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grayingarchitect-blog · 6 years ago

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Bad Therapist

I’ve been in and out of therapy for almost 9 years. I have seen a grand total of 5 different therapists in that time period. One of which was truly bad, two were average, one was slightly above average, and my current therapist is the therapist. The one I’ve been searching for. My soulmate therapist. She gets me. She pushes me. She lets me be angry at her and near her. She lets me be unreasonable. She lets me vent and process and breathe and eventually accept the reality that I exist in but was pretending not to.

tl:dr: She’s pretty damn great.

The worst therapist I had was when I came out in high school and my parents sent me to reparative therapy. Any therapist who has a goal of “fixing” their patients or converting them is not a real therapist. Nor should they be allowed to work with children.

I experience therapy through non-human routes as well. For example, listening to my favorite podcast feels like therapy. Going for walks in the woods feels like therapy. Writing in my journal. Crafting. Baking. Caring for others. All of these things feel like therapy to me, depending on the context of my life at that moment. But the one thing that so many others use as therapy that I absolutely despise? Running.

I started running last summer as a way to get into shape. I love walking around my city aimlessly because it allows my body to go on autopilot and I can just get lost in my mind. Running is the next step, right? Sure it’s more difficult, your body is doing more work, but the motions are the same, so once you get into the groove you can check out and do all the big thinking that I so desperately love to do. I started running 5Ks with my roommate. It was fun. We raced about once a month for a while, and I really enjoyed it. I felt athletic, I felt healthy, I felt engaged with my body. But then I started pushing myself to do more. I took a short break and then I started training for a half marathon.

I really struggled to run more than three miles at a time. I ran five once on trails and I felt so invigorated and alive! It was fire! It was amazing! I haven’t run that far since. I struggled to get past three miles. And then I struggled to get past two miles. What really bothered me was that my body felt fine. My muscles weren’t sore or tired, my lungs weren’t struggling to breath, I had the energy to keep going, but I just couldn’t do it. My brain started to get so angry for no reason. I felt distracted and disconnected. I couldn’t focus on anything for more than a few minutes before being overwhelmed.

My ex wife told me that she married me despite the fact that I was transitioning because she didn’t think I would go through with it. Because I quit everything I do. Today I quit running, and I feel like every awful thing that she has ever said to me or about me is coming true. It’s really hard to let go of the hurt from those words. Especially when my biggest fear is that she’s right.

I ended my run early today because I was starting to feel suicidal. As I walked back to my apartment, it finally clicked for me, in part due to an episode of previously mentioned favorite podcast on embodiment.

I am an internal being. All of my existence, all of the things I care about about myself exist within my mind. I have never been an athletic person or someone who truly invested in my body or even wanted to. If I had the opportunity to place my brain in a robot and exist as me in an artificial body, I would have limited concerns about that. I used to daydream as a kid about getting hit by a car and losing a leg, or getting cancer and watching my body deteriorate. These things didn’t bother me because my body has limited value to me. It’s more of a machine that carries my brain from one place to another so that I can experience things to add to my mental repertoire. I love my brain, I love thinking and feeling and processing emotions and thoughts and critically analyzing ideas. None of those things require a body.

One of my favorite movies in Run, Fat Boy, Run starring Simon Pegg. During his first marathon, he runs into a literal wall which is a physical representation of a real mental experience for runners. The wall may not be real, but it certainly feels like it. I had made the mistake of assuming that running was like every other physical activity that I do: disconnected from my mind. I thought I could just jump in and do it without having that mind-body connection. My body may have been able to run, but my mind wasn’t ready to have intimate conversation with my body without so much as an introduction.

I exist apart from my body. In order to run (and function as a physical being), I need to reintroduce my mind and body. Running was like jumping into a marriage with a complete stranger who is completely the opposite of you and trying to make it work. I wasn’t ready for that kind of relationship yet. I needed to slow down. This separateness that I’ve created between my mind and body (and that our society promotes heavily, and I haven’t even touched on the impact that my transition has on my embodiment) is something that needs to be addressed slowly for me. I needed to create space for that connection to be made naturally so that one day, I can start running again. And I can run my first half marathon, and my first marathon, and I can feel proud of myself and proud of my body because I am my body.

Running is the bad therapist that made me realize not only do I have an issue that I’m not addressing, but that this is absolutely the wrong way to go about it.

I’m looking at starting to go to yoga regularly as an introduction. Like a first date. Maybe I’ll start hiking. Perhaps I’ll join a queer baseball team. There are lots of ways to reintroduce my halves. And none of them are quitting. I am not a quitter. I am a responsible body-brain caretaker. And I am caring for both of my halves in the best way I know how. For now, that means putting running on pause. Even if I never start running again, I’m still not a quitter. I didn’t give up. I just changed directions.

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grayingarchitect-blog · 6 years ago

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Parents

Blue. See-through. Seductive.

Rotund. Slow. Awkward.

My first love. My gateway into the queer world. My first Apple computer.

Technically, it wasn’t mine. It was my aunt’s that I temporarily borrowed for a few months so that I could have my own computer in my room. Bear in mind that this was 2011, and still before iPads and tablets and teenagers having their own laptops. I think my phone still had a real keyboard.

BUT! I had internet access and a screen more than two inches across and I was ready to make my formal entrance into the queer kingdom that although unable to enter physically, my digital self was already a walking pride flag. I spend the next six months watching coveted episodes of The L Word on YouTube until 2am. Naturally all the good scenes were 18 and older only, so I had to use my exceptionally vivid and well exercised imagination to fill in the gaps. Despite my secrecy and well versed tall tales, I was still a rule follower when it came to all things digital. I even waited until my 14th birthday to create a Facebook account... Hold the judgement please. The only time I ever broke that rule was when I was ten, and I ended up in a year of fear that a creepy older man was going to show up at my door and kidnap me. But that’s a story for another time.

My parents sent me to reparative therapy when they found out that I was gay. I spent my Wednesday afternoons being driven by my mother to a small house across the street from their old church to meet with a middle aged woman who felt that it was her passion to help gay people find the root of their gayness and become straight “again.” She recommended a book to me called “A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.” I never read it. The title alone hurt enough. Was I the wolf? Or was I the sheep? Was I a monster? Or was I a helpless victim?

Eventually I succumbed to it and let the idea of being “fixed” settle into my bones like the root of a toxic weed, slowly cracking through my soul and feasting on any semblance of hope that I had left for a life of peace. My mother started letting my drive to therapy by myself. I always went. I ended up attending an ex-gay conference at the church across the street and heard stories of straight people experiencing sexual abuse and trauma, a man who molested his step children and was able to seek help and develop a healthy relationship with them again, and a man who previously identified as gay and was now married to a woman and had children and the happiest life you could ever imagine.

I was sixteen. And this was the message I received:

You are broken.

You are this way because you’ve been traumatized.

You share the stage with pedophiles.

You must be fixed.

I graduated from therapy at some point. I went back in the closet. I continued seeing my partner in secret. Making out in the back of one of our cars at a park. Covert meals at Taco del Mar. Long walks along the lake. Hours and hours of late night silent Skype sessions. Sneaking into their bedroom through the window.

My parents were less than pleased when they found out about all of it. I was called a bitch. I was told to go kill myself if that’s what I really wanted to do. Eventually I was told that my father could handle me being gay. But it would kill him if I was trans. So that’s the one thing I absolutely can’t do. At least I wasn’t trans.

I spent a lot of time in and out of therapy for the next... well I’m still in therapy actually. My parents really damaged me. They broke my heart. They didn’t support any relationship I ever had. They couldn’t accept that I was queer, and loved who I loved. I went in and out of that closet like it was a revolving door and I was a six year old having the time of my life. I was so angry at them. When I got engaged, I had to tell them two days beforehand because I knew that they would be displeased. Thankfully I had hardened my heart in preparation, because they were cold and distant once I told them. They didn’t like my future spouse, and made it abundantly clear.

I bought my suit with my future mother-in-law. I was too afraid to ask my own mother to go with me, because I was wearing a suit and not a dress.

My mom walked out of the venue while we were decorating the venue because my MIL called me by my chosen name.

They cried during the ceremony. My mom refused to sign our wedding certificate as a witness, despite having agreed to do so prior to the ceremony.

My marriage lasted less than two years.

______

I blamed them. When I got the “I told you so” after telling them that I was getting divorced. When they told everyone else. When they said that they never really liked my partner anyway. I was so angry that my partner left me and proved my parents right. I felt inferior. I was the only representative of queerness to my entire conservative religious family. And I fucked it up. I fucked it up for all the queer folks that any of them ever meet.

That’s a big burden to carry as a young person.

I blamed my parents for a long time. I had to. I needed to. The emotional work to heal was just too much, and it was easier to push all of that emotional weight on them instead of carrying it by myself.

I lost everything in my divorce. My chosen family that supported everything about me. My friends. My home. My security. My self-worth.

I attempted suicide and was hospitalized within a year of my divorce going through. I blamed my parents for that too.

My parents had traumatized me. They had damaged me. They had hurt me so badly that I never wanted anything do with them again. I thought that I had experienced the worst parents that a middle class white kid could experience. My parents were homophobic, transphobic, emotionally stunted, vindictive, and cruel. They raised a depressed, anti-social, anxiety driven kid who hates themselves, attempted suicide twice, and can’t manage to find a successful relationship of any kind.

Even if all of that were true (it’s not), they still raised me. Despite all of the mistakes, errors in judgement, and harm that they caused, they still managed to raise a resilient kid that survived transitioning in a conservative environment and managed to find a life of his own.

I’m trying to take the good with the bad. No, my parents aren’t perfect. They have made major fuck ups. But they keep trying. When I told them about my most recent partner, my mom’s first question was “do they treat you right?” They have grown so much. Because they love me. Not because they had to, or because society pressured them to (they live in a pretty conservative bubble and don’t have to change unless they actually want to). They told me that I was broken when I first came out. They totally fucked that one up. If we had had a better relationship, I might not have ended up marrying someone that was incapable of loving me for me. But their homophobia prevented me from being able to decipher the truth from the bias.

My parents totally fucked up at times. But they still raised me. And I’m pretty fucking awesome.

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