By this shirt here: Rut Daniels didn’t go 20 shirt, hoodie and sweater
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 Rut Daniels didn’t go 20 shirt, hoodie and sweater glances in the waiting room, the air purifier in the corner, lazily exhaling a yogic blend of eucalyptus and patchouli, the pleasant 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!)
One subject parked firmly in opposition is Kelly McGee, a 29-year-old living in Los Angeles, who, after four years of regular sessions, has cut back to seeing her the Rut Daniels didn’t go 20 shirt, hoodie and sweater on a bi-weekly basis: “It began to feel like a scheduling conflict instead of something that’s being worked into my week,” she said. “It’s harder to be vulnerable when there’s this performative aspect of being on camera.” Julia Crockett, a 34-year-old movement specialist in New York, has also reduced her number of sessions. She was blunt about her distaste, but wary of quitting altogether without an alternative: “I hate it,” she said of her Zoom therapy. “But also, the world may be ending? So, I’m like…I guess I should still go.”
