This afternoon I saw my therapist, and whereas our last couple of sessions have been emotional (I cried), today’s was light-hearted. We did a lot of laughing. Honestly, I think my therapist could be a professional comedian. Here’s an example. Today I mentioned my recent post about being scared of everything (which my therapist said was “maybe a little hyperbole”) and how I’d come to the conclusion that nervousness or fear was often my body’s way of saying “run to,” not “run from.” Then my therapist, making reference to a phrase she introduced me to a long time ago, said, “Nervousness is just excitement turned upside down?” I said, “I hate to admit it, but you might be right. But when when you first told me that, I thought, That’s absolute horse shit. I’m NOT excited–I’m scared. Screw you.”

She said, “I know you did. I could tell you wanted to punch me in the ass.” Punch me in the ass! I nearly fell on the floor. Who says that? Who DOES that?

My therapist actually gets off on verbal assaults like these–Screw you, I’m gonna punch you in the ass, whatever. Recently, on a Wednesday, she broke out in a grin and said, “Six people have told me to go fuck myself this week!” In the past she’s said she gets excited about this sort of thing because it shows that people are owning their emotions and feelings. Like, maybe they hold it all in at work or home, then they finally learn to let it all out. Today she explained further, “I just think ALL of the emotions are useful.”

I really like this idea, that there aren’t good emotions or bad emotions. Today we talked about how sometimes I’m “solid as a rock” emotionally, and other times I’m all twitter-pated with anxiety. I said, “There’s part of me that KNOWS things are going to be okay, but I STILL get worked up sometimes.” My therapist said, “UH–BECAUSE YOU’RE HUMAN.” This is something that I often forget, not that I’m human, but that it’s HUMAN to drift from one emotional state to another. I forget I’m not going to be nervous for the rest of my life, nor will I be calm the rest of my life, since these states of being were MEANT to come and go.

I don’t know why I keep CAPITALIZING so many words. (DON’T WORRY, THIS TOO SHALL PASS.

While discussing other (hopefully) transitory things, we talked about my health. I told my therapist that sometimes I’m really scared that my body is going to “fail me,” that this is it. I said, “What if I’m thirty-seven, and it’s all downhill from here?”

“EXCUSE ME,” my therapist said. “I thought you were twenty-seven.” (She says this a lot. You can see why I keep going back to her.)

“Oh yes, my mistake,” I said.

Anyway, back to my sometimes-sickly body. “But other times I really do believe that there’s wisdom here, that my body and my doctors can get whatever this is figured out,” I said. My therapist said, “I KNOW that you have physical problems going on, but I just see this as your body’s way of balancing. You worked SO hard for SO long and didn’t give yourself a break. I think this is your body’s way of saying, ‘You HAVE to rest now.'” (Okay, fine, I will.) So there’s that idea of balance again. It seems things aren’t always one way or other (I hate that). Emotions comes and go. You’re not completely sick or completely healthy your whole life. Rather, it seems life is a little of this, a little of that, and all of this and all of that forever changing.