Tag: therapy

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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People often reach out to me assuming that I’m now happy and high functioning—that I’ve “recovered” or climbed atop some “mentally healthy” pedestal. My first instinct when I hear this, ironically, is to clarify that I’m by no means what psychiatry would consider “well”—though this doesn’t mean anything to me. Instead, I explain how I’ve come to view the paradigm of “mental illness” and “mental health” as a false binary, and that I have found, in shedding this medicalized framework of self-understanding, that no state of being is permanent or anything to be attached to or worried about. And when I do seem to be falling into some kind of particularly unhelpful emotional or thinking “pattern,” I typically don’t need to sleuth around too long to figure out what’s going on. Inevitably, it’s rooted in my relationship to life around me: there is unresolved conflict between me and someone I care about; I have deprioritized social connection because I feel exhausted; I’m powerless about a difficult circumstance but haven’t yet let go of needing it to change; I’m placing too much attention on matters that really have no relevance for me. Much of the time, it’s because I’ve slipped back into my old habit of ignoring my intuition: I’ve spoken yes when my instincts said no. I haven’t had restful time to myself. Too many hours in front of a computer and not enough put toward the things and people that really matter—the things that, when I’m at death’s door one day, I’ll wish I’d done more of: expansive conversations at the reservoir with Cooper with scootering kids in tow, despite all those emails beckoning me to catch up on them; letting the boys blow up the living room to build that pillow fort even though it means more tidying; calling up the people who ignite me to catch up on life instead of just working more.

— Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (Viking, March 18, 2025)

Notes:

  • Recommended: Not a warm and fuzzy page turner but powerful. Her insights and thoughts will not leave me soon, if ever.
  • Book Review of “Unshrunk” by Casey Schwartz, NY Times, March 20, 2025.
  • Book Review in Washington Post: “She stopped taking her psych meds. Now she helps others do the same. Laura Delano’s “Unshrunk” is more than a memoir. It’s a treatise against psychiatric medications.”

we have an unstoppable will to go forward

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PS: It’s like every time i get pushed down and crushed, I seem to get more information…Parkinson’s had made me aware of time. Like, really aware of it. My sense of mission, my sense of this is what I’m supposed to do, that got much stronger in me. If I don’t do that, I start to think about “Oh, Shit, this happened to me.” “What a drag.” You know, it makes life harder. Then you go into this whole pity party thing. It’s a complete waste of time.

JH: Do you ever get into that zone, the pity party zone?

PS: Yeah, I get in it all the time, but I’m very fast at getting out of it. […] Because the whole premise of this is we’re not gonna win every time, we certainly can’t be perfect, we can’t control it, but we have an unstoppable will to go forward… Basically its the same goal, which is, “Schmuck, take action, no matter how frightened you are.”

— Phil Stutz & Jonah Hill, from Stutz, (Netflix, 2022)

Notes:

  • Lori suggested that I watch. I’ve watched it front to back 3x. Powerful.
  • Stutz: Rated R for frank language. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
  • NY Times Film Review: ‘Stutz’ Review: An Actor’s Tribute to a Therapist. In his documentary, Jonah Hill gently turns the tables on the famed Hollywood psychiatrist and author Phil Stutz.

Walking. With Headlights. (Lightly Child, Lightly)

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5:15 a.m. 918 consecutive (almost) days of this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.

I wasn’t going to post this. Nope. I’m so much bigger than this. I am.  No I’m not bigger than this. Not close. As petty as they come.

It’s 6:04 a.m. and I’m at the backside of the park. And there he is again, on the other side of the cove, his headlights on, high beams no less. A-hole sits in his car, doing Something, God knows what. And his f*cking lights have to be on marring the landscape with an ugly coating of man-made light across the shoreline and the inlet. This A-hole is parked right here about 50% of the time, headlights always on. He apparently has his morning ritual as well.

I’ve taken to walking directly into the light, right up to the water’s edge. I swing my camera over my shoulder to free up both hands, and give him a 1-finger salute with both hands, and shout out “hey a**hole.”

I’m a pacifist, with violent mood swings and anger management issues. Untameable. The mind drifts. I shift the shoulder-fired rocket launcher, setting it comfortably on my shoulder, uncock the safety catch, peer through the sights and let the heat guided missile find its target, a thin line of smoke trailing behind…

It’s cold. I’m tired. I’m irritable. I have no 4-legged friend joining me, Wally, is fast asleep. Continue reading “Walking. With Headlights. (Lightly Child, Lightly)” →

it was my calling, the way a bird is drawn to the song of its own kind

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I could get into med school.

Couldn’t I?

I could. I would. I did. But there was a complicating factor. Right after a thick acceptance letter arrived from Mac, another envelope came. This one had a postmark from the U.K. I was being offered a full scholarship to go to Oxford for a PhD in English.

The medical school acceptance letter was printed by a computer; the package from Oxford included a personal invitation on crinkly yellow paper to drink sherry with tutors. I could picture my new Oxford life: I’d have a bike with a basket, and spend hours at the Bodleian. The real white cliffs of Dover. Weekends in Paris. Wool sweaters from the highlands, and a hearth and a stone fireplace older than anyone I had ever met. Bookshelves full of Yeats and Tennyson, and a room of my own, like Virginia Woolf’s. A place where the words could pour out of my heart and onto the page, and maybe someday those pages would find their way onto other shelves, maybe even the Bodleian itself.

But lying awake on those tortured, miserable nights, working it all out as if it were a formula with an elusive right answer, the “Go” or “Stay” columns were really “tutors with sherry” versus my sister in her wheelchair, bent over at a forty-five-degree angle, holding her head in her hands and asking if I could please take her to the summer fair. Those tutors wanted to know my interests within postmodernism. My sister had a more basic question for me: When are you coming home? …

I didn’t need to study English at Oxford to learn the power of words. I’d already had my most important teacher. It was that doctor, yelling at my parents, There’s no brain left. He taught me that people with power have a duty to speak with care, because they have been entrusted with something fragile they have no right to break. He helped me understand that medicine itself was a very specific kind of power, one I would never, ever abuse, because I knew it was sacred. And anyway, I wasn’t drawn to power. I was drawn to medicine because it was my calling, the way a bird is drawn to the song of its own kind.

That was the only contest Wendy won in her whole life. She drew me home. Not out of pity, but out of love and its attendant duty, and a sense there might be things in life that would matter more to me in twenty years than whether I had a PhD from Oxford or had seen the Bodleian. So one day that summer, I was able to look Wendy in the eye and tell her something she would forget a few minutes later: because of her, I was going to be a doctor. And in a few years, I’d be coming home.

— Jillian Horton, We Are All Perfectly Fine: A Memoir of Love, Medicine and Healing (HarperCollins Publishers, February 23, 2021)

Notes:

  • Highly Recommended. And if you can listen to it on Audible, narration is absolutely the best.
  • Book Review: cecescott.com

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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So, if you can’t go back, what’s the harm in looking back? Twelve Step programs counsel “Look back, but don’t stare.” Wonder why? Because it’s fcking painful! I’m sitting comfortably at this lovely computer in my homey home office and almost everything coming to mind is about what an asshole I was and am still capable of being. So many stupid mistakes. So much selfishness and ego-driven thoughtlessness to bathe in. Sure, I recall the victories and joys and laughs and lovers, but for reasons beyond me, those happier remembrances are cloudy, dimmed, and distanced. I have to reach for them. Whereas the miseries and hurt, every mistake, misfortune, and betrayal I endured or delivered remains conveniently at my fingertips. The guns are loaded, the knives still cut, and the adage “Time heals everything” makes a lovely lyric but is a fcking lie. Time heals nothing…

In Twelve Step work we look back to identify the bad stuff we are responsible for and, if it’s possible to do so without causing more harm, we make amends for our wrongdoing. I recommend this cleansing exercise of exorcising. Suddenly, glancing over your shoulder is less frightening. There are fewer shadowy figures following you. You are freer to move about unencumbered, knowing that the scary shit of the past has been peaceably entombed. Unfortunately, entombed is not destroyed. It waits quietly in the dark for someone to dig it up again. Bad shit is patient. So, here I am with my work clothes on and my shovel in hand. If you’re willing to listen, I’m willing to dig.

— Harvey Fierstein, from his Preface titled “Look Back, But Don’t Stare” in “I Was Better Last Night: A Memoir” (Knopf, March 1, 2022)

NY Times 11 New Books We Recommend This Week (March 10, 2022)