Good For Anyone

A year ago today I was sitting in the day room with a motley collection of misfits listening to a discussion about relaxation techniques and guided meditation. There was Larry, a man who walked with the aid of a cane and sometimes seemed lost inside his own head, Merte, who kept bemoaning the fact that no one would give her a ride to Vermontville, Sadie offering cigarettes to everyone and hoarsely

warning them they'd get herpes if they kept trying to smoke cigarette butts from the ashtrays out on the patio, Jane who wore the same scrubs every day and played her guitar every night, Greg slinking around in a hospital gown trying to locate and steal sharp objects so he could kill himself, John with the anger management issues, Alan from Africa who wanted to go back to his own country, Lin from China who had been on a wait list for an apartment for over three months now, my room-mate Sarah who'd been admitted by her boyfriend and girlfriend so they could have a break from her, Lisa who lost her little boy and didn't have the will to live anymore, and finally James, a pleasant fellow who seemed to have gotten lost in the city, except that he was trying to convince the nurse that he needed more drugs because they were better for him than all the alcohol he must have drank to appear drunk from it even then, five days into his stay. I could try to say that I didn't belong there with them and that there had been some kind of mistake, but truthfully I felt perfectly natural and safe in their company...except for maybe with Greg, because I wasn't a hundred percent certain that he wouldn't decide to take someone out of this plane of existence along with him if he finally located the elusive sharp object.

I heard the intercom asking for me to appear outside the door to the counseling offices, so I left the group early and stood beside the glassed-in nurse's station waiting for them to unlock the door. In a moment, it clanged loose and the counselor on the other side held it open for me. I was glad to see that it was Tracy and not Laura, because Laura's sympathy seemed forced and strange to me, while Tracy was very empathetic and matter-of-fact. I followed her to her office and waited for her to sit down before sitting across from her myself. Tracy looked the way you might look if you'd been up on third shift all night long and now had to stay at work because your replacement never showed up that day. She looked that way because that is what happened to her, and it wasn't the first time I'd notice it happen. 

"So," she asked, "Are you excited to go home with your sister today?"

I wondered if she was disappointed that I couldn't muster a more enthusiastic response than "Yes."

"I saw your painting on the table in the day room last night," Tracy told me.

I smiled because I'd hoped I could show it to her before Thea came to take me home.

"Tell me about it," she said, "What made you decide to paint a bird, and why does it look like its nest is on fire?"

I quoted Emily Dickinson: "Hope is a thing with feathers. It perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words..." Dickinson would have gone on to say "and never stops at all," but I didn't think that was true at the time, so I stopped.

Tracy had this reaction to me, that I've often encountered in people who held some manner of authority over me, where she seemed delighted to have me there, as if I were the bird in the painting, stuck someplace it didn't quite belong, and had broken out in song. She also had the other reaction toward me that I've often seen, the one where she had no idea what I was doing in there singing instead of out singing to the world at the top of my voice.

I don't have much of a singing voice. It's why I started painting.

"You're going to do really well," Tracy said happily, "You've come a long way since you came to us a couple weeks ago, and the program we've put you into is good for anyone, really, but I think it will be especially helpful where your PTSD is concerned."

Everyone kept telling me that the type of therapy they'd referred me to was so great that anyone would benefit by it, but it was like we really were sitting in the shadow of an enormous elephant holding his massive foot to his pursed lips and wheezing "shhhhh!" 

When Thea arrived to take me home, I felt as if I were leaving a warm and dark cave. I climbed into the passenger seat of her car and leaned my head against the window, blinking at the golden glow of leaves scattered over the ground in the sunlight. It was like the world had been painted fresh that morning and hadn't even dried yet.

Probably the most unpleasant part of counseling is the first meeting with a therapist, in which you have to tell your life story in exchange for assistance changing the ending. I've done this several times in my life, and I'm not ashamed to admit it anymore because I'm always hoping that someone else might feel just a little bit less alone if they knew about it. Mental illness is a scary thing to carry around with you, because no matter how smart or talented or strong other people may think that you are, you spend most of your life attempting both to accept and to hide this problem from yourself as well as everyone else, trying not to burn out before your strength runs out or your fears become real. Neither of these things is really going to happen, but when you're struggling with depression you simply don't know that. I'd been referred for DBT, which stands for Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. It's kind of like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, except with elements of meditation and PTSD coping skills thrown in for good measure. I was to see my new therapist once a week, and also attend a DBT Group on a weekly basis.

On the first day of DBT Group, I encountered another white-walled room crowded with misfits, and I wasn't there more than ten minutes before once again I felt right at home. Within half an hour, I was extremely uncomfortable and just wanted to go home, because it turned out all of them -- ALL of them -- had at one time or another tried to commit suicide.

It was as if the elephant had accidentally sneezed out the secret he'd been holding back, and it hit me like a stream of water from a firehose. Tracy was right that this therapy was good for anyone else, but she hadn't really mentioned that everyone in it had, at one time or another, been sitting beside absent-minded Larry listening to Sadie talk about Herpes and wondering if Greg was going to kill them before they could do the job themselves.

I found myself listening closely to everyone else's stories, trying to find differences and similarities from myself so that I could figure out if I really belonged there with them or not.

I was telling myself that this was some kind of mistake. I shouldn't be here with Becky, who had had her stomach pumped no less than ten times in her lifetime, or with Matt who kept making up wild stories about his adventures strolling around town in a speedo so that he didn't have to talk about how scared he actually was of always being socially awkward and dying alone. But then Bonnie spoke up and said, "I'm really good with people. I'm always trying to cheer them up and make them laugh, draw them out of themselves and look at the bright side of things. They don't know I'm doing that because I really badly need someone to do those same things for me. They see me smiling and I think they think I'm really wonderful..."

I could tell that she didn't believe that she was wonderful, that she thought she'd somehow managed to fool all those people. I understood this about her because I have often felt the same way about myself. 

You can say what you want about Group Therapy, about how cheesy, embarrassing or cliche it looks on tv, about how you're not really a "people person" and therefore would never benefit from it, how there's no way in hell you'd talk about all your deepest secrets in front of a room full of strangers, or that sitting and listening to people complaining about their lives doesn't seem productive or especially helpful to you if none of them actually have your specific problem -- and I mean, you can say that if you want to, because I certainly did. And I actually am a "people person," but just at that time in my life I really didn't want to be. 

The reason I'd been hanging out in a "Crisis Prevention Center" in the first place was because, like an alcoholic, my life had "become unmanageable." It unravelled and I just wasn't able to roll it all back up -- again. I felt like I'd somehow ruined and wasted my life and could never catch up, that I was useless and had nothing more to contribute to the world. I wanted to be physically, mentally, and financially stable like everyone else seemed so effortlessly to be, but I'd given up on the idea of ever making that happen. 

Here I'm going to do something outrageous and tell you that giving up on the idea of being physically, mentally, and financially stable like everyone else was the best choice I've made in my life to date, and I'll tell you why: 

• I've never been physically stable; I'm a serious clutz, and I've decided to be proud of it.
• Mental stability is in the eye of the beholder. As my Neuropsychologist likes to say: "All the truly intelligent people in the world have some level of neurosis -- that's how they're able to see the world differently than everyone else, and that's what makes them unique and special."
• I looked up the definition of neurotic because I've always assumed it meant "CRAZY," but really it's a much more human concept than that; It's "a relatively mild mental illness that is not caused by organic disease, involving symptoms of stress (depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, hypochondria) but not a radical loss of touch with reality." Think about this definition very carefully before you go judging anyone else, and ask yourself this: "Do I have any of these traits?" I'm willing to bet that you do. If you're one of my friends, then I know you do, because my friends are all very highly intelligent and funny people.
• I don't have to be financially stable like everyone else, either. First of all, because not everyone else is financially stable. All I really have to be is financially stable enough to take care of myself and my kids. I don't have to be like everyone else. Even everyone else isn't like everyone else.
• The reason I feel at home among misfits is because I know how they feel and they know how I feel, and together all we have in common is all that matters -- That our lives have been such that we're forced to be more honest with ourselves and others than makes us (or others) entirely comfortable. 
• We meet in DBT group each week and we make ourselves roar with laughter at how funny life is, cry for each other when we hear how harsh the world can be, and how broken the world can be, that the people who occupy it think that the worst, most embarrassing thing they could ever do is to be entirely honest about their faults, their pain, their problems and struggles. 
• We meet in that room and we see, over and over again, what great strength and courage it takes to admit our weaknesses, and how much more beautiful we all have the potential to be when we learn to show empathy and compassion for someone else. The question is not "What could I possibly get out of discussing my problems with people who have no way of relating to me, let alone helping me?" 
• The are actually two questions, and they are: "At what point in my life did I decide that my problems are so different from everyone else's problems?" and, "At what point in my life did I decide that I'm so much better or more important than anyone else that I think my problems are more worth listening to than theirs?" 
• Or maybe it's more positive to ask ourselves this: "Why do I think my problems mean I'm worthless and have nothing to contribute to the world when having them enables me to light the way through the dark for other people who struggle?"

I've attached a painting that I've done for a person who is in my DBT Group. Because it is for a person in my DBT Group, it is also good for anyone else.