When I drive to see my therapist, I’m always nervous.
I arrive early and I park under a shady tree. If I happen to be in a phase where I’m listening to a playlist, I’ll let a song play until the end and rest against the round circle headrest in my Fiat and sigh and think: “Do I really need to do this?”
When I get out of my car I look up at the tree and pretend the leaves are waving good fortune my way. I say to them: “I’ll see you again when I’m done and I’ll be happier for it.”
I make sure I have a pen in my purse and my notebook. I always go into the restroom and look at myself in the mirror and wash my hands and pretend I’m an employee. If this were my restroom I went to every day, would I be sick of it?
Sometimes I have writing printed out that I’ll hand her when I go inside. I know it’s silly to print it, but it’s my thing.
“Do you want me to read it, or do you want to read it?”
On that particular day, I told her I’d pick and choose what I wanted to read.
I was finally getting to the point where I felt it was enough. I talk about this with my cousin a lot, where we’ll both agree, “How much self-reflecting can we do?” or “Can someone else in the family pay $125 a session to get better?” And we laugh like we are the most healed beings on the planet, even though… who is?
I ask my therapist, “Do you think I’m okay to stop for a bit?”
She says without hesitation, “Absolutely.”
I say, “What’s something I should continue working on or… what’s something I need to remind myself, when I find myself slipping?”
She says, rather flatly, “You overfunction emotionally.”
I picture myself as a crackling robot woman (fire for eyes), overheating as I write it down, and I feel my heart tug along with the corners of my mouth while I give her the softest, “Okay.”
“The biggest thing, for you?” she says, her brows arching over her tortoiseshell glasses, “You avoid your own needs by intellectualizing or narrating them.” She waves around the papers I hand her, and that heart tug gets more painful. “You’ll write a gorgeous piece about feeling too much. But you don’t directly tend to what you need. When you’re writing, ask yourself: what do I really NEED?”
It’s funny, because (as I type this commentary out from my own scribbled handwriting), I realize I’m avoiding even asking that question.
I’m willing to bet so many of us do this. Maybe not with the writing, specifically, but with how we process anything. It’s far too convenient to skip the step of feeling what the body is trying to tell you when you can type it all out (or pick your avoidance method of choice) and pretend that gets the job done.
I feel a little stupid for saying this, but I never knew my writing was a type of self-soothing. A sophisticated form of evasion where I get to neatly showcase my emotional awareness and patterns and projections with precision and insight—but when it comes to actually… feeling them?
That’s a little trickier.
So, I suppose there’s a thing to work on while I move away from therapy. It was probably the one thing she wanted me to work on all along.
(Daily Writing 032)
Thoughts?