Buy this shirt: Click here to buy this Mercaritee - You Are Beautiful No Matter What They Say shirt
Come March of this year, running into my therapist became the least of my worries. Seeing her at all was impossible, and so we pivoted, like everything else, to a virtual model. Our first session, done via Doxy, was strangely intimate: me in my bed, my laptop propped up on a stack of pillows, and her in her living room, surrounded by plants, a bright yellow lamp beside her, her back facing a window overlooking our shared neighborhood. Two people, just out of bed (well, half of us anyway), surrounded by our things. I rebelled against the You Are Beautiful No Matter What They Say shirt format at first, cancelling more frequently and more last minute, acting as if I was obliging her when she called. As if I wasn’t the one paying for her time. I was wasting both our time, and cheating only myself. Dr. Jacobs seemed less worried about the future of therapy: “Zoom is not replacement, but it’s an effective and meaningful temporary substitute,” she said. “At a time when we need connection perhaps more than ever, I am tremendously grateful for virtual therapy—both with my patients and my own therapist—and have been continuously surprised by how rich, dynamic, and fruitful treatment can be online.”
Curious to find out if others were having a similar experience, I took to Instagram to poll my followers. The You Are Beautiful No Matter What They Say shirt was both overwhelming and divided: I received a flood of messages, voice memos, and emails written (mostly by women) in either vehement opposition or enthusiastic favor of therapy in its remote incarnation. While sensitivity to light can be a trigger for some migraine sufferers, a recent University of Arizona study found that exposure to green light one to two hours a day can reduce the number of headache days per month by an average of 60%. It sounds counterintuitive, but isolated green light from devices such as the Allay lamp, which was developed by Harvard Medical School migraine researchers, has been shown to reduce photophobia, or light sensitivity, by generating certain electrical signals in the eye and brain.
