26/09/11

I did counseling for a couple of months a couple of months ago. My guy was called Greg or Geoff or something. He was gross looking. It was offputting. He had a weird wiry body, long greasy hair and a goatee. I hated the goatee. I like men to be clean shaven, to have stubble or to have a full beard. I think everything else is for the gays. I felt bad for him.

I got talking to him. Turned out I liked him. Not aesthetically. As a person. He was cool. He talked about his experiences with anxiety/depression in a very self-aware way, like David Foster Wallace. Like (and this is a crude approximation), "I realize that my experiences with anxiety and depression were very different from what you're going through now but I'm going to tell you how I dealt with issues because I think that it might be in some way helpful for you." It was the self-awareness and clarification that appealed to me. Unlike everyone else in the world, he didn't think he was a Superman. He didn't think he knew all the answers. He was very aware of what he wanted to say, why he wanted to and how to say it in a way that would cut through my defense mechanisms and strike at my core.

I've had many mentally ill people tell me that "snap out of it" was the worst advice they had ever been given. "I would if I could," they say. Greg/Geoff never said that exactly, but it was his attitude. The subtext of almost everything he said was, "It is incredibly boring to hear you talk about how much it sucks to be you. You could be awesome but first you have to quit hating yourself, get a job and get a life. The best thing for you and everyone else is for you to snap out of it."

It kind of worked. When my dad tells me to snap out of it, it's counterproductive. I hate him and I therefore find myself doing the opposite of what he wants from me to piss him off. I liked Greg/Geoff so I wanted him to like me and I knew that he wouldn't like me unless I was making progress, so I began to fix myself and my life.

He took sick leave. They switched me to a lady. Kylie. I was feeling very expansive in our first session. I was buzzed on coffee and sleep deprivation. I said I was feeling amazing. I told her that I'd realized that self-hatred was counterintuitive. I told her I was ready to figure out life. She riffed on it. She told me, "yeah, it is ridiculous." She told me about her frustration with her clients. She talked at me with the sort of humorless humor that unfunny people think is humor. She did this and all of a sudden I felt like shit. Here's what happened. I didn't like her, so I became the opposite of what she wanted from me because I knew it would make her feel shitty. I'm very reactive in this way. I stopped showing up.