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I don’t remember my last session in person. But I do have distinct memories of the office itself: the stack of magazines (if my therapist is reading this, I admit I considered stealing The New Yorker every week), the evaded glances in the waiting room, the air purifier in the corner, lazily exhaling a yogic blend of eucalyptus and patchouli, the I Just Want To Drink Beer Watch My Bills Beat Your Team’s Ass shirt neutrality of it all. And it’s that neutrality that worries me: Because it might mean I’ll never return. And if I don’t, what other reasons to leave my home, to enter into the outside world, will I lose when this is all “over”?I’m a lifelong insomniac. Until college, I preferred any bed that didn’t leave me alone in my own, a tendency my parents long suspected therapy could solve. I’ve since spent close to a decade chasing sleep and experimenting with methods that span the therapeutic spectrum, from seeing my mother’s own behavioral therapist, a warm woman (but an obvious mistake), to a short stint with a Jungian therapist on the Upper East Side whose rotating screensaver of Galápagos wildlife I would watch, reclined on her tufted-leather couch; to a few sessions with a male psychiatrist who I associate with Paul Auster novels and a low-level depression that I thought Zoloft could solve. (Couldn’t!)
But the world was collapsing, and I, useless and confined to a new stay-at-home reality, was watching it from my window. And so, as if roused from a bad dream, I awoke to the reality of my privilege: I had someone else to talk to, and someone to safely welcome into my home. Suddenly my therapist was there on the I Just Want To Drink Beer Watch My Bills Beat Your Team’s Ass shirt , sitting beside me; she was there when my electrician showed up unannounced; there when my boyfriend accidentally entered the room (a mistake he knows never to repeat). She was becoming someone like a friend, an intimate confidante, a bystander to my life as it was unfolding in real time. And whether it was my newfound commitment, or the forced intimacy of telehealth, I was making breakthroughs. I even found myself looking forward to our sessions.
