Good Therapy

About a month or so ago I went to try therapy.

“Let’s see,” she said. “So you started using drugs regularly at 15. I am sure you have heard that whatever age you start using is the age that you basically stop growing. So we’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s time to grow up. You are still, essentially, 15.”

Hmm. Maybe it’s possible that this woman, who for the first 45 minutes of our meeting did not allow me to talk except to answer her pointed questions, somehow missed the part where I mentioned that for over eight years I’ve been on a committed path of recovery and self-help, learning to take responsibility for me and aiming for emotional maturity.

Of the “adult” skills I’ve actually focused on, one has been the willingness to allow others room to be heard; so normally this helps to curb any immediate reactiveness to asinine fucking comments like the one above. But that day on the therapist couch the blood curled around my neck even as I smiled graciously at her opinion, oh, uh-huh, mmm-hmmm. It was later in the session when the radical, albeit kind, honesty kicked in. When she tried to tell me that my wanderlust and great passion for traveling too were indicators that I needed “to grow up.”

One of the other adult skills I’m really working on is learning to integrate information from various different sources and in the end use them to supplement my own views with all the regularly outputting stimulus of the world. I am learning, in other words, how to trust myself.

Needless to say, therapy, this time, didn’t quite work out.

I was 15 when I first found myself saddled up with my bags and my trinkets, my combat boots and cigarettes, scowling from low down in the passenger’s seat of the blue hatchback my mom behind the wheel, my brother’s perpetual chirpiness behind us his head in the middle between the seats. Up the Baltimore beltway then down 295, on our way to Dr. Lessey in the city. He had an office on Park Ave. On the corner was a soul food joint with bars on the window and a yellow sign for Lake Trout. Across the street and to the left was a store called The Leather Underground.

I had my learner’s permit, I was almost 16, it would soon be my regular, weekly route. Soon enough it was just me in the car. I was never brave enough to try the soul food. The bemused gay men in the bondage store, however, eventually knew this pink-headed purple-booted riot grrl by name. It was the early 90’s and hard to find places like that were ahead of the soon to come piercing trend. Leather Underground was the only place that I knew of that you could go for a belly button ring, and they used a 10 gauge cow-ring, not a bar, and there was nothing girly or petite about it.

Dr. Lessey was soft and gentle with gold spectacles and a sandman peace about him. I always pictured him with a nightcap on, the kind that triangles down one side of the head with a little cotton ball on the end, you know faded cotton-white with light blue stripes. And a candle in his hands.

It was six or eight months that I went to the city to see him. I was touched in a way that I couldn’t get my words to say, I was touched by the kindness of this sweet, quiet little man. I never told him about the pot I was smoking or the drinking that was edging beyond exploratory. I kept us occupied by tales of the girls I hated at school and this new, daring guy who showed up one day by my side, grinning down at me delicious in his eyes, walking me up the stairs to my homeroom. He had just gotten kicked out of public school. I was entranced and a month or so later when the same guy got locked up at Harbour Hospital in South Baltimore, Dr. Lessey encouraged me to go see him. I trusted the good Doctor. I used to bring my friends there to meet him, my brother, my boyfriend even (the boyfriend that I had secured as result of a visit paid to him at South Baltimore’s Harbour Hospital mental ward.) Dr. Lessey looked on in amazement, the only adult who didn’t judge and seemed uniquely interested, when my friend Briana showed up with me in his office sporting her knew Leather Underground navel loop. I loved how much he seemed, simply, to care.

Around the time that I really did start to make changes and work to get my life cleaned up, this would be roughly the spring of 2001, I entered in to another therapist relationship, this time with Father Ed. His was, I think, the fourth “couch” I’d been on by then. He was supplied to me for free by the uber-conservative liberal arts college that I’d already by then dropped out twice from, both times as result of drinking and drugs. Father Ed had me do things like hold fake conversations with the air; the air of course was always a character and usually someone close to me in life. I had to hold pillows tight and close and pretend that they were me. He was the first therapist I ever cried in front of and lord did it make me feel so, so clean. I loved him, Father Ed, for the same reason as Dr. Lessey, he truly seemed to care. That, and one clear, new thing: I was capable, or at least so beginning, of being honest. Truly honest about me. No more hiding the extracurricular’s that were so much a part of my life it wasn’t that I was even purposefully hiding them before, just that I took them so much for granted as a part of how I lived my life. The drugs and the alcohol were, plainly, part of me, of who I was, as natural as air or water or food when it came to the things I did each day. I just never questioned any of it, no matter the consequences or miserable thin vein of fear that seemed to increase with each passing year, feeling like ice in my blood and a cold wall at the base of my heart, steadily growing.

The honesty made all the difference. Clarity is a mixture of willingness, or at least a capacity, to be honest with myself and then trusting me enough to know that my own truth is the one that counts. The therapists that I’ve gained the most from over the years, as I’ve sorted through and grieved out my humanness and wounds, are the ones who’ve made it clear that they care and you can’t fake that, caring is a quality that is or isn’t. I know when it’s true, and more, affront when it is false or faked. In an atmosphere of care one feels safe, and safety is what is required, at least for me, to get to a place where I am willing to get honest with myself—on whatever level, at whatever risk of responsibility it means that I am going to have to take. And good therapy, for me at least, has been no more than the process of showing up to witness that allowing. Good therapists ask the right questions and then let the process of discovery guide its self. I always end up being the one who sees what I need to see just by having a safe place to say it out loud.

So if I’ve learned anything at all over the years, it’s that the answers are indeed within; and that especially it’s not a sign of weakness to sometimes need another’s help in order to get them out. In fact I’d say that empowering oneself like that is all about being Brave. But that other person doesn’t get to tell you what to do. They definitely don’t get to yield control over your ideas. Self-trust is the goal to me, and so it was that over a month ago my life started to turn around at its darkest point: what I thought would be the beginning step in self-discovery when I took the plunge on to a new couch turned out actually to be the exercise I needed to affirm the ending of self-doubt. And now that I am here, doing the Real Work with a book and some close friends as my guides, I am realizing that the two concepts are actually one and the same.

On Myth, for El Rey de Peras

Jezebel's Side

I never asked you to come here
who laid down in homage to the night
who suffered the sweet enjoyment of it
out of claim it was your right

Who built high the alters of sleep
upon the incense of my dreams
who named your darkest habits
stifling the nightmare of my screams

Who tried to call it mercy
when I fell finally to the hell
of the fears that I'd kept heaven-sent
while you rang your mission bell

I never asked you to come here
for I knew of the great trespass
the dismantled pieces in my own hands
that would never be let to rest

For had I--when I finally did
let down the wall to my guarded, sacred ruins
I knew you'd lead me here
to leave me, to climb out on my own

And yes, while it is true
that we who consecrate this dance
memorize our steps by night
and love to name it fate, or chance

But you, as you set down
upon your high-backed, risen throne
though this destined disaster
may well have been my own

Remember, I asked you never to come here
but what true choice had I in the matter
take no gratuity in your righteous calling, man
for hell-sent is heaven's ladder

For Teena

You know how I know poetry is here?

She shrugs, empties an enormous Tupperware full of frozen roasted vegetables in to a barely steaming pot. Both the Tupperware and the pot are bigger than any cookware I’ve ever owned. I could bathe in them; use one to bunch up naked in and the other as my awkward ladle. I don’t know how she does it: a call came from a mutual friend only moments ago; could she and her husband stop by for a visit? To the common eye our home has no food. Yet here Teena goes, preparing a feast of pork and Thai soup.

Because I want a cigarette, I answer. And some cocaine.

This barely grabs the response I am trawling for—some kind of dry laugh and a bit of witnessing, a hallelujah—even an eye roll of empathy will do. Her grin is sardonic enough, though, that’s just Teena’s general style. A huge part of why we get along: soft and hard in just right the places. She moves behind me to an industrial size catering trash bag and disposes of some packaging, laughs a teeny bit uncomfortably and states that Chop has a No Tolerance policy.

Just for cigs though, right? Not cocaine?

To relax her I go immediately in to a brief update on my recent recovery-process. Really even though it doesn’t look like it, I am doing something all those afternoons and mornings out in the yard or on the dock in the white sun or even under the clouds. With the journal and the books at my side, the intermittent moments on my knees gathering or at least identifying, and well, yes, conversing with the herbs; or else sprawled out on my blue chair seemingly staring at the sky or the river or the sun, arms hung over the sides chest opened wide; or laying gentle as I can on the purple tapestry curled up and cuddled with the earth so soft beneath me, the tapestry that, even with a dozen washings still smells at once like dust and the chemical that everything that comes from India smells like. And the wild, homecrafted herbal tea at my side, really I am doing something when I am out there. It doesn’t show probably but inside of me, I can promise you, this work is the most real and probably toughest that there is. I am being gentle, going slow as my spirit demands.

But I don’t need to put any of this in to words for her. Teena does know. She kneads at me here and there by joking about all that nothing I’m doing. We both know though. Just to assure her that she’s not gonna have some relapsed junkie terrorizing her home I do go on to explain about my most recent little bout of serendipity that came in the form of a phone call from Vermont last week. How the timing was succinct with the toughest part of my Real Work Inventory. This is what we do, Teena and me. Mingle irony at our individual lives, mocking one another gently as we mock ourselves because the pain that has rimmed this house this year is enough for a city of sleepwalkers, a whole morgue of zombies, to eat their way out on and grow whole on death and when you live like that only on death eating on the dead and living on the dead it is hard to see your way out sometimes, hard to remember your way back to life. But we have, we are, we do. It’s what we’ve together, somehow, done. Our own little mostly silent means of resurrection. So the jokes, which used to come in the form of relief, like spring rain, come now more as touchstones, reminders. And they corner with the reality of individual triumph, the sharing of serendipity that grounds us each in our regular, and growing, personal moments of peace.

What happens if you don’t give her any attention? Teena says, she is talking about Poetry now. Will the words wait or will they go away?

They’ll go, I say. And if I give over to them, they may not stop for the whole day, which would suck to be in my office with all that crazy paperwork and Poetry stuck on taking me away.

Maybe you could do your paperwork at Chop? She says and even with her back to me I know there’s the grin.

I laugh and know too that the Devil’s got my eyes now. I’m gonna go upstairs, I say over my shoulder. Teena is stirring her pot. Give Poetry a half-hour or so, maybe that’ll be enough…

I pause then, when I get almost to the stairs. Poetry, you’re such a demanding little bitch! I cry, just loud enough.

And even from the stairs I can actually feel Teena’s smile.

That girl

Lately I've been hanging out a lot with this girl. She's kinda tough and I forgot how sharp her edges are and also how fricken quick she is. There's a lot going on inside that she's trying deeply to protect. It's summertime in this shot above, near the end. 1994. Labor Day Weekend to be exact. Her and her then best pal Lindsey used to take pics like these at the end of every summer. Immortalization. She absolutely balks at fraud and authority. Balks, actually, is probably not the right word. Bucks is far more accurate.

She is grounded in this picture because of a three-day house party that she threw in July. It went like this: Her and her long time on-again off-again thugg of a boy-man were sitting in the air condition one stickyhot Marilen day watching MTV and making calls to get some weed. It was hard to find the acid was everywhere but barely no bud. Her ankles were both busted from the first song, first set, first band to play Lollapalooza that year which was Green Day. The pit erupted like mad and it was heat and it was sweat and it was fierce and her too big MaryJanes didn't do enough to secure her feet in the rushing and pummelling her way through. She went down and ate a face of dirt before a hand was thrown to pull her up but it was too late by then the ankles both were twisted and sprained. He was shirtless and fat and stank and got beer on her the guy who landed fullweightdown on her feet and calves and the quiet there just for a minute of ohnowhat'snext but then that was okay, too, the acid made it not that bad and then he was up and threw her his hand. So two almost broke ankels rest of the day at the festival and somehow she used this and work as an excuse to stay home when mom left with her bro for the beach the next day. So house empty, a party was planned and it was a shittonnafun and worth every late night that she had to feign work as a greasy sub girl at the pizza shop in order to still get out and about and around her mom's imposed restriction. This is one of the first shots of her learning. Learning how to be her. June, 1992. Ocean City, Maryland, down near the pier. These are the first days of the Immortal series. 93's shots and the ones in 94 will be taken at Labor Day, a means of marking the course that she by then has learned she runs. Summer is the prime time of exploration. She didn't know it then, but this shot is the beginning of Cataloguing, and so takes place in June. Archiving. Life of Journeyer. Purveyor of Soul and Experience. Search to be made, or to prove what is, Real.

My father moved to California the day before this picture was taken. Mom took us all to the beach that same afternoon. Moment of linger in the driveway home from the airport and then a sigh and nothing, let's grab our bags and head for the beach. I got caught that weekend again with cigs mom found them in my purse but me and Linds didn't get caught sneaking out the side room at the Pines beachhouse to cross the ditch out back feet all muddy and 15-year-old pissy on light beer at Todd Johnson's houseparty through the woods.

It was the first time she ever really snuck away.


It wouldn't be the last.

Facebook gives me clarity tehe

I just realized that I wrote the following in a facebook message to a friend tonight. She and I haven't seen one another since summer:

i am finally getting that alone time/retreat i always wanted just for me. lately i am looking on this time with my heart wide open, so aware that i will look back on this as one of the most precious times in my life.

Wow. Who woulda thought my retreat, that deep alone time I knew I needed, was meant to look like this?

Sweet.