Proverbs 12, Verse 8
"Everyone admires a man with good sense, but a man with a warped mind is despised."
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
Almost three years ago, when I went back into therapy for the first time since college, I sat cross-legged, like a girl, in front of that guy and said,
"I just don't know if I'm a good man or a bad man,"
And, fortunately or unfortunately, he didn't cock his head, squint his eyes and say,
"Are you fucking kidding me? How old are you?"
I don't like the words "identity crisis", because I think they were made up by some slackass with too much time on his hands and a very good grasp of what educated white people will grasp onto to explain why they're annoying, plus I don't think being unsure of yourself is necessarily a crisis. It might be. I don't know. I've never watched "Dr. Oz".
I'm not quite sure why I went back into therapy. In college, it was free, and I rocked that couch every week for a significant portion of my time there. Other people my age looked forward to beer pong, Frisbee golf and pussy, while I always got up out of bed faster and with more energy on the day when I knew I was going to therapy.
In college I treated therapy the same way I treated everything else: like it was a performance. It was a one man show and it just so happened that there was one person in the audience, too. And that didn't matter to me-- the way I performed there might as well have been a thousand people crammed into that hopeless office replete with '70s-era furniture and a broken HVAC system that made the room approximately 327 degrees all year long. I loved telling funny anecdotes from my past to the therapist, who never really thought to rein me in. For me, watching him laugh, until he was sometimes doubled over in his chair, was therapy, and I would leave the Health Center practically walking on air. I was doing what I was born to do: make someone else feel better. Forget that that was supposed to be his job.
Well, sort of.
I didn't really understand the point of therapy in college, I just knew that, of all the buildings on campus, even the theatre buildings-- that was the building in which I belonged. I knew it, it couldn't be denied or argued. In fact, I was so sure of this that when I came in to schedule my first appointment, the stereotypically dowdy secretary said,
"You know, there is a back entrance that you can use for your appointments."
I looked at her like she'd just said something dumb.
"Why would I want to use that?"
Of course-- why would I want to use that? I was just going there to perform a 50-minute monologue. Looking back on it, I now realize that this is pretty much as healthy an attitude as you can have about utilizing behavioral health services. Private entrance? Why? I'm not going to get pube extensions or have a swastika done in henna on my forehead-- I'm going to talk to someone who can hopefully give me some insight into my life, my behavior, my thoughts, my feelings and my relationships. Why should I need to slink into some hidden away door shrouded in trees and secrecy?
Of course, that insight that I'd hoped to gain kind of didn't happen, at least not all that much. You know, cuz I was far too busy pretending I was Spalding Grey. Which-- don't get me wrong-- was great fun. I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for it.
And so when college was over, I stopped going to therapy. After all, what would a guy with a freshly-ended relationship, no direction, an oversized nose and a B. A. in Theatre need therapy for anyway? I went from job to job, stupid apartment to stupid apartment and, all the while, I wrote. I wrote plays and editorials and commentaries and I pissed people off and I made people laugh and I appeared in shows and I made very few friends and lost quite a bit more, I started dating this cute girl who was living in Pittsburgh and miraculously she moved out here and became my wife and all the while, through the living and the crying and the writing and the eating and the television and the operetta and the paychecks and the junk that passes for antiques and the family dinners that grew rarer and the jokes and the meanness and the huggles and the sleeping, I guess that thought started to get more and more incessant--
Am I a good man or am I a bad man?
Obviously, I know that this particular dichotomy, like most of them, exists only in my head, and only to torture me and make me hand over $50 every other week to a guy who probably doesn't need it, at least not from me.
But, here we are.
I don't try to entertain anymore. Sometimes I see myself trying to shock him-- with some depraved thought I've had, or some terribly awful comment I've made that I repeat for his benefit. A cutting remark, an acerbic bit of nastiness that I've offered up from the meaner part of my soul.
He's perfected the art of being nonplussed. They teach it to them in school, and I'm sure there are those out there who are better than him-- but he's good.
"I know you want me to agree with you sometimes," he said to me once, "that you're bad-- but I just don't see it."
"You don't understand. You're not with me all the time, you're not in here. You don't know."
"No," he said, "but I know enough."
Maybe that's what this blog is, in the end, it's me ripping off my shirt and tearing at my skin to pull everything apart to show you, to make you see, to force you to look and inspect and be horrified. But maybe there's just a doddering old man in a funny tie behind the stupid curtain.
Well. At any rate; I'm going through the front door.
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