Dear Internauts,
I kinda miss having a therapist.
I'll admit I've often used this weekly blogging thing as a platform for pseudo-therapy. While there's not necessarily anything wrong with that, it is too much of a one way conversation, a bit like prayer in that sense. Or at least what my prayer life was once like.
No offense.
Oh, I cherish our time together, sure, even if this is the closest current equivalent I have to homework in my quasi-adult existential squall. Thus today's late posting is more reflective of my last semester of school than it is like the homework of most of my academic life. Please take solace in that you are not anything at all like algebra 2 homework.
Also, please take note that my mood and manner are maybe a bit marred by my mouth's most recent malady (but more on that in a minute).
I've had many therapists in my life. All in and after my feint toward higher education. Some talked far too much, leaning more toward life lecturer than listener. One wouldn't talk at all, even after I'd made every attempt to elicit a reaction beyond the nodding and indiscernible expressions. But all for the better, I suppose. Some when they start talking get a tad too mystical for my liking.
What you need is someone who doesn't force you to talk about what they think the issue really is while still being able to help you deal with what the issue really is.
Also, unlike every single therapist I tried to get in touch with on my insurance plan during the first half of this year, it helps if they don't have a waiting list of three to six months for the first appointment. I wonder if, after that first appointment, my place on the waiting list for our next meeting is decided by how well it went. Would it be an audition?
Between every therapist, social worker, doctor, nurse, intern, old friend, family member, or whoever else I've wound up relaying my mental issues to, the tale has gotten a bit stale in the telling. Along some stories which can grow in splendor at every recounting, tales of illness tend to flatten out, broken down by necessity into their barest facets. There's an effort to appear the opposite of embellishing, to circumvent any attempt by the listener to diminish my pain through disbelief or comparison. Combine that with the need to share a list of symptoms in the same breath as prescriptions for the hundredth or so form, and one might start to think depression is just a cerebral tooth ache.
In a way, trauma is similar to a root canal, and not just in how one tends to exacerbate the other. Consider— a stranger in a position of authority put me in a vulnerable state and cut away at my nerves with a loud, metal tool. It recalled both issues from my childhood as well as interrelated circumstances from adolescence and the insecurities of self-care as a young adult. If I'd been more prepared to deal with it, the situation would likely not have occurred at all, and yet there remains an inescapable feeling of helplessness and inevitability. (I do believe, if half-heartedly, that some inevitability is at least in part, escapable.)
Of the many differences, of course, one pertinent is that the dentist cut away the nerves from within the infected tooth, so now the intense nerve pain which had existed is eradicated. (Why do we even have nerves in our teeth, anyway?)
Maybe, this is then a better metaphor for how traumatic it is to deal with trauma after the fact? Every trauma builds upon itself. To construct, or at least to fix, we must first destroy.
You can't build on a busted foundation. And boy is the drilling like a jack-hammer!
I've currently got some temporary cement in there with the plan for something more permanent in early November. My jaw still gets sore, so I have to keep up with the pain meds. My teeth feel uneven, despite the sanding and shaping they did to try and find a balance. But then I tend to grind them anyway. Nervous habit.
Fitting, I suppose, that one of my first experiences as a 27 year old is to deal with something that's built up over so many of those years.
We can do everything right. Brush, floss, rinse with whatever brand they're hocking at the time. The tech's gotten better, as has the environment and the medicine, I guess. Still, something can get in there and infect and no matter how hard you try and deal with it on your own, a professional may be needed. Of course, that professional may be a jerk (like so many can be) or they may be kind as sunshine. Still, sometimes they've gotta go in there and dig at all the nerves and the pain and dirt and uncertainty. At the end of the day, it's your mouth.
Sometimes we can't live with the pain. Sometimes even the best fix can't make things even up quite right ever again.
But if I eat a lot of junk food and never brush, the trauma of a little chip in my tooth could turn into a root canal situation all too soon. As far as metaphors go, that's a pretty poor one to say that our brains need regular cleaning too. As with all metaphors, it falls apart upon close inspection.
Still, sorry for the preachiness. Just know I hope you can find a way scrub out some of the junk from your neural pathways. At very least, please know I'm not gonna judge you for taking whatever sort of ibuprofen you need for that sore jaw you can't help but grind.
Thanks for reading,
Odist
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