By this shirt here: Some Girls Are Just Born With Weight Lifting In Their Souls 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 Some Girls Are Just Born With Weight Lifting In Their Souls 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”?
If I had to summarize the current contents of my brain, it would sound more or less like the Lady Gaga scream from A Star Is Born. I’m not the only one, either; as the world anxiously awaits the results of the 2020 presidential election, it feels like everyone—or, at least, everyone on Twitter—is on the Some Girls Are Just Born With Weight Lifting In Their Souls shirt, hoodie and sweater of absolutely losing it. There’s a lot of discussion going on right now about the best pop-cultural counterprogramming to soothe your overtaxed brain when you just can’t refresh the CNN home page anymore. While there’s certainly an argument to be made for unwinding with The Great British Bake Off or a classic rom-com, I’ve taken a different tack; over the last three days, I’ve watched three full seasons of the HBO series Veep, and I hope to finish the entire series by the time they call Nevada.
