as of this week i've made appointments to start seeing a new doctor AND a new therapist.
been nearly a year since i walked out on my old shitty therapist. very interesting year. a lot happening (a LOT a lot, oh my god). some bad. some very bad. but a lot of very very good. way more good than expected. more than i could have imagined, really, when i was trying—two years ago when i saw the change coming, looming and blocking out all beyond it like a total wave, and i was mainly grieving and terrified.
also a lot of self-reflection, and on the flip side a lot of getting lost in the moment and forgetting myself.
(it's like how, when i'm unmedicated (like now), i can remember what it's like for my brain to be working better, but i can't really remember until i'm back on meds and all the neural pathways line up again. and yes here i am comparing talking to emotionally intelligent people (professionals) with being on prescription drugs. c'est la vie)
before this i had gone through around five years of therapy and had never taken a significant break. i got used to having a companion in my introspective adventures. a touchstone to keep me from wandering back into all my old bad habits. i was so afraid to give that up.
in the end, i didn't have much choice. so i got up and walked out and started walking my lonely road (as green day might put it) again. but this time, i found, i had the ghosts of therapists past walking with me. it was not at all the same.
i didn't realize how much i had changed until i could compare those two oh-so-different solitudes.
because, in the time that therapy was working for me, i learned so much. i learned it and damn well applied it. how to cry in front of someone. how to be upset and yet not feel like the world was ending. how to let my emotions exist. how to let the world exist and face the shape of my life without trying to force it to change. how to talk to someone. how to build trust, like a bridge, with my own two hands.
i associated all that with being in therapy; i didn't know it had become part of me.
my dear good therapist taught me how to ask for help. my shitty therapist taught me some other stuff which i don't think she intended to; and in the midst of that mess of mixed gems and slag it emerged: the clarity of contrast, to appreciate all i had learned and was capable of. the motivation of spite (justice!) to seize back my agency:
"i can do a better job at this
(the business of helping myself)
i would not choose to make anyone else use that method to learn, but it was what i had, and i damn well learned. i know better. i know myself better. i don't need to feel insecure about this. i am done with the starvation of waiting for cruel people's mercy.
(i am on the hunt for a kinder world, and i am a persistence predator.)
it is strange to anticipate this new venture into therapy, with all my changed motivation. i have my guard so far up. yet i am somehow, simultaneously, ready to open up, to be (in the eyes of my past self) unfathomably honest and extend enough of an olive branch of vulnerability to form a genuine connection, to tackle both my truest struggles and my "unacceptable" flaws. a surreal synthesis.
i am ready to ask for help and i am ready to walk out if i'm not getting it. i'm done wasting time. my fears and desires have narrowed down to the knife-edge of needing to be a better person.
i am ready to get to work.
