hobby: collecting therapists

Our couples therapist sussed out that I was no longer seeing an individual therapist, so she sent their secretary after me to put me on the books with someone new. Fine. I have to take a couple hours off work  for the appointments, and that is OKAY WITH ME. This week I introduced myself to her by dumping my bag of trauma all over the floor and kind of waving a hand over it all. Ta da.

She sort of glanced over the skinwalker/murderer/violence stuff and then went straight to the relationship junk. Damn. It would have been nice to talk about adventure and peril instead of why I was actually there. It's kind of unnerving letting someone dig around in your most private feelings. Your mind keeps going to the things you hope they won't notice - like the heart under the floorboards. There's a fear that if you let go, you will never be able to feel those things again. 

And I know it isn't always a bad thing to lose something you're hanging on to. The other day I was standing behind the circ desk, chatting with a coworker, when someone called out my name. I looked around and saw a woman who looked familiar, smiling and waving. "It's me, Tiare! Remember me?" I did, though she looked a lot different. We caught up for a couple minutes, she told me about her grandbabies (6 of them), and then we waved goodbye. As she left, happy, my coworker said, "So you know her?" "Oh yeah. She was my high school bully, I still have a scar." I pushed up my sleeve to show the line running up my forearm. "It's okay, though. She doesn't remember it that way, she thinks we were friends." And come to think of it, she was always smiling while organizing the kids in PE to pelt me in the face with footballs or hold their noses when I walked by, so at least she's still a happy person. She lost power over me pretty suddenly one day when she turned around in her seat and asked for help with the English assignment. We had to write an essay about what we planned to do with our lives. "What does that mean?" she said. "Well, what do you want to do after graduation?" She thought about it for a minute, "Get my benefits and marry my boyfriend." "Okay... what are you good at?" "What do you mean?" "Like… is there something you enjoy doing? Something you can do that you feel good about?" "Oh, dancing!" "Okay! That's good! What kind of dancing?" "What do you mean?" "Like, hula? Ballet? Breakdancing?" She held her hands up in fists and bobbed her shoulders around, "Skankin'." She meant it. I really saw her then, and felt a sympathetic kind of affection for her, and nothing she did ever bothered me again. 

I don't think you let go of things, I think things let go of you. So maybe it'll happen again with this whole therapy business, and maybe it'll be a relief.