in hindsight, it all makes sense: a peek into my therapy session

oh and while it was 90 degrees in sf i curated a list of fall jackets

Oct 09, 2024

In today’s newsletter-

a personal essay, slight overshare imo
all the fall jackets in my online shopping carts
books i bought based on cover design only

After walking in circles around my house, wearing only a white t-shirt and black granny panties, I sat myself on the couch and caught up on homework. While laughing loudly to an audience of none, at a podcast I initially refused to listen to because “i don’t like listening to noises”, I got a text from my therapist saying to let her know when I was ready. She was referring to our once monthly appointment that I almost always forget about and almost always need…very badly.

At first, I played coy, not wanting to talk about the existential dread that has been plaguing me (and everyone else since the beginning of time). Instead, I talked about my son and his budding ocd symptoms. To be fair to him, I won’t spill the details but he’s fine. Really. In a short aside about the bay area heat wave I let it slip that over the weekend I freaked out about the temperature and my daughter, always proactive, decided to text her dad for help. Using the diction tool on her apple watch she said, Mom is freaking out.

To be clear, my freak out was mostly internal. It was hot. It was dry. My heart rate was elevated, or so I thought when I compulsively checked it. Love is Blind was on and while Hannah was being love bombed by yet another mid looking white man who was fluent in love bombing the Crossy Castle soundtrack played directly into my right ear drum making it very hard to focus. Melting into the couch was not the relaxing activity I thought it would be so I got up and started to pace. I said out loud, to nobody in particular, “ohmygod, I’m freaking out. it’s too hot in here.”

My daughter, who in her short life has seen a few of my panic attacks, went into action mode. At which point she said, “i’m gonna tell dad.” Knowing that the poor thing was probably traumatized from my last full fledged panic attack, when we were almost late for school because I was too scared to drive because of another elevated heart rate incident, I pulled it together. Freak out done. Freak out over. Freak out was only a freak out to the extent that it was verbalized, but in hindsight I could have kept that to myself. Nonetheless, she had outed me.

My therapist and I discussed whether or not my anxiety is a learning opportunity for my children and how I might use my moments of despair as teaching tools. I glossed over the guilt that comes with being a mom with anxiety and ocd because it’s not easy to talk about without feeling badly about myself, and like I mentioned before, the existential dread was there in the background. As we got further into our session, I realized that wow, I had a lot to talk about. I told her about all the free time I had. It’s sick how much free time I have and how little I do with it. I asked her how other people managed to do the things that they wanted and how I would ever get a job that pays well and how I would ever finish school if I ended up getting a job and maybe I should just be a bank teller or something like that because obviously I’m not the kind of person that does well creatively. “You’re ruminating,” she said, as I stopped to catch my breath.

It’s funny how therapists can listen to a 3 minute rant and instead of getting caught up in the content that I’m spewing, point out a pattern that I’ve been engaging with for years. This pattern of getting lost in the content, of avoiding hard feelings, trying to skip over discomfort, and then feeling badly about myself because I’ve not done anything that I care about. It turns out that OCD gets in the way of a lot of things. In my life, it makes it very difficult to know how to spend my time. Is this the right thing to be doing? Will this be the best use of my time? What if this choice doesn’t lead to the future I want? What if I don’t even know what future I want? What If I Never Know? And then my silly little idea of practicing Bach’s Prelude in C Major for a few minutes on my keyboard goes out the window because apparently I’m hopeless and destined for a life of eternal discontent.

(Can you believe I’m 37?)

I told her that sometimes I feel like the only way to get around this feeling is to get into a silent chamber for a week where I can actually hear myself think and get underneath all the garbage that is floating at the top of my mind. My therapist dug deeper. “Can you go do that? Does your life allow for you to go do that for a week?” I said yes, technically i can do whatever I want. “So why don’t you?” The immediate challenge to go do the thing that I thought would solve my problem, the thing that I could do if it weren’t for my glaring anxiety and tendency to stay within my comfort zone, felt aggressive. Surely, she didn’t expect me to go on a silent retreat, as if being quiet in the woods would actually give me the answers I needed. “I didn’t mean literally,” I said.

The truth was right there, floating above us in our shared airspace. I was stuck in this loop because I refused to do anything that might shake me out of it. My unwillingness to move through difficult feelings is the cage I live in. It keeps me safe from danger, but only the imagined kind. It keeps me feeling comfortable, but only in the discomfort I’m used to. More than that, it keeps me from entering open doors into spaces that I know I could thrive in. I have a tendency to wish I were different. I wish I were blessed with one of those brains that allows someone to make choices and stick with them, to remain steadfast in the pursuit of goals, and to feel a healthy portion of anxiety only when it is helpful. I wish I could be the type of person that goes to the silent retreat, if only metaphorically.

My silent retreat is having an idea and going for it even before the perfectionism sets in. It’s going to las vegas with a grieving friend. It’s reading the book on top of the pile. It’s taking the route suggested by google maps. It’s walking to the library and not checking the ingredient list and taking off my goddamned apple watch for 5 fucking seconds. It’s all these little things that keep me contained into a space not big enough for growth. So while a silent retreat may be nice, taking an enthusiastic approach to chasing values in spite of discomfort seems like a medicine I’m more inclined to swallow. Then maybe, just maybe, I might come to you with all I learned after a 10 day commitment to silence.