When last I posted about my mental state, as you might remember, I was an emotional firecracker with a very short fuse, leaving a snark’s trail at the least provocation. That’s done. There is no denying that my affect has been flat in these last two weeks. I’m not unhappy but I’m tight. I’m tied up. I’m not smiling a lot. I’m slow and cautious in responding. i’m not experiencing the ennui I associate with depression but I ain’t quite right. So what, right? It’s never the same river even once. A lot is going on in my head. After all, I’m recuperating from a month in a hospital bed, the loss of 15 pounds, an abdominal surgery and being so close to shuffling off that I needed ten units transfused just to keep me stable. What do I have a right to expect? Don’t I need to give my psyche a little recuperation time too?
Be cool, be present and let the rest happen. It will change again just as it has before, right? Let the antidepressants do their work and, soon enough, we’ll be back to baseline (and my baseline in the last couple of years has been very elevated – I was describing myself as the happiest person I knew and I meant it). That’s my approach, I guess. Still, I’ve been wondering if maybe I should go back to therapy. There’s a sense that I have that returning to therapy is like being Lot’s wife, that once you’re out there’s no looking back without turning to salt or at least transforming yourself to something needy and wounded. I think i’ve mentioned that I was acolyte to a particular psychiatrist for over 30 years.
That’s a whole lot of transference (and counter-transference, I would say). We broke up because I had become disillusioned, primarily over a single issue. A few months into my second marriage it became clear to me that my wife was very badly damaged and by the time we hit our first anniversary I was ready to bail. Dr. Bloom was very insistent that the best chance we both had for happiness and growth was to work it out together. He became, in addition to my shrink, our marriage counselor, dedicated to healing the marriage, but over the course of the next two years my wife became more and more disabled, her psychological problems more manifest and I ultimately ended the marriage but that was two unnecessary miserable years during which he should have been looking out for me, not the marriage. I wasn’t angry with Bloom. Well, maybe i was but mostly I was hurt. Like Rod Steiger in Waterfront, he should have been looking out for my end a little. My unhappiness should have been respected. His formerly sandaled feet began to look a little clayish. Still, what am I going to start at b’reishit with somebody new? Or go to some behaviorist to give me “useful advice”? I don’t shrink that way. I may enjoy a superficial life but I demand depth from my therapy. So that leaves me at a bit of a dead end which, maybe, is where I prefer to be because, as I said, I really don’t want to go back there. Here’s the big reveal, though. Because you, tender reader, you’re my shrink now and this blog, among it’s other purposes, is a doily-less couch and we’re now finishing up this session and I think I feel better for it. For now. I’ll let you know. I’ll be in touch.
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