This Is Us

I read a lot as a kid. I didn’t speak out of turn. People liked me.

Sure, I never knew where my school worksheets were. I was rarely able to turn in my homework on time. And, yes, my elementary school desk was always a disaster. I used to flatten myself across it, so people couldn’t see inside. Paper, crayons, pencils, and books spilled out onto the floor. It was embarrassing.

I lost things I couldn’t remember picking up in the first place. I couldn’t keep track of time; yesterday’s moments fusing to tomorrow’s expectations. I was bright. I drew…

This Is Us

The first time I sought out therapy, I was met with a smiling gender-conforming white lady who furrowed her brows when I described the pain I was in and said softly to me that it “must be so hard.” It made me immediately want to bolt from the room. Instead, I just sat there and cried.

I was in graduate school, depressed and unmoored, and the therapist was overseeing a social anxiety group I was desperate to join. She sat me down on a couch across from her and asked a few gentle, quiet questions about what it felt like…

Humans 101

“Sit with your feelings” is the lukewarm, nebulous buzz phrase we’ve all been hearing a lot lately. We hear it from our therapists, we hear it from mental health columnists, we hear it from yoga influencers showing off their smoothie bowls. Last week, I’m pretty sure I heard the Amazon delivery guy say it. The expression is decidedly mainstream, yet it remains a pretty vague instruction. Given the deluge of feelings we’re all currently drowning in, it seemed like the right time to offer some clarification on what this seemingly simple bit of advice actually means.

Let’s start with what…

I started therapy last August, after years of fits and starts. Every previous time I’d tried to start therapy, it had been a mild catastrophe. I could never seem to find a shrink who was a good fit. Either they were all unable to see who I was, or I was too emotionally shut down to really show it to them. Inevitably, they’d give me advice that struck me as really bad and pointless, and I’d smile and nod and say nothing. Then I’d cancel my next appointment and run gleefully back into the familiar, cold arms of emotional suppression.

…

Trust Issues

On my first day in Florence, Italy, three years ago, I went into a tiny gelato shop near the apartment I was renting for the month, and after I ordered gelato, reached into my pocket to pay, and realized I didn’t have enough. I struggled to explain this in my limited Italian to the shopkeeper, a friendly young man who listened perhaps for a second before he breezily said, “Pay me later,” in excellent English.

I admit I was stunned. I’d never met him before. But what was interesting to me was that as he said this, I thought, I…

Waving goodbye to our husbands, my friend and I flew off to Jamaica where ingesting magic mushrooms — psilocybin — is legal. Yes, psilocybin is a psychedelic. And no, neither of us had ever tried magic mushrooms before.

Why would two women in their early seventies do such a thing? I can’t speak for my friend but as a born and bred neurotic, I sought to heal more. I’d already found relief from taking medication prescribed by a psychiatrist since 1985. That medication (along with talk therapy in the beginning) continues to take a major edge off of my formerly…

I can still vividly recall the look on my high school history teacher’s face when I raised my hand and asked why the Lebanese history books stopped at 1975. It was 1992 and my mind could not fill the gap with the obvious: No one wanted to talk about the Lebanese Civil War.

I was born at the end of the war and by the time I turned five, it was over. Business was booming with reconstruction projects. The Lebanese joie de vivre was back in full swing. I spent the years of my youth dancing on the Beirut rooftops…

It had been at least two years since James absconded from our connection of five years. Now he had resurfaced, requesting we pick up where we left off. It was as if the chasm in time was insignificant. What mattered were his pressing concerns in the here and now.

Only I didn’t view it that way.

From the start, we agreed that we’d part ways responsibly and respectfully, when the time came. I was emphatic about that. Then he sent me a “pleasant” obligatory email ending our relationship, betraying our clearly defined agreement in the process. This callous rupture left…