“I’ve been treading water.” I came into therapy with an immediate admission of guilt- I’ve not been writing. I’ve been sleeping instead of living. I lamented my laziness. That’s what it’s always been treated as.

Kathy immediately countered with “What if you’re not being lazy? What if it’s an unhealthy coping mechanism? Someone that’s abused has a hard time envisioning a life where they aren’t abused. So they seek out familiarity. You’ve said yourself that you don’t know what it means to be happy. It’s very normal for people to have a ‘default mode’ that they switch back to.” She alluded back to my first words. “You’re going back to your default to avoid having to swim.”

“If you don’t know how to move forward, you’ll seek familiarity. You’re learning how to be a new you, to be happy.” The shaft of light that’s been progressing across the room is getting closer to hitting her eyes and I wonder why she doesn’t shift to run away from it, at least for a little while.

I don’t know what a new me will look like. I don’t even really know what the old me looked like. Pretty sure I hate them both. I asked “How will I know that the me I am, the me I’m becoming, the me I will be, is a worthwhile one?”

“Good question. How indeed?”

“I guess I have to look to others because people that fall short of the standards that society sets, or the ones that aren’t contributing to the GDP or whatever, I still think they have worth.”

Her reply was a rigorous batch of finger quotes. I don’t think her fingers stopped wagging at any point. “Those that don’t ‘Measure up’ or ‘have value’ by ‘societies standards’ of ‘worth’ are still worthwhile and you know that. So on some level you must know that about yourself.”  She gives me a gentle smile. “I think you just give up on yourself too quickly.”

“Grandma saw your value, right?”
“I don’t know that.” I tend to view it as a sort of “gotcha” technique when she invokes the name of my recently deceased grandmother, but I don’t argue with the fact that it’s highly effective.
“Would grandma have wanted for you to give up on life? To kill yourself?”
This is an easy question. I actually start laughing through the tears. No, she absolutely would not have and several times she was the reason I didn’t.
“So you know that, even if you can’t quite put it into words. And if you can know that, there will be other knowings.” She finally shifts to avoid the beam of light. It was driving me crazy.

We transition somehow into the topic of creating.
I ask her if she tells all her clients to create or if I’m special.
“Yes, we are all creating. It’s what we’re supposed to do. I’m a person of faith, I don’t know where you stand with that, but I think God created us to be creators. To create with him. When you create, you are bringing yourself strongly into the world.”

“If you’ve stopped creating, if you’ve given up to just lie in bed, of course you aren’t going to feel purpose and joy. People create with words, things, ideas. It’s supposed to be fun. It’s like God says ‘I gave you this huge big world, enjoy it!’ Look at it from the perspective of ‘How can I go out in the world and create today?’ Co-create with God. Have fun. Enjoy life.”

“Some people like to live in very prescribed ways, they don’t want to be challenged. It’s safer living that way, though it limits their creativity. You are not one of those people, don’t try to live like you are.”

“Poets, prophets, artists, musicians, they are on the fringe of society because they think outside the box. Artists challenge society. But we can’t force them to think the way society does. You’ve been dealing with being different by assuming you are flawed or broken. I don’t fit in, therefore I’m bad. What you don’t see is that you’re brilliant. You have the ability to see beyond what’s there. You’re not bad, broken, lazy or flawed. Those are labels that you’ve accepted. I’m challenging that, I’m suggesting that it was never true.”

“Maybe you’re buying into those thoughts because you don’t fit into somebody’s idea of what it means to be productive(I use that word a lot). I wish I could just shake you!” She looks visibly exasperated while she gesticulates at the writing I’ve brought in to give to her.

“Van Gogh was never appreciated in his time and it caused him to be very depressed. I just wish that he could have listened to his critics and talked back to them a bit. ‘That’s not how you do it. Clearly it’s not. It is the way that I do it.’”

“So have your voice. Express what’s inside. Maybe people will judge, because that’s what society likes to do, but you have to remember that those are the insecure people who like to live in very prescribed ways. I have no intent of doing that or aspiring to be that.”

“Approach every day as an opportunity to create, and it brings with it a sense of peace and happiness.”

“There’s still our prophets, our creators, our edge live-ers. I’m okay with that, because they’ve got something to say.”

“You have a voice, you have creative abilities, please don’t stifle it. Please don’t take yourself out of the game. That’s what you are doing when you just stay in bed.”

“God made some crazy things, and he called them good. So create, and call it good.”