2003-11-13
Sorry if my silence has concerned any of you. If any of you are still reading, that is.
Actually, things are really good lately. I seem to have had a breakthrough in therapy---or who knows, maybe it was a coincidence, but I'm sort of suddenly a lot happier in my life, the same old life that was making me miserable so very recently. No, I don't think it was a coincidence. I know it's terribly old-fashioned, but I really do have faith in the value of talk therapy.
My crisis in therapy, wondering whether I was seeing the wrong shrink, seems to have occasioned the change. It's very characteristic of me to find fault, to be disappointed, to believe that there is, somewhere out there, some alternative reality that was meant for me. It causes me a great deal of anxiety. I've written before about the "party car" image in the movie Stardust Memories--that sums it up well, this sense I have that I'm missing out, that I have somehow taken a very wrong turn somewhere along the way and that others are having a much more wonderful time.
I'm not proud of any of this--quite the contrary--and I really do know better. When I can think rationally, I mean. But there is some very deep, old emotional punch that this kind of thing packs for me. I suspect it stems at least in part from my family of origin, my being the youngest by many years, my sense that my four older siblings constituted the "real" family and that all the real family stuff happened before I was born or at least cognizant. (They've tried to set me straight, to assure me that I really didn't miss out on much more than a lot of bickering, but again, this thing knows no logic.)
Anyway, I play this out fairly regularly, suspecting that whatever is real in my life at the moment--my job, where I live, my therapist, my friends, whatever--are but pale imitations of what they could or should be. As you can imagine, this is pretty much a recipe for unhappiness for me. The people around me don't tend to be too thrilled, either.
I played this out with my shrink a couple months ago, basically detailing my disappointment in him, my suspicion that there was a better shrink for me, and ultimately concluding that for the time being anyway he was good enough. Somehow, working together, we were able to shed light on this conviction I have that the real thing lies elsewhere, and by doing so, the hold it has on me loosened a little.
This is the magic of the therapeutic process. I don't believe it happens often--i don't believe most shrinks are very good--but when it happens, it really can change one's life. I seem to have been able to generalize what I learned, and feel quite differently about my reality, even though it is the same reality that's been here all along.
Another thing that was contributing to my angst was that from August though late October, I was involved in a very protracted application process for a job I really wanted. They ultimately declined to offer me the job because the salary they could offer was substantially lower than my present one. I was very disappointed; I'd been pinning a lot of hopes on the job to fix my life.
I do that a lot--fixate on one external issue which I believe will be some kind of magic bullet. Another area I've spent a lot of time fixating on is where we live, believing that the geographical isolation of living in the woods is responsible for my unhappiness and moving back to town would fix everything. Lately, I'm not thinking that way at all. In fact, we met with an architect last week to discuss some possible ways to improve the place.
So, anyway, I won't make any big pronouncements about how I'm going to write more frequently but maybe I will.
Clay is turning into an absolute joy. A few entries back, I mentioned that I've never caught myself wondering whether there's a cooler kid out there. If that seemed like an odd observation to make, I suppose this entry explains it.
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