Therapy cracked me open and fried me like an egg
Reflecting on my first year of therapy and the spiral it sent me down.
We are now settling into March with its receding cold and blooming flowers, these last moments of a depressing winter have been a conducive space for an attempt at unbiased reflection of one of my least favorite seasons of the year.
My tropical blood and Texan upbringing don’t make me very keen on unnecessary coldness, in my mind any temperature lower than 40 degrees should be accompanied by blankets of pillowy snow, otherwise, what’s the point?
This law of mine goes against most natural weather rules that a majority of the cold-but-not-cold-enough southern states follow, rules that are also followed by the city of San Francisco, to my luck one of the few areas on the west coast that have my blessing as a fit place to lie my head down at night.
I love this city so much that I reluctantly take its winter months filled with cold, wet atmospheric pressures(?)—and ZERO snow—in exchange for being among talented Bay Area creatives and streets lined with magnolia trees that bloom several times a year. Gotta take the bitter with the sweet.
. . .
A year has passed since I moved to San Francisco drunk off the possibilities and opportunities that the west had to offer me, embodying the rogue spirit of a 1949 gold miner, and almost a year since I started therapy for the first time in my life—truly a self-inflicted torture of sorts—in my quest to figure out who I am and who I want to be.
All my life I’ve sworn up and down that I have terrible memory, that I can’t recall events from the day before, let alone from childhood. One hesitation that kept me from doing therapy for so long was my worries about how good of a patient I would be due to my goldfish memory; my mind was a plunging deep fish tank, each of the many fish stones that settled on the bottom a tiny chunk of my dismembered memory—hardened and eroded from time, less colorful and pleasant-looking than when they were first created.
The possibility of forking up $100 per session only to piss it away from my inability to form cohesive thoughts about my forgotten past was high and I wondered if I could even access these lost parts of myself; I had locked them in the basement like an ugly step-child with the rats and roaches and all the other undesirables for someone else to deal with, hoping darkness would feed on them until they no longer existed and I no longer remembered.
Yet all it took was a few therapy sessions to unleash those bastard children I had exiled and locked away, they bursted back into my mind with fury and vividness, just as intense as the day they seared into my mind. My memories demanded to be remembered and felt, all the pain and suffering that I had been cross-country running from my whole life finally caught up with me and it knocked me dizzy like a rogue Mario Kart turtle shell.