By this shirt here: You can take this girl out of germany but you cant take germany out of this girl shirt, hoodie and sweater
It took me until August of last year to commit regularly to weekly sessions, at a discounted rate reserved for “creative types,” with a young therapist who I now know, after a quick Google search, is a licensed marriage the You can take this girl out of germany but you cant take germany out of this girl shirt, hoodie and sweater specializing in anxiety, life transitions, and identity development. (My trifecta!) At first, I was wary of seeing someone who wasn’t my parents’ age or older, and my trepidation only grew after a series of run-ins with her at my Brooklyn farmer’s market: she’d stand, exotic produce in hand, dressed elegantly in outfits foreign from her in-session uniforms, surrounded by a cadre of other hip 30-somethings. I’d hide, crossing the street so as to avoid an awkward exchange. More than facing the fact that my therapist might actually be cool, I was having trouble accepting that she too was a person with a life outside of the room we found ourselves in on Tuesdays at 10 a.m.
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 You can take this girl out of germany but you cant take germany out of this girl 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”?
