Unraveling

I have a new therapist, at least for six months, because my regular therapist is on maternity leave. Part of me is jealous of six months of maternity leave, which felt like something I could never do if I wanted to stay on my career track, and then I ended up leaving academia anyway, in part because of not being able to take a leave of absence after the stillbirth, and having my maternity leave dicked with, and then  getting marked down on my annual evaluation for not getting enough done the year my younger daughter was born. But anyway, I have a new therapist.

He’s Swedish and really into guided meditation and told me he was very impressed by how I’d started sobbing in his office on the first day. And I’m like, whatever, just don’t pity me and don’t try to to create some big narrative about me and we’ll be fine.

But in that first session when I was trying to explain how overwhelmed I’ve been feeling lately, and struggling for how to describe what it felt like, he suggested the word “unraveling” which struck me as the perfect word, and I’ve been having a lot of fiber arts based thoughts.

I’ve also been trying to write about Brigit. An agent I had an informational interview with told me I needed to publish more essays, and in better journals, and he suggested I write about the bad old days in San Francisco, and try to capitalize on GenX nostalgia.

But the women in my writing group are all baffled by my essay about Brigit, and I think they feel like I’m not really reacting right to what was going on when I was 20 (being in a totally dysfunctional polyamorous relationship, dating a trans woman who was ten years older than me and deeply depressed, us almost getting kicked out of our apartment because she was trans, performing at a BDSM club and getting heckled by straight dudes). And they want me to be really judgemental and shocked. But for me I look back on it as this sort of Edenic time, because it was before I started doing heroin, and before I knew Lila was doing heroin. And I feel like my outlook was, “Things are tough all over, and you just have to keep going.”

I look back on just pushing through all this crazy shit around housing, and being harassed on the street, including strangers threatening to kill me because they couldn’t figure out my gender, and all of Michael’s overdoses and then finding him dead, and being convinced that there was no one who I could safely turn to for help without being institutionalized for being bisexual, gender-something, promiscuous, druggy, etc. etc. And I think maybe the reason I’m unraveling now is that it feels like it’s safe to. Especially because I’m still really good in a crisis, as long as it’s a crisis I can actually do something about, and not like someone being disappointed in me or whatever.

But, like, it feels very hard to pin down what was really so bad back then that it would feel so crippling now