"Why Isn't Therapy Fixing Me?"
Getting into a question I asked myself for years (+ 5 current hyperfixations)
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
I can fucking do this.
I laid sprawled out on the floor, stared at the ceiling and felt the rough fibers of my rug scratch against my arms with every anxious twitch.
I was attempting to sit with an uncomfortable emotion.
It wasn’t going well.
I jolted upright, mashed my face in disgust and pulled my legs to my chest. In an reflexive moment of angry resistance, I banged my forehead against my knees. Hard.
“Ouch.”
I wanted to drown my reality out with a pill, a joint, or perhaps by shoving the entire contents of the kitchen pantry down my gullet.
It turns out facing your demons is really hard. How would I know? Maybe because I’ve spent most of my life dancing around the fiery fringe of my mental health problems as they continued to expand and consume me.
For many years, I didn’t understand why I felt so depressed nor why my dating pursuits yielded disaster after disaster. I thought I was doing work on myself but I didn’t understand why nothing in my life ever changed.
For almost a decade, I would dutifully take a 45 minute double-transfer subway ride from Brooklyn to my therapist’s home office on the Upper West Side.