On the Subject of Shantelle

I spend a day helping a drifter reconnect with her abusive boyfriend because I have no boundaries

There are a lot of memes about the things men would rather do than go to therapy. For most of my life, I would rather have done any of those things than sit in a small room and talk about my innermost feelings. Charter a plane and go sky-diving. Hike through the mountains alone. Roof a three story house without a harness. Live in isolation in a forest and write down my philosophy of life. Then, one day, when I’d been doing my best to kill myself by a canal, I’d experienced something I couldn’t explain. Reality had… unfolded and I’d witnessed something completely outside of my sense of normality. God, the universe, or whatever you want to call it.

Of course, I was too smart to believe in any of that at the time. Too empirical. I’d read too many books. Performed too many experiments. In high school, I had the somewhat horrific distinction that when the science or math teachers were out sick they left instructions to the substitute that I was to instruct the class. In college, I’d worked in a developmental biology lab with mutant fish. I aware of too many types of cognitive distortions to go down easy. Why should I believe in God simply because I’d seen Him?

What my secular beliefs had then demanded I do, against the preferences of my male ego, was to seek the guidance of a therapist. Then I’d get a pill or something and the whole matter would be resolved. And yet there were no pills to be had there. No quick fixes. No blustering through the pain.

Only seemingly small requests, like:

“Now tell me those same events again, but not as a story and not as a joke.”

It was one of a hundred such requests that felt like the moment in a chess game where your opponent makes a single deft move and you realize you’re going to lose, even if you don’t know exactly how. This particular request also felt a bit rude, like I’d been having a beautiful fencing match with someone and then I’d looked down and discovered they’d stabbed me in the stomach with a hidden knife. I suppose I was paying for therapy so that I could encounter exactly this sort of productive rudeness. In all honesty, it was most effective when I was uncomfortable. It was one of the few times in my adult life that I not only didn’t know what to say, but didn’t even know how to figure out what to say.

“Well, I think you might be onto something there,” I coughed.

Not being one to let me off the hook easy, my therapist took a sip of water.

“How so?”

Then she sat there doing that thing that therapists do, where they at least convincingly present a total contentment with silence. Which I know must be an act because no one is that comfortable with silence. I’d made her laugh several times in the first few sessions, which had made me feel a lot better about the whole “being in therapy” thing. I’d half convinced myself I didn’t even need to be there, not if I could make a therapist laugh. It had been a kind of proof. I was fine. There was merely some sort of chemical imbalance. All I needed was a pill and then I could be off again.

In the session prior to the one I’m now describing, I’d made her “break character” for non-funny reasons. I’d announced that I was just going to break down and let my mom live with me and pay all of her bills again. She was my mother. So what if she wanted to destroy my entire life? So what if I would never get married with her hanging around? So what if she was mentally ill and refused treatment? No one else was around to take care of her. It couldn’t be helped.

Julie, my therapist, had been so taken aback she’d violated the Sacred Therapist Code and said, “I’m not supposed to tell you what to do, but absolutely do not do that.” And so, for this session, having understood my defenses, she had adapted and come ready to force me to make progress.

“I mean… well… I like to make people laugh?” I meant it to be a sentence, but it came out like a question.

“And do you think that’s your job? To make me laugh?”

“It’s depressing otherwise. Isn’t it? You being there. Listening to me complain about my life. Just a line of people complaining all day every day.”

“You’re paying me to listen.”

Her face was the most professional-not-your-friend face I had ever seen. It was the face of a doctor who cuts off a rotting limb to save the whole. The face of a judge who will pass the required sentence to do what is right and follow the rules even as you curse and spit in her face.

I think I must have stopped smiling at that point.

While I am, of course, one person at times it was easier to conceptualize myself as two. One, a manic Robin Williams type of man who has to keep the mood light and funny no matter what. The sort of man who wants you to laugh at any cost. The other man, almost always hidden, is a somber character from a Dostoevsky novel seeking to find meaning in it all. The one I let remember all the things from my childhood as something other than funny stories to tell in inappropriate situations. Not a depressed man per se, but the man who had held my depression when I pushed it away from my brighter half. The man who had been jumping over that canal, trying to leap his way out of the enormous weight he felt pressing on his shoulders. For the first time with another person, the Dostoevsky character came forward.

“If I don’t have a duty… if I’m not helping someone… then I don’t even know who I am.”

I shrugged.

The same thing happening to me then had begun to happen to me in college. The world was out there, full of unlimited potential, and it had terrified me. People had liked me, found me funny, wanted me to be around. A professor even singled me out of the entire lecture hall and invited me to come work in his lab, as I mentioned above. Even when I hadn’t tried to do well, even when I tried to hide my light under a bushel, something like luck had always seemed to find me. And yet if I kept on doing that… who would any of that be for? I’d sworn to myself to never have a wife or children. So would it all be for me? Some weird guy with a giant head that looks like Shrek and spends all day distracted by weird thoughts? No. Absolutely not. I wasn’t a person that things could be done for.

I’d never been able to find a way past that problem and I had been running from it almost all of my life.

“Maybe you should try figuring that out,” Julie said.

I found that thought incredibly discomforting. The truth is that I had almost been relieved when my mother had called me, reading the letter from the bank with the date she was finally going to lose her home. It had been almost a comfort to feel that more familiar sort of stress. Her drama would keep me perfectly safe from having to do what I thought was right, or pursuing something that I cared about. In allowing her to rule over my life, I would be spared the terror of existing.

“So what do I do if someone needs my help?”

Julie shrugged, and asked another question which I had never considered.

“What would they have done if you weren’t there?”

Another deft move on the chessboard, against which I had no strategy.