Circular Saws
My last therapist didn't like to read so she never saw anything I wrote and won't read this. She diagnosed everyone based on their personality test results. This worked for some of them, I reckon, and she helped some people through some real serious trauma with breathing exercises, like the lady who always looked like she was emerging from a mescaline trip as we passed each other in the waiting area. She liked to talk to me about aliens and I was fine with that. And she had a friendly little chihuahua in the office and she had a lot of hilarious stories of her own so I kept going. I liked that her office was at the bottom of a long hill I could coast down on my bike and glide out onto this newish wooden bridge they built over the marsh. That was probably the main reason I picked her off the list of available therapists.
The truth was I needed someone to sit and listen while I worked my own shit out. I spent a few years pacing in circles around a studio apartment during the pandemic and talking to myself. I could hear the repetition, the circular reasoning, the way I latch onto a cause to explain how I'm feeling, especially when it's a bad feeling, when as far as I know it's just a reaction to chia seeds that throws my gut biome balance off and makes me cranky. Those were some pretty bad years, for me and for the planet, and I'm not about to pretend we all can't go back there or somewhere worse.
It's a personal goal of mine to be able to write about lethargy in depression in a way that keeps people wanting to read more. It's not easy. I don't usually want to read about that stuff myself but if someone strikes the right tone, finds the right balance of humor and honest commitment to hopelessness I might stick it out. Certain recovery memoirs come to mind, then it's just a long list of depraved
songwriters and poets who found meaning in telling the rest of us about their
misery. I'm trying to avoid that. For one thing I'm not miserable. I've been
that and this ain't it. What I am is stressed, anxious, and tired of listening
to my own thoughts. So I zone out and go somewhere else when I need to and if
necessary strap some noise canceling headphones on and let a bunch of wordless
music fill the noisy chamber between my ears.
When I look at these job boards I'm supposed to be taking seriously I withdraw. No it’s more like reverting to a pre-human state, to a kind of protomatter whose only interests are to sit perfectly still and not respirate too loudly. Out in the world there are disasters playing out, people loving each other, and I can hardly be bothered to water the plants at this house which is in essence my only actual responsibility. What did the plants do to deserve this kind of neglect, you ask. Nothing, I say. That's their problem. If they can be arsed to they sometimes shift
gradually in the direction of the sunlight. Lazy heliotaxic bastards. They
bloom, they withdraw, and for them this cycle is natural and reasonable but if
quit a job over ethical concerns and go to Montreal to clear my head and end up
staying there for six months going further into debt I'm being irresponsible.
The way all the recruiters sync up and find new and innovative ways to waste our time is fascinatingly dystopian. It's gradually becoming apparent, too, that a lot of them are fronts for AI training endeavors whose tech doesn't work but are trying stay ahead of an invisible curve by replacing workers with clunky sims whose only real purpose is to vacuum up as much personal information and assessment results as possible while keeping you on the line in hopes that you might score an equally impersonal gig. And I suspect it's all just being funneled, directly or
otherwise, into the trash compactor soup of AI data farms run by one of the few
big companies who seem destined to remain ubiquitous and everpresent in our
lives for the rest of time, at least until they manage to make us and
themselves redundant or immortal.
So what I was going to say in the beginning was: I don’t have a therapist these days but the writing makes me feel better sometimes. Knowing some of you are bothering to read it is tonic enough. Thanks for that. Walking helps too.
-JA
(here's an obsessive instrumental playlist I've been adding to for over a decade)