I went back to therapy today, for the first time in 6 years.

I didn’t realize how vulnerable and lost I would feel all over again.

When I made my initial appointment a few weeks ago, having noticed my new insurance plan offers $5 co-pays for in-person visits with a mental health professional, I imagined the appointment itself would be guaranteed to resemble a moment of glory. It sure felt like it when I got the fortunate and well-timed phone call informing me I had graduated off the waiting list back in February, merely a month after my initial inquiry.

Considering that I hadn’t seen a professional therapist since 2018 — the summer my mother unexpectedly died of pneumonia and my long-term romantic relationship ended just before our five-year anniversary — I immediately painted a mental image of March 18 as my de-facto day of redemption.

March would bring the sun, and the sun would bring my smile.

But on this Sunday night, I had fallen asleep without using my CPAP airway device that manages my sleep apnea. I had spilled the previous night’s hastily made dinner — microwave popcorn — all over my bed. I was sleeping, quite poorly, and noisily, with Orville Redenbacher’s crumbs all over my flannel sheets. While hazily plucking individual popped kernels from the plastic bowl using my tongue as a sort of proboscis (admit it, you’ve done it), I overturned the glossy pink dish and dumped a bunch of crunchy popcorn debris into my sleeping quarters. Which I never was awake enough to really move.

In reprehensible yet comic form, I was getting sloppy, but I had been rounding the final bend of a busy weekend of bartending that saw me make great money at an exhausting physical cost. On Friday, I rapidly assembled cocktails at a downtown video arcade late into the night, slinging and cashing up to 50 drinks an hour. On Saturday, the brewery I serve at had our busiest day yet, thanks in part to the appearance of a regional food truck specializing in fresh, sea-caught lobster — an incredible feat given the region is Indiana.

[Brief aside: The lobsters are flown from states away. People lined up an hour early, around 4 p.m., in anticipation of the food truck’s arrival. “Is it still coming?” many folks asked, still 20 minutes before the truck was scheduled to appear. It was the sort of honest spectacle a small-town newspaper would have written about with great fervor in 1915.]

In sum, come Sunday night, I was spent, and I spent the evening partying. I video-called a friend to catch up on life, and to share some marijuana together. I traded relaxation for pleasure and indulged quite hard.

At one point, I had fallen asleep listening to the R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 soundtrack while painting my fingernails (poorly) a soft powder blue. The polish was smudged and chunky, as I kept forgetting to let them dry while drinking beers at my keyboard. I didn’t do as well as I should have, even if I was merely having fun painting them again.

And consequently, I did forget to take the trash out before their Monday morning pickup, as is my house responsibility to do on Sunday nights. I had also let the dishes stack up to the point the sink could not be used, though I will cite having three (3) separate jobs where I clean dishes all night as a particularly reasonable excuse for not wanting to do them after a long day at work.

I am not a perfect person. I do not take care of myself like I should. I do not eat like I should. I do not work a normal job (or four), and I have a skewed perception of what “real life” looks like with each passing month.

Now that I’m moonlighting as a part-time party vampire, I go to bed when the sun comes up, and I go to work when the sun goes down. Mildly uncomfortable and relatively inexperienced in a surreal work schedule, I typically spend my next moments of free time seeking a fleeting joy instead of working proactively to improve my surroundings. I frequently feel alone in my struggles, as I feel like nobody sees what I’m going through, no matter how many times my friends tell me they love me or insist that I am not alone.

Hello. My name is Jeff. And I’m going to therapy.

On Monday morning, I woefully and groggily picked up my hungover pieces and washed about half of the myriad dishes stacked across my kitchen. I also took the trash out — too little, too late — but the cans are still less than half-full, so we should be okay for now.

Regardless, I am mentally massacring myself.

you’re such a bad housemate and you are an embarrassment and you’re 33 now and you’re still acting like a college kid grow up jesus christ why are you sleeping in popcorn you dumb fuck

I am very bad about negative self-talk. I call myself an idiot for just about everything I do, intentional or accidental. I give myself very little grace compared to how I treat both peers and guests at my bar. In a sense, I’m a walking hypocrite, and a nag to myself.

And yet, what I’m saying ain’t entirely wrong all the time.

I was already beating myself up on the drive over to my therapist’s office, of which I was running late on because I was low on gas, but bargained the night before to purchase fuel on the morning drive over. (Everybody hates that move.)

I had skipped breakfast, as I have made a terrible habit of skipping meals when I’m stressed. I was anxious that our first meeting was going to be met with me feeling sick and unable to “do the work,” as I have cheerfully pledged to friends in the weeks leading up to March 18.

By the time I parked the car, the responsibility of what meaningful therapy entails was becoming apparent. Here I was, at parties and social settings, acting with braggadocio that I am going to be a better person once I start getting my $5 therapy hours in, but I couldn’t seem to do anything right on the day where I was to actually start evaluating myself.

To go to therapy is to realize how far you’ve fallen.

And felt like I was dangling from a cliff on Monday morning.

I got out of my truck and immediately noticed how quiet the industrial park was. I opened the door to the nondescript strip mall office and got hit with the usual aromas of vague terror that healthcare distinctly provides: Hand sanitizer. Burnt coffee. Fabric seating. And the vague sense that somebody nearby just smoked a stale cigarette not too long ago. These scents established the very horrible recurring theme that such offices, such as dentists or doctors, provide me: traumatic vulnerability.

I took a seat opposite a woman wearing a face mask, which made me feel guilty, because I’ve generally stopped wearing them. I pulled out my outdated Google Pixel 3a to check Twitter, and felt guilty that I was already spending so much time online that day, fighting with Barstool fanboys of all things.

I felt a lump in my throat. I sighed and I gulped.

this is gonna hurt

“Jeff!?”

My new therapist is a sweet woman named Daisy. Mentally, I have been calling her “Wendy,” which makes no sense at all, and I have no reason or mnemonic to be making this mistake consistently, but the whole point here is that my brain doesn’t work as well as it should.

I make a graduated point to stand up and say her actual name. I enunciated like a language arts teacher.

“… Dai-sy?”

“Hey, nice to meet you, come on back.”

It’s hard to anticipate what your therapist’s office is going to look like, especially when the waiting room has all the energy of a dying fern. Or a fern that you can’t even tell is real.

Wendy led me through the main entry and through a narrow labyrinth of gray hallways. Somehow, it looked even more drab and claustrophobic than the Motel 6-chic lobby. We crossed other therapists leading other clients back out, turning sideways as to allow extra room and not shoulder-check each other. At one point, six of us were strafing past each other like a macabre dance.

Certainly, if I’m in a space where everyone is trying to accommodate each other, I thought in that moment, then this must certainly be a good place for me to be. I took a breath, and Wendy swung

I did it again. Her name is Daisy.

DAISY swung open her office door, revealing a warm and golden suite, plush furniture in every corner. My eyes met a soft lampshade light on the side table and my face immediately relaxed, as if I was a baby being soothed by its mother.

She told me to take a seat anywhere, and I chose the loveseat over the recliner. I don’t know what that says about me, but I’m certain it’s a litmus test for something.

She complimented my blue fingernails, and my gut instinct was to say “thank you” instead of pointing out how poorly I thought I did.

“I work with my hands professionally, so I do like to take care of them.”

I smiled, widely and sincerely, though with a tired countenance.

I laid back, in my matching blue pit-stained “Surfing Anteaters” T-shirt — my favorite shirt, which I wear to casual job interviews and parties alike — that had accompanied me to therapy like a NCAA-licensed security blanket.

Already, instantly, I had felt seen. Like someone worthy of a compliment. Because Daisy absolutely did not know me towards this point, and had no *reason* to compliment me. And yet, she saw some beauty in me on what had otherwise been a humiliating day for yours truly.

Daisy smiled back, took out her laptop, and we formally began a provider-client therapy relationship.

Now, just from me to you, as writer to reader: If I want to Do The Work as I’ve alleged I need to do, that means most of the specific conversations and details of my therapy sessions will and must remain unknown to you. I already share a great deal of raw content and damning personal implications with my writing (too much, some have said), and the idea of trying to manage my big life reset with an audience of several thousand online followers is not going to be a very smart idea in the long run.

But — I am quite compelled to compliment my therapy progress with the most reliable communication medium I’ve ever known: the written word. To be honest and raw with one’s writing is to be raw and honest with one’s thinking.

I am committed to telling myself the truth, no matter how ugly it seems going forward.

Wen- no, DAISY, yes, Daisy sat with me for close to an hour, asking me and my tired brain the most serious questions with incredible tact. Consequently, I said some things in therapy today that I’ve never said before, to anyone. And that means a lot from a guy who started his first blog post in months immediately confessing to waking up covered in popcorn, pantsless and ashamed.

I am intimidated by the weight of the boulder I have pledged to move, but I am more motivated than ever before to engage in the Sisyphean task of self-improvement. I spoke with the weakest, most wavering voice it took at some times today, but I did not tell a single lie in therapy.

And that’s what “Doing the Work” — the one recurring maxim I know every therapist to say — looks like.

I already know that I have a tremendous ally in Daisy, who has given me gentle homework.

Her first assignment, simply, is for me to eat more — “I’m not asking for three square meals every day,” she said with a loving, joking tone. “But I would love to know that you ate something before we meet again next week.”

The way she phrased it, I felt genuine interest in my well-being from someone. It sounded like something my late mother or father would have texted me. They’ve been gone for 21 combined years. And yet, someone just wanting to see me eat? That made my day.

It made me…hungry.

I told my therapist — a fan of the women’s IU basketball program — about an online phenomenon that recently tickled me deeply. I cited how the thing that’s made me laugh more than anything in the past few weeks, even going far as to saying it kept me holding on, is gentle mockery of a local Hoosiers beat reporter claiming he could accurately read the pulse of the IU fanbase at the woebegone westside Buffalo Wild Wings while a men’s basketball road game was on.

This was, of course, met with immediate online derison from folks inside and outside the IU basketball fandom. To eat corporate wings in a college town is already a tragic decision, whether you boast it up in the Big Ten or put ’em away in the Pac-10. But this restaurant is located miles from the furthestmost point of IU’s campus, and it has a notorious reputation for serving unhealthy food. It’s the only place I know of in town that has definitely had Hepatitis A outbreaks.

Over the past few weeks, as I’ve dealt with grueling work hours and the suicide of a bar colleague, I’ve found myself giggling at the audacity of the tweet. It would be like declaring Diet Shasta as the world’s finest beverage.

Considering that Daisy’s office is adjacent to this ill-fated B-Dubs, I told Daisy about the joke, and she thought it would be funny to go check it out for myself.

But, she told me: if I went, I had to eat something.

After an hour of fighting back tears and confessing some pretty stark truths to myself, I ambled over to the yellow-and-black establishment with three days worth of food debt in my stomach. I politely stood at the “seat yourself” sign and waited two minutes for a server to appear so I could ask if it was OK if I took a bar seat.

That’s my anxiety factory on full display right there. All terror, no brakes.

I took a seat in front of a wall of TVs and draft handles, next to a balding man who was picking at french fries. I scoured the menu and found nothing that interested me greatly. There were no sports on of value, unless you care greatly about Minnesota Twins spring training. I had thought this in-real-life riff of an online joke out much better in my head, that’s for sure.

But I did order an ice water. And six buffalo boneless wings. And six honey barbecue wings. With ranch and fries.

What arrived was the single least-appetizing tray of food I may have ever seen served from a licensed restaurant.

The boneless buffalo bits ended up being served with a “rub” instead of the sauce I requested, but mistakes happen, and I was committed to eating them anyway. The honey barbecue wings arrived dry, and stringy, and barely touched by sauce.

What I had imagined for weeks as a day of accomplishment and happiness had arrived as a complete flop: Hungover. Hungry. Tired. Sad. Bullshit snow after Spring Break.

And now, a hillock of food that actively disgusted me.

But I promised Daisy I would eat. I already got the sense she cared for my well-being, and I didn’t want to let her down.

I started with the dry-rub wings and took a few bites. I almost quit after the second wing. Mentally, I considered asking for a box and trying again later, but I knew that I would probably quit on them altogether if I placed them in a styrofoam to-go casket.

So I forced myself to sit at the bar and eat every single dry, fleshy, over-boiled and underwhelming wing. I carefully reconsidered all the things I copped to in my first day of Doing the Work, and The Fray’s “Cable Car (Over My Head)” — a song I loathed in high school for its sappiness — overtook the B-Dubs stereo system.

Life has an incredible ability to sort itself out into little cinematic moments. Some of them, you anticipate. Others, you get blindsided by. You didn’t buy the ticket. But you’re definitely along for the ride, whether you’re prepared to cry or not.

So I sat in the far corner of a bar I made fun of, eating food that tasted like absolute shit, listening to music I absolutely hated. It was the perfect metaphor for the struggle of going to therapy and confessing the many shortcomings about myself that await me going forward.

The restaurant was out of ketchup. A shitshow.

I fought back tears as I choked down fries.

“And eeeeeeveryone knows I’m in
Over my head,
Over my head~”

A song I constantly teased others for liking as a teenager now had me weeping in the corner as a grown-ass adult. Admittedly, my younger self probably would have called me a pussy. (I don’t use that word like that now, and that probably makes my 15-year-old self feel justified.)

But that’s what growth looks like. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes it takes years. But it definitely requires work, and acknowledging some uncomfortable truths — whether you are wrong about a popular song, needing to cut back on the vices, obsessed with teasing somebody on the internet you’ve never met, or that you feel asleep in a pile of fucking popcorn.

That’s what therapy is all about. Telling the truth.

And I greatly appreciate you listening.

-moose

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PS: i will never spend $28 at Buffalo Wild Wings ever fucking again