Exit Only
“Because once you depart from this one-way road of life, there is just no getting back on.”
Therapy on the I'm OK You're Crazy Plan
Dying is easy; comedy is hard,” an old vaudevillian once said. But comedy never seemed that hard to me, provided I didn't mind sacrificing my dignity some. I was just five years old when I first began trying to make my family laugh with a sped-up rendering of the "Look! Up in the air! It’s a bird, it’s a plane…" prologue to the old Superman show, while standing before my captive audience in my little red jersey and tights, a dishtowel for a cape knotted around my neck.So with all due respect to that old vaudevillian, if you were to ask me for an epigram depicting one true thing, I’d tend to say “Comedy is easy. Therapy is hard.”I found out just how hard therapy is way back when I was first enrolled in counseling by my husband under the “I’m Ok, You’re Crazy” plan. Doing therapy under the “I’m OK, You’re Crazy” plan occurs when somebody you live with suggests you get counseling, although he personally wouldn’t 'open up' in a therapist’s office if you dragged him there in chains and threatened to pull out all his nose hairs.This husband, who I have often wanted to drag places by his nose hairs, said back then he thought I should seek treatment.Because I seemed sad, he said. “Hey, all humorists are sad down deep,” I quickly retorted, but I knew he was right: I was sad. Not long before, my mom had died, and I guess I felt too young to face life without her. Plus, she didn’t just die. She died in my living room. During her own 80th birthday party. So, yes I was sad. And finally I began seeing this counselor to try feeling better.Every week I drove to her office, all unwilling. Every week she asked me how I was. I could only tell her how everyone else in my life was. I told her a million stories, most of them richly humorous. I entertained the heck out of us both, but I wasn’t getting at the problem, and I think we both knew that, so after 18 months, I quit.Then ten years passed, and ....I was funnier than ever! - yay! - though still in full flight from every kind of sadness that had ever come my way. I just didn't want to feel it. Then one day, my oldest friend called to say she was doing counseling - over the phone of all things - with a gifted therapist in Colorado, who was at first reluctant to work with someone in such an unorthodox manner.“But it’s helping!” my friend said, and one day added, “and, you know, you should really do it too.”And so. And so I began doing it, though God knows it wasn’t easy. I couldn’t seem to sit still as I talked to this faraway therapist but because we were on the phone, she didn’t know this.Sometimes I cleaned the bathroom toilets while we talked.Sometimes I stripped small pieces of furniture.Once though, she got wise to me. “Are you DRIVING?!” she said.I was driving all right.But the main thing is I was doing it, as I wish my mom could have done in her younger years, to ease her own aching heart. Because it did sure enough help. I faced my sadness and the sadness under my sadness, and the sadness under that, and so what if I did most of that facing after the therapist and I had hung up.. I’ll say it again and you can take it from this old vaudevillian: Comedy really is easy by comparison; and therapy is very, very hard.
Who Needs a Shrink?
I worry about these things, evidently, but maybe I shouldn't, overmuch. God didn't make me a manager anyway. He made me a teacher I’m pretty sure, and maybe I'm a teacher still, on the inside, because really I just want to affirm everybody and make it a good class. And clothes from the 70s are cool! And as for the cats, well the cats died some time ago. Maybe they're sitting in Heaven right now, together with my mom, all three this very minute enjoying a nice little plate of pastries.
If it weren’t for your subconscious, you wouldn't have a CLUE about what your real issues are. I dreamed that I woke one morning to find our house filled with many different families. I began tearing around to make sure we had enough provisions for all these strangers and only noticed after what seemed like days that I hadn’t seen the cats. “WHERE ARE THE CATS?” I cried in this dream, dashing about yet more frantically - until I found them at last in our dank unfinished basement, as skinnied-out with neglect a pair of empty gloves. Then, two nights later, I had a dream that was no dream at all but an actual memory, of something my hail and vital mother said halfway through a party we threw for her 80th birthday. At the celebration's start, just before the guests began arriving, she heard some of us squabbling about who was supposed to have laid the fire. “That was always the trouble in our family,” she sighed sadly about a time 60 years in the past: “No one was ever in charge.” Then, an hour later, still sitting there by the fire, she closed her eyes and died, her small plate of dessert pastries falling from her lap.Unearthing that memory sure explains why I’ve held myself responsible for the very wheeling of the stars ever since that fateful day. SOMEONE’S got to be in charge!...And more messages from my subconscious came just last night, when I dreamed I was trying to run a meeting of volunteers in my community but somehow could not speak commandingly enough to hold their attention.I started out in the classroom and so I know: this is every teacher’s worst fear. In this dream that was more of a nightmare, one of the whisperers actually turned her chair around so that her back was to me. In this dream that was more of a nightmare I say again, I went over to her and in a pathetic begging tone said, “Don’t you care about the mission of this organization?” "Not since YOU took over as president!” she sneered. Then, “When is this going to be over? somebody groaned. “Yeah,” whined someone else. “I want to watch the game!”I threw out the most intransigent talkers, something that in real life you can't actually DO in an all-volunteer organization, and finally gave up and gavel things to a close.On her way out, the sneering one shot me a sidelong look. "Nothing personal," she smirked. "It hurt, what you said before," I began, again with that pathetic wheedling tone, but "Hey!" she barked back. “It is what it is! Plus, you know you've really let yourself go lately."So there it is: a trifecta of Bulletins From My Subconscious, which would appear to be suggesting the things I am evidently worried about, which are:
