All Dressed Up With Nowhere To Go

It’s one-thirty in the afternoon, and I should be sitting on Dr. Awesomesauce’s couch right now. I’m not, however, because an hour before the appointment, I got a call from his office asking if I could come in another day because he needed to cancel. Needless to say, I hate it when this happens, especially when it’s on such short notice; there’s a process I go through to get ready for therapy sessions, and when an appointment is postponed I feel like I’m all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Now my next visit is scheduled two weeks out, and while I’m a little disappointed, I’m not in any particular psychic distress so I can roll with the punches pretty easily. And I realized just now that my way of thinking has changed a great deal in the course of the past couple of years: I don’t take these things personally anymore.

It’s amazing, really. I used to get all butt-hurt when something like this happened, thinking that the other person just didn’t want to deal with me for some reason. I remember a couple of previous occasions like that with Dr. A; since I’ve been seeing him, there have only been a few instances when he needed to cancel, but when it happened in the past I’d think he didn’t want to see me or that he was just too busy for me.

Now I understand that it’s not about me: he’s a doctor, for Pete’s sake—he might have to work in a patient who’s in crisis, or he might have had an emergency hospital admission. He’s also a human being whose kid might have gotten suspended from school, he might be sick and need to go home early, or he might simply be having a horrific day and needs to get the hell out of the office before he loses it.

In other words, feces eventuates. And if it eventuates on me once in a while, I can be OK with it.

I don’t know at what point my outlook changed, but I do know I probably never would have discovered it if I hadn’t had the benefit of good treatment. I was still somewhat emotionally immature when I started all of this, and it’s taken a lot of meds and therapy for me to understand that I’m not the same sad little girl who always got the fewest Valentines and was rarely invited to parties. Medications open the door to recovery from mental illness, but therapy is what enables one to walk through and see what’s on the other side.

This must be what normal people do when faced with minor disappointments; for one thing, they don’t turn them into major disappointments, and for another, they realize there are extenuating circumstances in almost every situation. Of course, that’s why I enjoy my therapy sessions so much; I learn something new every time. But right now, I’m doing OK, and if things were to go to hell for me, I know I can count on Dr. A to toss me a lifesaver. It’s all good.