I'm understanding why you can't see the priest while you give your confession. Admitting your sins to set of eyes, a mouth, a swallowing throat, a subtly twitching cheek muscle, is impossible. Or, if you can reach past that shame, descriptions refuse to unfold. Okay, for me, at least.


I've never successfully been in therapy. For someone like me, it should be enforced, but in a world where therapy is enforced, I probably never would have ended up in therapy, so work your way out of that one. I had a food therapist for being too fat for a while in my prime breast budding years. I had a therapist for being overworked when I had repeated panic attacks about college applications and actually slid down the fridge in my parents' kitchen like I was in a movie. I had a therapist in college when I was so sad and lost and alone and filled with murderous rage. They gave me Wellbutrin and I drank a lot, so instead of getting better I spent a lot of time vomiting and once, sobbing, biked across the sand to the edge of Lake Michigan and contemplated simply riding down into the depths. Not my best laid plans.


Now, I'm back in therapy again. This week my therapist wore the same dress as at our last session and I was enraged. All I could think about was how the strange bejeweled waist-buckle pushed up at her breasts and made her look kind of dumpy. I want to tell her that and other things, but I won't. And this is the problem. I can't tell the truth to a therapist. When I want to say, "The fan above my bed has become my fucking sword of Damocles," I actually say, "It's hard to fall asleep at night." I plead ignorance of things that I absolutely know the answer to. I should say, "Yes, I'm probably depressed, but I'm fairly sure, as all other depressives are, that I am seeing the world as it actually is and if you take that away from me, I will become a liar." It's hard to look into someone's face and tell them about the blood-curdling rage I feel or the lies I've told to other people to make myself seem not so pathetic or how I like that I'm kind of good at lying or that I think I tire of people easily. I want to tell her about the fears I have that I might be a complete sociopath and the fantasies I have about being a complete sociopath. I want to tell her I'm obsessed with purity and imagine myself being slowly poisoned by the world, such that I'm becoming a spiritually voided hole. I want to say all the filthy and disgusting things I think and know. I also want to tell her about the beautiful things. I want to tell her about the time I nearly came, fucked out of my head on E, leaning against a warehouse wall at a rave, without anyone touching me. I want to tell her about how writing is an act of possession for me. I want her to know that dancing feels so good to me that it's like worship and my body seems an inadequate casing for my expansive soul. I want to tell her about how much I see everyday, how the world is blasted open for me minute by minute and I know so much more than I ever thought I could. But, I end up saying things like, "Of course, I am can be bad at expressing my desires and bottle up my feelings when things don't go my way." 


The act of translation is exhausting. I have to take the magic words of my truth and force them to sound like words that will not make me cry. (It is horrifying to think I would go anywhere once a week just to cry for an hour. Such indulgence!) It's such hard work. It makes me resent her, as if she's meant to be some sort of rune expert who can read my words all backwards. I bet she would hate me if she knew. The confession booth is a success in that regard. There's no face to stare into so there's less hiding, the ultimate listener (being omnipotent) is an alchemist of thought and you don't have to do that work. You can continue to exist in a pleasant land of cognitive dissonance. Do you think a therapist wants to hear your opinions on the failings of psychiatric practice, jacking them as you did straight from Foucault and some angry books about Freud? When that friend's friend goes to her therapist and gives her a long speech about how the therapist must be judging her for suffering only extremely bourgeois issues, do you not think the lady goes home to laugh?


I've been trying a bit of non-translation this week. I have said: "I am afraid of being looked at, just looked at with, without any of my usual distractions or deflections." "The thing is, the whole website is the things you know to be true of your surface, but you really, really hope are not true of your heart. It's the worst." "I don't want to be here and I don't want to talk about what's happening inside me." "I'm coming for you." And each time, my skin felt tight and itchy and I got hot and that good ole' eye juice threatened to fall. But, I'd like to become the girl with the unnerving stare and the frighteningly apt phrasing.


I feel like I mentioned tits a lot. By which I mean, I put that in here for a little levity, because I'm afraid people think I'm deeply sad. Because now G has said it and has said that it makes him afraid for me, so thanks, you asshole, now I gotta carry that one around.