another (such as quitting my job at Pottery Barn (more on that soon)). It's funny though how in the rush to get these things all going, I felt like I was doing it to make my teacher happy. Not because I could then scream out "I'm CURED!" but because having a time limit meant I needed to just figure my business out... to show I had figured my shit out to the one person that knew what that shit was.
I don't know if it's the last session I'll ever have with her, or even if it's the last time I'll ever talk to her. When I closed my laptop after exiting the zoom, I put my head down on the dining table and I cried. Perhaps it is the overwhelming happiness I feel at accomplishing something again, when it feels like it has been years since I last did. Perhaps it's the sadness that this individual, large in part a tool of recovery to me themselves, has to go away for a while. And then perhaps, also, it is because for the first time in a very long time I feel hope for what is to come. I feel like I've got a chance now to change my circumstances, in whatever way I want, and that's a really great thing.
Just like therapy turned out to be, as it were.
I used to be so skeptical of a stranger coming into your life and turning it in so many different directions through the power of conversation, but that is what happened here. Kelsey saved me in ways I didn't know I needed to be saved... in ways I didn't know I could be saved. And I'll be forever grateful to her for being a person I could turn to in my lowest hours, for just a little reassurance and the slightest hint of guidance. The rest was up to me, as it always has been, and she let me see that for myself.
I'm filled with gratitude toward her, more than I know how to say. And if you've ever had the opportunity to participate in something such as this, perhaps you agree. It's not always comfortable, it's not always easy, and it's certainly not always fun. But in the end, it's important work and it's so alleviating (hopefully) as to what is troubling you. I'm living proof of that.
Ciao for now (c:
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