The Session

I arrived early. My dad had wanted to drive me but I insisted on going alone. It almost erupted into a simmering fight but my mother shouted from the other room, something about ‘who cares about him anyway, just let him go’. I found it easily. I always wondered what was down that road. It was one of those small roads nestled in right by the freeway behind an on-ramp. The left side of the road was taken up by dark brown condos or maybe they were townhouses, and on the right was an office complex built out of dark wood and desperately trying to look friendly. I’m expected in suite 202 which is right next to a realtor’s office. I’m sitting in the car trying to find some humor in a realtor’s office being right next to a therapist’s office but I can’t come up with anything. I once saw a bar right next to a gun store. It was right next to where I was working at the time. I never went to that bar though. It would have been cool if everyone from the office went to the bar next door after work. I don’t think anyone from the office ever went to that bar actually. It was a bit too much cowboy, a bit too local color, for our taste. I also sometimes thought about going into the gun store. I wondered how it would feel to just walk in and say “Excuse me, I’d like to buy a gun please.” I’ve never even held a gun. I don’t even know if you need some sort of license or background check or whatever to get one. The therapist will probably ask me whether I’ve ever had suicidal thoughts. I’ll tell her about the gun store, and thinking about buying a gun. Everyone’s had suicidal thoughts. I’ve even thought about what my suicide note would say. “Whatever you think the reason, you’re wrong.” Having thought of a suicide note comforts me. Only about twelve percent of suicides leave a note – and most of those actually have something to say like confess a murder or reveal a secret. I don’t have any secrets worth revealing. So if I were a real suicide risk I wouldn’t be bothering with a note, at least that’s my thinking. I wonder what the therapist will say about it. It’s time to go find out.

The receptionist is nice, girl about my age. She has me filling out this form, questionnaire really. I think it’s some sort of standard psyche evaluation. I hate these things. For each statement you have to say whether you agree or disagree on a scale from one to five. It seems so arbitrary. “I have trouble sleeping”, sure sometimes, does that make it a four or a five? What would it take to make it a six? And then to confuse you they ask basically the same question but worded differently a bit later. I know they just do it to get a more accurate picture but I always feel like it’s a test, like they want to catch me lying. So I go back and make sure I give the same answer, which I guess is cheating but it’s a psyche test; they can’t expect the insane to give honest answers. I wonder if the receptionist looks over these things at all. It must be kind of odd to deal with folks who have problems all day, except never to really know what those problems are. She seems chirpy enough, so either she’s hiding her contempt for everyone in the waiting room or she just doesn’t think about it that much. In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that this not the first time I’ve seen a therapist. Once in college I saw the on campus counselor over in the pepto-bismol colored building. He was really nice. Everyone in college was really nice when I withdrew from all my classes that one semester. So I’ve been through this routine before, but I’m no expert or anything. I’m not a serial therapist seer. In fact this whole thing was my parents’ idea. I’m happy to go along with it, if it helps I’m all for it, though I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to get out of it, but it was their idea. And in case you’re confused this isn’t taking place the day after the lawn thing; they didn’t have the appointment already set up or anything. My dad made the initial call after we talked and then I called the day after that to set up the exact time and everything. I’m almost done with this questionnaire, it’s longer than the one they had me do in college. Then I have to fill out this second form, which is mostly insurance stuff. I always wonder where doctors get their magazines for the waiting room. Most of the ones here are about photography. There’s actually an interesting article about how to each this cool effect with moon shots through double exposure. Apparently two different people came up with independently of each others. Photography is cool. I remember reading Susan Sontag in college, and when I was in Junior High I actually learned how to develop pictures in a darkroom. But these magazines are all treat photography as yet another super expensive hobby. Homo Sapiens Suburbia is often portrayed as a mindless mass, but that’s not true, they all have at least on yet another expensive hobby to make them unique. Some of them are even kind of cool. I know this one guy who writes a blog about roller derby events in the area. He went to every single one and took pictures and wrote up a little report afterwards. He played the journalist in this little micro-culture of roller derby which is actually kind of cool if you don’t think about too hard. I’m so engrossed in this glossy photography magazine that I don’t hear my therapist calling me to come on back; she’s already in therapist mode, calling quietly, smiling kindly but with a hint of blankness. I wonder if she practices that. I think I would.

I don’t like her office, too much cloth. It’s like a mini living room, a couch and two comfy chairs. Curtains over the window make everything dark and diffuse. The light from the lamp is yellow. Off to the side is a desk, it’s incongruous with the rest of the office. I guess she wants to make the whole thing seem less clinical and put her patients at ease. I’d be more at ease in a real doctor’s office. This doesn’t feel serious. It’s as if I was sent to the nice lady next door who paints calming pictures to talk things over. I don’t want to talk things over I want someone to tell me what’s wrong with me. My greatest fear is that nothing is wrong with me. I can tell she is writing me off as just some kid with make believe issues, “the sensitive” one who over-thinks everything, probably a bit of a romantic or idealist, and believes “no one gets me”, but is mostly a whiny white kid. That’s not me. Honest. I tell her that. I tell her straight up that I know what she’s thinking but I’m not just here to have a therapist hold my hand and help me through my life. She asks me why I am here then. I try to explain about my parents. It’s hard. It never comes out quite right. It would be so easy to make them the villains and leave at that. I can tell she that’s what she wants me to do. She thinks it’s part of my condition that I can’t bring myself to lay the blame squarely on them and it’s her responsibility to liberate myself. I keep trying to explain, to capture the whole situation but no matter what I say it sounds like it’s somebodies fault and then I have to keep talking to exculpate them but I only end up blaming someone else in the process so I just keep going. I realize I probably sound mental the way I’m rambling on to her. She just sits there and smiles and takes notes. Aw, what the hell, it doesn’t matter if she gets it or not.

When I get home the first thing my dad wants to know is “Did it help?” I have no clue how to answer him. One session, and I’m not even sure how I would know if it helped or not. He desperately wants it to work. I can’t help but feel that he doesn’t so much cared about me being better but that he just wants me to be ‘fixed’ so I can get on with it all. Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe the distinction is academic. But, I have no idea how to answer him feeling like that. So I just walk out, again. It’s an awful thing to do. I wonder what my therapist would say about it. I have a hunch she would be proud of me. What is pride coming from someone I’ve only met once? Not really met even, “had a session with”. I briefly consider sitting on the grass again just in front of the house. If I could just sit there alone for a while and then walk back in, sort of erase the question… maybe I could hustle through the evening, sort of avoid talking to them for a while until I had an answer and knew where this was going. I’m halfway down the block already – there was no way I could have just sat on the grass alone, my dad would have been out there in a second asking what was wrong. When I was younger and cried because I was angry or sad or afraid or whatever they would always ask why and sometimes, you know, I didn’t want to tell them for whatever reason, maybe it was about them or maybe it was my own private thing, or maybe I felt they ought to know, and they always said “if you’re not going to talk about it then you have no right to cry so either talk or stop crying”. I hated that. I think sometimes I kept crying just because that hurt so much. – and I haven’t even thought about what my dad must be feeling right now, standing back at the house. Walking out like that was stupid. I had no reason, it was just a simple honest question. But I didn’t have an answer; I didn’t know what to tell him; I didn’t understand what was going on.