• Previous posts

  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
  • Smol Ketchups
  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

It’s been the sort of warm day that you could mistake for late summer here in Eugene except for the reawakened front yards which are riotously mid-bloom, impossibly green, crackling with promise after winter’s long soggy Ctrl+Alt+Del; Dylan lost a front tooth last night and his infectious dimpled grin has a gappy, goofy new charm; I have greatly reduced the amount of time I spend online and while I miss interacting with people, I’m finding it to be a less distracting, more peaceful way to live; the new AWOLNATION album is just as awesome as I’d hoped it would be; I started helping out in the kids’ school again; we went for a family hike in the woods yesterday, everyone strolling along in a good mood, joking back and forth, stopping to admire trees and bugs, and it was such a small thing … but also, you know, everything.

For the next ten weeks, I’m doing outpatient treatment. Three days a week, three hours a day. This is where that one day at a time saying comes in handy, as a less overwhelming alternative to staring at a calendar and thinking, TEN WEEKS?

I cried the first time I went to an outpatient session, because there was a resentful, childish part of me that felt like I’d paid my dues in rehab. It seemed so unfair that I had to come right back to the same facility and sit in the same plastic chairs and engage in the same excruciating business of talking about my feeeeeeeeeeeeeelings. I just wanted to be done with all of it — the group therapy, the serenity prayers, the awkward feedback models we’re required to use (“So what I hear you saying, Bob …”), the dingy weird-smelling conference rooms.

Now that I’ve been to a few sessions, however, I get why this program is so strongly recommended as a follow-up to inpatient. This fellowship of people who are going through the same things I am, combined with a counselor who knows how to pick and pry, is a pretty powerful thing. The process of sharing is likely never going to be easy for me — every time I’m faced with a tough question I can feel my body going into freakout mode, like WHOOP WHOOP WARNING EMOTIONAL GUARD COMPROMISED PULL UP PULL UP — but at the same time there can be a queasy relief in being put on the spot. Because sometimes the crack that gets chiseled open reveals something I didn’t see before.

Today I described my difficulty reconnecting with friends and family and how crappy I feel as a result, and someone gently asked me, Do you believe you deserve to feel better? My answer was instantaneous, and it surprised me: No. No, I deserve to feel like shit, because I am shit.

I guess my resistance wasn’t really about the uncomfortable chairs. It was about not wanting to spend ten more weeks confronting the uncomfortable truths. Like how the reason I’ve been turning away from everyone who’s held out a hand recently is because I’m not okay with myself right now, so how could anyone else be?

It feels awful to talk about this, I think, time and time again. It feels worse not to, some part of me whispers.

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