Where I Left Off

"Well, I'd kind of like to pick up where I left off," I told the therapist on the phone during our initial chat last week.

"Oh, okay," he said, "when were you last in therapy?"

"I stopped going when college ended," I replied, "in 2002."

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. Well, on both ends of the line, to be accurate. I guess you can't really have silence on only one end of a conversation, can you?

This is the type of horseshit that my new therapist is going to have to contend with every Tuesday morning, at 8:30am. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that I'm more than likely this cat's first Tuesday appointment-- I can't imagine anybody loonier in their tuning to get up for a 7:00, 7:15, or even a 7:30am session of mind-bending bollocks. But me? I'm ready at crow of cock. If this sonofabitch wanted to see me at 6:30, I'd be there, ready to throw up all over him.

Symbolically speaking, of course.

That's really what therapy is, though, in my mind, at least: vomiting. Vomiting out the contents of your mind and, to take the analogy a bit too far, sifting through the viscous detritus to find the choice chunks to... study.

I hope you're not reading this whilst shoveling in your Sugar Smacks. Do they still make those things?

In any event, today is my first day back in therapy in nine years. As I bang out this blog, I would say that I'm somewhere on the spectrum between ambivalence and elevated anxiety. Part of me knows what to expect, part of me has no idea what to expect. Maybe the techniques will be similar and familiar, but the office and the man behind the clipboard will be different.

Oh, and I suppose I'm a little different, too. A little grayer up top, but still just as immature as I was as a college junior, in many ways. The fact that I can boast a marriage, a car, a mortgage, two dogs and a job aren't really relevant. I'm still struggling with how to deal with my family, still racing frenetically from one obligation to another like my ass-crack is on fire, still battling that depression and anxiety. Still resisting medication. Still... dying to talk about myself.

Don't look so surprised, dear.

I wonder, though, in the end, what good it will do. Because we're doing CBT, there will inevitably be homework assignments that I will have to do-- well, not HAVE to, but that will be in my best interests to do. There will be some that must be written, and no doubt there will be some that will have to be... performed, as it were-- interactions between myself and others that will probably make me uncomfortable, irritated, annoyed, and wanting desperately to stick my head into a sandbox, or a bag of sugar, or Megan Fox's nether regions.

I would be lying if I said I was 100% up for the challenge. I'm not 100% up for anything these days. Oh, go ahead-- make a penis joke. If you don't, I will.

I told this individual, (I feel uncomfortable calling him "MY therapist" just yet, seeing as we haven't even shaken hands as of this moment) that I wanted to pick up where I left off, but I know there's really no way to do that-- not when you "left off" with someone else, and not when you did it nine years ago. Truthfully, I don't really know what I want, or how I intend to achieve it. And I know he's going to ask me, and I don't know what I'm going to say.

I suppose most of what I want is to feel better. Isn't that why people go to people called "doctors" in the first place? I'm pretty sure it is. In the plainest language: I don't feel well. Sounds childish, doesn't it? But some of the most childish-sounding things are the truest of all.

My head/belly hurts.

I'm sad.

You hurt me.

I'm sorry.

I love you.

That's not fair.

All as true as true can be. And though it was often my way during therapy in college to talk the psychological talk, to be elevated and insightful and sometimes even a little poetic, perhaps I ought to just stick to those innocent little basics, and maybe I'll feel better a little bit quicker.

I hope it goes well. No doubt I'll have more fun there than at my dentist appointment at 2 today.