Yesterday’s meeting with the therapist started with “How did you feel last week, after our first…?” I said that it felt like I was just getting started, and later articulated that it felt like I was working a muscle I’d never or rarely ever used. As such that muscle could get sore very soon. I have always compared depression to a bad or missing muscle. It is like running a marathon on a broken leg, or lifting weights with broken arms. it’s an analogy that a lot of people do not get, since they don’t consider the mind or the brain to be a muscle. If you are depressed or feeling down you should just get laid, get a girlfriend/boyfriend, or make a lot of money and shut the fuck up and be happy.
She spent a lot of our hour together yesterday looking bug-eyed. I talked almost continuously, and when the hour was up (we are only supposed to go for 45 minutes) it felt like we might have only done 10 minutes.
I don’t know if she has an approach to all this, a method behind the sometimes baffled look in her eyes. I feel like we are sorting out the chaos, putting the pieces of my life in order, trauma by trauma, hurt by hurt, and triumph by triumph. But it is scattershot so far. My mention of an ex from a long time ago segued into specific details about the policies of a certain opera house in lower Manhattan. I dated a woman who sang there, and never had the balls to tell her she was the worst opera singer I’d ever heard, at least within the context of a professional company. It turns out she was not paid to be there. She was paying to be there. It was a shady arrangement. When I looked her up maybe 6 years ago I was not surprised to find she was no longer in the opera world, and that she does not even reference those years in her LinkedIn.
I had other things to say about that woman, but it got sidetracked by the therapist’s surprise at my assertion that this opera house (with which she is evidently very familiar) had such questionable practices of giving stage time to wealthy dillatenates.
I am going for a walk in the woods while my incorrigibility cools. Restless after a long and annoying day at the big beautiful old desk.
