“I would like to discontinue our professional relationship,” I said to the giant psychic therapist spider.
You may remember the giant psychic therapist spider from Fuck What You Heard Vol. I. We had mostly an antagonistic relationship, and it’s fair to say that the psychic therapist spider’s methods were at best, unconventional.
“I understand you may have misgivings about the work we do in the dream world, but you cannot discontinue our relationship in the ordinary way,” said the spider. “I am here until you no longer need me.”
It’s been four years since I’d been in therapy with the giant psychic therapist spider and some days I feel like I’ve made no improvements. I am still a lost and wounded child, stumbling through dreams that drive me to tears.
“I would like another form to guide me,” I said. “I’m sure you understand.”
We sat together in a smoky dim therapist office. Me on a couch, that was sometimes a dinosaur, that was sometimes a hole, that was occasionally a bed in a hospital. The giant therapist spider weaved metallic webs across the floor and ceiling, sometimes flying like a parabola across my face that lay carved out in front of me like a haunted mansion. In dreams I never could seem to stay inside of my own eyes, or in one place much at all for that matter. Everything around me was always changing shape. I suppose my mind was always ricocheting around the place.
“Do you not understand the importance of our work? It is you, after all, who created me to guide you. Surely you must find what we’re doing important.”
I groaned. “Maybe I’m just a masochist.”
The ceiling pulsed, turning into black and white tiles, then dancing around like a sand mandala. The spider’s web shivered with rainbow light.
“Would you like to tell me what has changed in your life, since the beginning of our meetings?”
“No,” I said, but I knew I wouldn’t give myself much of a choice.
The walls fall away and strapped to my seat as I’m taken through a 3-dimensional tour of my failures.
I think of all the ways in which I’ve disappointed people that I’ve loved. The nights spent hurt and crying on the floor and the sour taste in my mind and the feeling that I’m on a rollercoaster in hell, perpetually doomed to repeat my mistakes in a forever cycling. The nights when I was sure that my life was over and I’d have to kill myself to end the suffering, if I wasn’t too much of a coward to do it. Getting drunk in the daytime to try to break myself of my suffering, to try to detach myself from my own mind. I dragged a knife across my wrists and the blood welled up because I hated the skin attached to my soul and I hated the rotten soul that couldn’t escape from the skin. I was nearly 26 years old at the time, too old to be cutting myself. I should’ve gotten over my emotional antics in highschool, but in high-school I’d been a worn out shell and hadn’t even begun to feel pain.
I was definitely too old to be dragging behind a childhood trauma like it was a carcass.
I think of how I’ve spent over two years working on the same book, and don’t feel anywhere near finished.
I think of everytime I’ve cried myself to sleep and I wonder if one day I will be forced to bear those nights over and over again in some kind of therapeutical hell.
“Why are you focusing on the negatives?” my therapist spider asked.
“I consider myself a realist,” I said. “I don’t want to be blindsided by the possibility of disaster. I don’t want to miscalculate and throw myself into a raging fire.”
“No,” the spider therapist said. “You’re not so much as a realist as a doomsday prophet.”
“The universe is full of cold, dead matter. Life is an anomaly, a rare phenomenon. There are infinite ways to fail. There are only a few ways to succeed, and many of us do not have the knowledge required to do such a thing.”
I don’t know why I always insist on arguing with the giant psychic dream therapist, who is really me, who is really trying to show me something. There is always resistance, I think, to a better self, because it is the unknown that compels us toward fear. I dig my heels in because I want to fall back into the familiarity of misery, unfinished novels, salt in wounds, tears. It’s all I knew, and it was killing me
But also…
I’m taken to another perspective of the world, in which I am no longer strapped to a rollercoaster. I breathe easy and can even, for just a moment, let my hands ease up from clutching the sides of my chair/dinosaur/plush mushroom bean-bag/werewolf fur rug and am able to actually enjoy the moment.
The last few years have had good moments too, hadn’t they?
He told me the first thing I had to do was believe that it was possible to have a better life.
For all the times that I dreamed of Iceland, the aurora borealis, I never really believed it was for me. It was like a picture that I hung on the wall to soothe
So inch by inch, I began to believe.
There was a singular moment in which it all began to make sense, a moment in which I woke up to reality while sitting on my bed, and crying at the beauty of the sky that I had never seen until then. The sky was a heaven and it had been there the whole time. It’s difficult to explain because we all know that the sky exists, but for years I hadn’t truly seen it, truly understood it. I had spent so long staring at my feet that I’d forgotten to look up, and I’d forgotten all perspective, that I forgot I could even look up at all.
I rolled in the grass like I was a child discovering the wonders of sensation for the first time.
I saw the city that night - up in a huge dance club with open windows over guard railings. I saw the city as if I was awake for the first time, with that crackling sky and the vibration hum of everything in existence. I drank whiskey out of a flask and could actually feel my bones humming inside of me.
It all sounds like voodoo mystic bullshit if you haven’t experienced it, being awake, being fully aware of the sensations around you and realizing that you exist free maybe for the first time in your life the disassociation that keeps you wrapped up in a fantasy world inside of your head. You feel that life is dull because you have been living inside of a dulled fantasy. The wildest imagination cannot compare to the splendid intricacy of real life.
There are other moments that point me toward the idea that life is getting better. Inch by inch. Moment by moment. Just like the first time.
It’s not easy to envision a new way of life.
It has to be done deliberately from one moment to the next.
I realized what a terrifying thing it was to move, and battled demons that came out waiting to devour me.
I took acid and listened to Eminem’s “Rap God” while laughing like a lunatic, sitting inside my office room that now felt like a space station.
I started taking my puppies to the park every single day, and we’d walk through the trails and I’d relearn the way my body moved, and saw through their simple joys a new way to revitalize ourselves.
I fed my puppies roast chicken and felt joy coursing through me.
I learned to appreciate a smile more.
I learned how to cook - fettuccine alfredo, a medium-rare steak, macaroni & cheese (the fancy kind, with gouda, havarti, bacon, and creme fraiche), chicken pot pie, General Tso’s chicken, bibimbap, coq au vin, poached eggs, pigs in a blanket, mulled wine, sangria, margaritas, salmon, Filipino style chicken, miso soup, and a host of other things.
I danced in the rain.
We moved to San Diego together.
We watched Bladerunner and ate delicious Pho.
He helped me rehearse a reading of my short story, and got to see me reading it at a local bookstore. I got to have him there while I grew into the skin of who I wanted to be.
We gave each other good endorphins and then went out to Schlotzskys, laughing and flushed.
He said if we ever got rich he’d take us in a helicopter to eat breakfast in Paris, and I realized that I was a part of his plans for his future life.
He told me he could see spending his entire life with me.
We sat on the balcony together drinking gin, eating pizza, and talking about life. (After a lifetime of frantic heaviness, it’s the simple things that matter most to me now.)
I drank beer in the creek near the dark, stripped to my underwear and swam, but ended up losing my pants. I ran back to the apartment laughing.
I swam at Bull’s Creek with the puppies and talked to kids in the water about growing old and dogs.
For brief and fleeting moments I felt as if I was a part of a family.
Loved I realized that I was loved.
And I return to the office of the giant psychic therapist spider with stars wheeling in my eyes and I vomit on the carpet because I’m so nauseous.
I have progressed so much, I know that, but honestly I haven’t even really begun. And I’m waking up but I want to cling to this new skin, this realization that I keep forgetting. A better life is possible.
“See you next sleep,” said the therapist spider, and she had no human face but maybe it was a grin peeking out of her eyes.
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