I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

My therapist’s office is exactly what you might picture if you were to conjure up a vision of a New York therapist’s office. It’s in a large building off of Broadway that houses other offices and apartments, and a preschool on the ground floor. The building is even named after a Saint, which I always thought was fancy but also kind of strange for such an ordinary structure in Manhattan. The security guard is from Cote d’Ivoire and on good days he and I like to speak French together. On bad days I give him a perfunctory wave and head up the spiraling stairs to the second floor office. The floor’s bathroom needs a code for entry, as if the doctors don’t trust that patients can’t enter it without killing themselves. There’s a white noise machine near the door of the office, and one of the doctors who shares the space with mine is named “Margot Tenenbaum.” Really! Every time I go I want to take a picture on my phone but I somehow always end up forgetting.

I started seeing this therapist last summer when I was going through a bad breakup. My medication was off and I was having one of those intense depression spells where I couldn’t really do normal things like get out of bed in the morning or go to work without crying. These dark patches of my life are characterized by things like: the simplest tasks feeling incredibly exhausting, losing huge chunks of time to sleeping and sobbing hysterically, and making about ten calls a day to my unimaginably patient mother. They strike rarely, but when they do, they’re debilitating.

I had my last therapy session in New York yesterday. I’m pretty awful at therapy. If therapy were a graded course I’d probably get a C-. I feel weird talking about myself and always end up wanting to know more about my doctor’s life than I do about my own. Good therapists like mine can easily deflect attempts to shift topics to the universal. Nothing gets fixed when you speak in universal terms. It’s the minutia that’s the hardest to talk about, but like a screw that once put in place secures the whole structure, in therapy it’s parsing the small stuff that counts.

Yesterday my hair and shoes were wet from the rain. I hung my coat on the back of the tan chair that sits in the corner by the door. Everything in the office is neutral color, down to the bleary paintings of European cities that adorn the walls. I think this is why the room screams “New York therapist’s office!” This and the arrangement of the furniture, with the couch against one wall and the doctor’s chair and table directly diagonal from it. Of course, there is a box of tissues on the coffee table beside the couch. I admit to having used it once or twice.

It takes a really long time for me to get to the small stuff during each session. I probably spend about 30 of the 50 minutes talking about the general course of my life, things like “My roommate moved out,” and “I took my cat to the vet,” and “This is my last week in New York.” I think therapy sessions should be no shorter than two or three hours, because it takes me so long to get to the real heart of anything.

Yesterday I shrugged a lot, and bit my lip. I do these things when I’m nervous. My therapist stared at me intensely from behind his wire-framed glasses. “It’s funny,” I said, knowing full well that what was about to follow wasn’t really that funny at all. “I came here devastated by a dude, and I’m leaving devastated by one too.” I said it just like that, using the word “dude” and everything. Calling men “dudes” makes them somehow less real, like they’re comic book characters instead of people with whom I’ve actually shared intimate experiences.

“I don’t think that’s true at all,” he said, and shifted in his chair. “You were upset over both, but the way you handled the situations was totally different. You came to me last summer because it was hard for you to cope alone, but with this relationship you seem to be doing the coping all on your own. I think that’s real progress.”

I guess I pay him to say things like this.

He’s right, though, in a lot of ways. Even though it’s the one place where you’re allowed to shed self-deprecation, in therapy I still frequently downplay any success or progress I accomplish. But I have changed so much in the past nine months that it’s hard to argue with him. Before, when I went into those spells of darkness, I was never truly convinced that there actually was a light at the end of the tunnel, or that I was strong enough to recover from the things that devastate me. I guess it’s a form of low self-esteem. But strangely I don’t feel that way anymore. I used to be terrified of being consumed by the things that haunted me, but now I don’t really live with that fear. Perhaps it’s there, abstractly, in the same way most people’s fear of death or loss is, but it doesn’t buzz with the same urgency that it used to.

I think part of growing up is figuring out how to be good to yourself, and learning that it’s okay to do so. I used to be afraid “introspection” and “narcissism” were the same thing, or that “self-preservation” and “selfishness” were equally negative. I believed that nine months ago, but I don’t anymore.

“We have to get good with ourselves before we can effectively take care of others,” a friend told me last night. “And taking care of others is really the point, isn’t it?”

Yes.

Leave a Reply