Hoops and Rewards

Speaking of money and getting personal (weren't we?), I made a big breakthrough in therapy today. I'm so happy to be in therapy again. It's been a lot of years since the last bout, and sanity is worth the investment. The absolutely glorious thing, is that therapy is not just sanity-inducing, it's personal growth. Big fat life lessons learned, with the perspective of somebody outside my head, equipped with brainaical skills, willing to push me through my fortress doors out into the bright of day, the bright of life. Yes, I write for Hallmark, dammit.

Today's breakthrough...I walked in and told my therapist it was over. I ran out of money for therapy. I have to come back when I've got a stronger foundation and extra money for such a thing.

The parenthetical to this is that all week long I've been pining over the school program I left in New York eight years ago. EIGHT YEARS AGO. Holy Jeez. I thought I was over the regret, but New York keeps coming up in the hot weather, in my city walks, in conversation, photos on Facebook. I miss the people I left. I miss the dream I stepped off of, thinking I was stepping further into it by leaving. I am jealous of the success my peers are achieving in their faraway states and camaraderie. I want to be achieving it with them. Practicality states that survival is success and the pace of both for me is just a little slower than the others I'm comparing myself to. But the fact is, I don't have any babies or marriages or award-winning plays under my belt, no fancy grants or creative foundations tripping over themselves to give me development money. Not yet anyway.

I love it when thoughts that seem just along for the ride in life and its circumstances tie right into a day's therapy session. So I tell Ken-the-therapist that it's over and he tells me based on the six or so sessions we've had and the voluminous heat of each of them, that it'd be an apropos time for me to bolt. Ah, yes. I agreed. If only I WANTED to bolt. But I wanted to stay, I just didn't have the means. Then all of a sudden those New York thoughts came breezing in, remembering I left in part because I thought I was going to lose it, and I needed to be in a familiar place if my mind was going to go...so that I could survive the fall. I didn't have the means to survive it. NYC was new, as were my friends and my circumstances. Who would take me in if I crashed? Who could I ask for help if I didn't have a fight in me left?

It's all very melodramatic isn't it? I was in a dramatic arts program, if that redeems me at all. But it's true. I felt a niggling sense of doom, and a faraway call to find a nest, find it fast, and prepare to lose my head.

The parallel of needing help, and not having the means to acquire it, came clearly into view. Even the time span that I've been here in Portland, following another dream, is the same time I was in NYC following that dream before I felt the foundation begin to shake.

Ken-the-therapist nodded as I pulled this all together. Threw in sage words. And offered me a deal I couldn't refuse. Breakthrough: I'm staying in therapy. I'm getting the help that's supporting my creative brain and my business success...and lest we forget, healthy relationships with men, boyfriend in particular. It feels, I feel, relieved. I feel really good. And I feel like I made a different choice than the sad, regretful one I made to leave New York.

As for missing places in general, I've been doing that a lot lately.

I miss the rosewater ice cream in Hollywood, and my old mob of cohorts at 415 in San Francisco, and the Fritz Blitz festival selection committee in San Diego, and my friends and the the foothills and ocean running path and the ocean itself in Santa Barbara. Melissa Lion wrote a cool book called Upstream. In it a teenage girl comes to grips with a devastating loss, and in her healing progress realizes that what she misses is who she was. I miss that sometimes, in the gap between what I am and what I'm becoming. Thing is, I've been becoming for a lot of months now, and I forget who I am in the meantime...making me remember who I've been and miss myself.

Curious, if I didn't think so much of myself, I'd think I were a narcissist. ;-)

Thanks for hearing my breakthrough today. It's a big one and I am happy. I feel older. By two days. At least.