Saturday, May. 21, 2022 - 11:33 am.
My therapist told me this week that she did not agree with the adoption unit's report. I do not need therapy to adopt, there is nothing to improve in this regard. There are of course things I can work on, but I’m a well-adjusted individual and I’m fit to raise a child, as fit as one can be considering that this child is imaginary.
I cried when she said that. I felt so validated and angry, I always felt that the psychologist’s assessment was short-sighted and unfair. Here I am now, then, seeing time go by without being allowed to adopt while I’m fully capable of handling it (look, I am gonna break down with this task at some point, but what parent doesn’t?).
For a few weeks I thought my therapist may see things that I don’t see, the way the adoption psychologist “saw” things I probably wasn’t seeing either. But my therapist was very honest in that she didn’t know what to do with the adoption unit’s referral because their stated motive for therapy was just not there.
It’s funny because one thing that kept me from seeking therapy was my lack of motive. What’s my problem here? What’s that thing I’m lacking or pained about that I want to see changed in six months’ time or so?
The strongest reason I once had was how triggering some sexual things were for me. But by the time I realized that was a problem (and not a quirk or a normative experience), over the course of a few years, stuff happened that helped me work them through. Rather than stuff, people: Andrew and Helen.
So now that I arrive to these therapy sessions, it only takes one session for my therapist to help me release what was left of my doubts about my early sexual experiences. And this has happened with other issues. In essence, I had a problem (never bad enough to interfere with my everyday life), I had enough personal resources to veeery slowly work through them, and now my therapist comes and gives me one last push to feel at peace.
Since I started therapy six weeks ago, I’ve felt much more at peace with my body, with my emotions (I’m less explosive), with my dad (even though he keeps getting worse and worse in how miserable he feels). It’s also helped that I got help for my jaw. It helps that I exercise regularly. It helps that I've kept a journal to think things through since I was 14. It helps I have a job, it helps I have Andrew and my parents and siblings and good friends (shout-out to Brother #1, it's his birthday today!). It helps that, for whatever mistakes my parents made raising me, they made it all up by always making me feel safe and loved.
Now we don’t have to force our therapy agenda with what the adoption unit says, but we still have things to explore. I told her about feeling like “the world’s loneliest whale”, which sings at a frequency that no other whale can hear, despite my modest enjoyment of feeling like an alien wherever I am.
I told her about feeling frustrated with all my high-quality academic and literary and comic-strip output to a general indifference. It’s not that I think I’m not good enough, it’s that it frustrates me that the world (with notable exceptions) makes me feel like I am not.
Related to the above, I told her how I always try my best, and I think I’m doing well, but the world is always making me doubt myself and gate-keeping, and the world is proven wrong until it’s too late to make amends. The latest example of this, well, me being prevented to adopt a child because “I’m too rational”, even though I’m also “very empathetic”. I didn’t feel that was a problem. Guess what? It isn’t.
I told her about Simeon and my childhood desperation about feeling that I was missing a fundamental piece of me. Like a twin. I don’t feel like that anymore, but Simeon was like my imaginary friend first and then he (and the gang) became a world in itself.
Whew. So we do have some things to work through based on the above, and therapy will go on for a while. Might as well. I am enjoying it, anyway.
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