September 29, 2019
I’ll be honest, I stole the concept of thisness, the phrase, “See, it is doing this now” from a science fiction book.
I honestly expected nothing less.
I suspect that Neal Stephenson got it from elsewhere, too. I think he basically admits as much, in that he was talking about Husserl at the time. Still, it’s proven handy.
The biggest thing I’ve taken away from therapy has been an increased sense of self awareness. The ability to say “ah, I am doing this now.” It is the thisness of myself. The thisness of my mind. I am able to see myself dipping down into the well of depression. I’m able to see the hypomania that starts to creep into my mind, into my life, and forces me to bury myself in projects.
Like this one.
Yes. That’s why I’m moving so much more slowly with it now. I have slid off the pedestal and into the slow morass of depression. I can feel it coloring my life with anhedonia.
Not coloring, no. Sapping the color. Not even black-and-white, but an absence. A missingness.
Yes.
But you didn’t have this back then. You didn’t have the thisness of mental health maturity. You weren’t able to see what was going on.
Yes. I was having panic attacks from day to day. I was caught up in those rising swells of anxiety that would lead to me freezing. Occaisonally, I would have to stop in a rest area on my way home just to calm down enough to continue driving.
That’s when you started your habit of asking others to tell you good things.
“Tell me good things,” I’d say, and I’d get a slew of responses. Many were along the lines of “You! You’re good!”
But you weren’t able to internalize that.
Not then, no. Not back then, and especially not during panic attacks.
Some of them would be “A good thing is that I had a good day at work.” That was what I needed to hear. I needed to hear that others were having a good day. I needed to hear that others were capable of having good days. I needed to hear that good days were possible, and that I might be in line for one, myself.
My boss picked up on that, as well as so many other things. “You’re so angry,” he said. “You’re scaring the project manager at times.” So he sent me to a psychiatrist.
He handed you a check for a thousand dollars and said, “I know it’s expensive, so hopefully this helps you out.” You never cashed it.
He sent me to his doctor, doctor Johnston. And he was a pretty good at what he did.
You fired him when, after you asked him for a letter of support for hormones, he said, “I don’t know enough about that, and you don’t even want to know my feelings about it.”
Well, yes, but there’s no denying the utility of what he gave me.
He gave you exactly what you brought to the table, except with context.
Yes. I brought my anxiety to the table, and he taught me about it. He spoke my words back to me and added footnotes. He wrote in the margins of my speech and I learned. I learned coping mechanisms and breathing techniques. I got my prescriptions.
You brought your anxiety, but not your depression. You thought you just had anxiety, not any mood disorders. Boys didn’t have moods, right? You were just anxious. Despite years of experience, you didn’t tell him about how you felt.
No, and there’s the problem.