In the absence of an other

I used to have a fire burning within me, a desire to dive deeply into my professional work as a psychotherapist. I wanted to write articles, supervise trainees and interns, have my website at the top of every relevant internet search, to become trained in various modalities, to deepen my understanding of what makes people tick and what helps them to change.

Perhaps it was the pandemic or just the accretion of experience, but those professional fires are currently banked. I continue to be invested in the importance of deep connection and the healing possibilities of a caring, attentive therapeutic relationship. I am devoted to my clients. But I feel like so much of the noise around psychotherapy, the idea that specific actions can universally initiate change, the desire to replicate training programs to mainly line the pockets of other clinicians who charge big bucks for certification, the focus on diagnosis – I feel like it’s getting us wrong. It underestimates human nature, culture, how we are embedded in time, and how these forces intertwine.

Rejecting substantial bodies of psychological research can be a dangerous position for a therapist. Relying on some ineffable magic about the therapeutic relationship, perhaps putting all the spark in the therapist themselves, leads to a loss of perspective that can be harmful. I do not reject all research on effective therapeutic techniques or see therapists as shaman or gurus. What I do recognize is that what is transformative about the type of therapy I practice is hard to capture. It emanates from a collaboration between me and the client, allowing for deep listening, responding with compassion, slowing things down, reflecting, working through ruptures, and containing and processing pain and shame. It involves the creation of a third space, an overlap between the client and myself, while also allowing for our separate experiences. Psychotherapy done in this way is a deliberate, delicate, and careful process that creates space for people to bloom into and accept their full, messy selves.

That’s what I try to do, though it can get tricky when dealing with clients across the developmental spectrum from childhood to middle age. The expectations of connection and the methods to get there are different depending on life stage and, like any person, I am more “successful” with some than others. My ambition as a psychotherapist has been whittled down to a room with two people reflecting on the beauty and suffering endemic to the human experience, asking questions about how to live. How do we make our way forward in this damaged world? How do we accept ourselves and be fully present? Sometimes this process takes place in words, sometimes in the creation of art, and sometimes using games and play.

While my psychotherapeutic ambitions have shrunken to the intimacy of the therapeutic relationship, my writerly ambitions are beginning to fire up, though with a similarly small approach. I recently committed to writing every day for at least 15-20 uninterrupted minutes. Using a timer, I ignore my frequent urges to look things up. I let my fingers fly. The result has been a torrent of words as I sort through thoughts and feelings I did not know I had. This is step one of my re-entry into something resembling being a writer. Eventually I want to include more narrative, long-form based writing, but just getting the engine started is a good for now.

Unlike almost everything else I do, writing is based on my needs. Since the concept of writing for a reader can itself be constraining, leading to a performative flexing of writing chops that can result in flash and falseness (like this sentence!), I am attempting to leave the reader’s potential needs and interests out of it. My current ambition is just to write, to build a truly creative life that is not dependent on anyone else. Of course, being a writer does imply having an audience (hello wts reader!), but I don’t want that to influence what I take on. My daily writing is for me alone. I write in this blogging space for myself and others. Perhaps as I string other narratives together, something meant for public consumption will emerge more regularly.

My psychotherapy work is a private creative act. Much of my writing is a private creative act. I suppose it could lead to something, but this is not, cannot be, the main driver. I am a woman in a room by myself, creating a shared experience in the absence of an other.

(As I was cleaning up this draft, I read an email promoting a writer’s retreat. My heart sped up. The images of community came involuntarily. So maybe I am protecting my ambitious, creative self by claiming no desire for an audience. Just have allow myself to be as I am in this moment.)

No way out but through

This is the truth of it. I am 56 years old. My husband is nearing 60. My remaining parent will be 76 next year. There is young blood in the house, our 20-year-old son, who is grappling with what the youth of today must grapple with, disconnection, lack of joy, low expectations of this melting, fetid world. Alone, together, we live in a no-outsiders urban outpost.

I did not expect to feel so isolated at this stage in life. I’m not truly alone. We’re not alone. But our ties to each other are all we really have. They are deep, meaningful, singular, and insular. And they are all the boy has right now, this small clutch of hoary eggs thudding against one another in a brittle, aging basket.

I am ashamed of this isolation. It is an old shame. Who wants to show such congenital loneliness, inadvertently passed on to the next generation? I have friends. They are spread out, some more present in my current life than others, all from earlier days. But the boy is no longer in touch with peers and seems to believe he has nothing to offer. My husband, the more affable of our group, is also mainly without outside connection after two significant losses. Our small families have been pared down to a loose set of four with the occasional visitor.

There was a time when I wanted to be in the world. I pursued connection. Maybe it’s the emotional heft of my job, the responsibilities of my private life, or the reemergence of depression (recent bouts of controlled crying, hopeless outlook). I find it hard to make time and space to pursue new relationships or maintain old ones. Who has the energy? Who has the interest? It’s safer in this fading basket.

Someday I may pay the price. I may be the sole survivor of the marriage, the boy far away. Or the boy and I will hole up in the house until he, too, is alone. My current solution to this looming problem is to cultivate what I imagine to be a Buddhist-like sense of removal and acceptance, courting low expectations, normalizing solipsism. Many a hermit, a solitary soul, has survived this world. I can enter the flow of humanity outside my doorstep and re-enter my solitude at will (someday). It’s the boy, the young man, who worries me. Now is the time to build a life, not to hunker down with the oldsters.

Even in this relatively anonymous format, I feel uncomfortable writing about it. This no-longer child, intelligent, thoughtful, somewhat emotionally aware and sensitive, a focus of my writing in the early days (was it my depressed parenting that caused him to withdraw from the world?) – it is his life to figure out. And figure it out he will. He will. Most of me knows it.

What to do with this loneliness, my mind folded around ghosts? What to do to create meaning out of this all too human experience? I always return to creativity and perhaps confession, the lure of a writing life. Even that elusive bonbon has been sucked of its sweetness by artificial intelligence and electronic distraction, the mass of humanity in the grasp of glowing screens, pulled into a liminal space of image, shadow, and illusory escape.

Consider this my fight against hopelessness.

(“No way out but through” is from the Robert Frost poem A Servant to the Servants. “The best way out is always through” is the more commonly quoted line, but I prefer this one. The poem is a long and odd one, more appropriate to the topic of this post than I expected.)

Remnants

He will never read this. That’s not a crime, just a fact. And I will not go cycling or ask about what he is reading, nor will he ask me about my books or the inner workings of my mind.

I am sharp-tongued, impatient and pushy, sardonic and quick. He takes his wounds silently and quietly retreats, his vulnerable parts protected, unexcavated, safely out of reach.

I cook. He does the dishes. I complain, he (mostly) listens. He drives. I ride. We share a surreal sense of humor and, often, a telepathic sense of what the other is going to say next. We have formed together, each growing around the other, our unused bits and pieces atrophied. Dormant. This is the way of all long relationships, I suspect.

It is neither good nor bad. It is not exactly a choice, though we could have chosen differently. But sometimes I am aware of what lies hidden, the heartbeat of emotion, thickened veins of want thrumming with need. Over time, it becomes harder to access what we’ve left behind.

Nostalgia is a creative space

I can’t get away from the past, yellow Formica countertops, tobacco-stain brown pine cabinets, cooktops in harvest gold, burners coiled like snakes. I walk the spongy carpet to the louvered doors, breathe in the cool, mildewed conditioned air. This synthetic world of cigarette smoke and formaldehyde made me. I am sawdust and Coffee Mate, vinyl and Butterick’s sewing patterns.

Forty years on, on the opposite coast with its own arid form of nostalgia (Eichler and Eichler-adjacent, plywood walls, all right angles and walls of glass, the occasional built-in interrupting the room), I tap through real estate ads from my Mid-Atlantic homeland. It is as familiar as ice cream scooped out of a cup with a wooden spoon. There are green expanses of lawn, muddy riverbanks, Colonial brick center hallway wallpapered wonderlands. Rooms are sparse with overstuffed easy chairs that sink into wall-to-wall, buck’s heads unblinking over boxy brick fireplaces.

I knew this place once. I came from it, a thistle emerging from rows of seed corn. And then I moved to the Bay Area, a land of rugged beauty. I made my own drama. I ached for something else and then settled into what was. But nothing is as fertile as that starting place. The key to creativity lies in nostalgia.

All right, all right, all right (everything you love will disappear)

The office is complete. The mind is faltering. The boy is staying home. The mother is okay enough. The husband is good, good, all right. The world is falling apart. Sleeping dogs lie and, somewhere upstairs a cat pushes a paw through sunlight.

If I practice doing this enough, sitting in space silently, ignoring the technological pulls, I can escape into something else.

A long time ago, I thought there was redemption through writing, that if I could write it well enough, it would all work out for me. Writing equaled readers equaled entry into the elusive world of publishing. I also believed that our democratic system was sturdy, people were generally good, and progress was linear. But now I know that while writing assumes a reader, requires an imagined audience, that potential reader may never find your work. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that your words, like your thoughts, will die with you. Electronic files and websites will disappear. Paper will molder and burn. Progeny, distant relatives, or strangers will toss your work into the dumpster. As for the rest of my naïve beliefs, well. Look at the world now and before.

In my low, self-indulgent moments, I can see how this is the slow ending of so many things. My thoughts, my words, my family. I worry that the boy was born in a time of chaos, upheaval, and disconnection into two families that were slowly dying out. He is the last of us. What pressure he must feel.

But this does not acknowledge the meaning of what we have right now. I sit in a world of beauty, lucky to have the time to think and write if I wish. My family is strong and smart and stable. We share ideas. We laugh. We lack for nothing. So isn’t it enough, in this moment, to enjoy the sound of wind chimes, to feel the wool beneath my feet, to hold my loved ones close and stop worrying about what will be?