I am here.
B. wholeheartedly reassured me. This is not going to happen. You will be okay. I will make personally sure this doesn’t happen. You have me.
Something as heavy as a boulder of tears dissolved and disappeared. She has reassured me before. This time I believed it.
I am here. I can barely believe it. In the morning I woke up feeling like death barely warmed over, now I’m here.
We survive together.
I couldn’t sleep last night. I slept a few hours between 8 am and 12 noon, but that’s not enough for me. Yet, I am not tired. I am wired. Fear? Pain? Anguish?
One needs to live with all this stuff. Live. Live. This afraid, pained, anguished person is me, a much beloved creature of God, treasured by many, maybe a little precious to herself, too.
Childhood can hurt so much and for so long. When could things have been turned around? I think by age 5 there was no simple enough solution that could have improved things for me. Nothing short of serious help for me and my family would have turned things around. Unimaginable really.
I think a lot about my having died young, the relief of not having to live so long with this pain. My little body threw a lot of death at me. My little body tried hard to take me out. My little body also fought hard to stay living. Clearly the living bit won. I honor this. I won’t forget you, little body. You had everything against you and still, you fought for air. You believed in the sky. You swam up and up til, boom, your lungs could take in oxygen. Air, blue sky, the scintillating surface of the water. What a relief. Enough for a day.
You do this thing one day at a time. Each day is a universe. Each day is its own lifetime.
I see my analyst everyday. I am not alone.
A lifetime of longing. So much longing. I think “longing” and see myself walking down a busy street, late 80s, everything so beautiful though I didn’t know it then (the US’s love for urban ugliness throws a powerful light on memories of other places), a street paved with marble, and me, thinking, I must die.
I see myself in a number of streets thinking this. Also, please help me.
I see myself at some community home to which I do not belong in San Diego, a stranger sitting on a porch, don’t know how I got here, feet on the railing, the sun lasering down, my motorcycle parked in the street, thinking, please help me. I get up and bike away.
You survive because you have survived so damn fucking much already. Because you have sat in your therapist’s office and felt a smidgen of love that addressed the specific longing that wants you dead. A love shaped the particular configuration of that hole. An impossible love, offered impossibly. The only love that can save you. You come back for more. You stay for more.
This is lovely and peaceful.
In his 2019 paper, ‘Ontological Psychoanalysis or “What do you want to be when you grow up?”‘, Thomas Ogden describes two dimensions of psychoanalysis: epistemological psychoanalysis and ontological analysis. He is careful to point out that these dimensions frequently overlap, and neither ever exists in pure form, but that they do nevertheless involve quite different modes of therapeutic action. Epistemological psychoanalysis, as practiced by Freud and Klein, has to do with knowing and understanding; while ontological psychoanalysis, in Winnicott’s or Bion’s hands, is more concerned with being and becoming. The titular question, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ is the key (but probably often implicit) question posed by the ontological analyst, and Ogden implies that the analysis is only approaching its goal once the patient is able to answer the question truthfully and wholeheartedly: ‘Myself’.
Though he never states it explicitly Ogden leans very heavily…
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1. I suffer enormously from being ignored. Being ignored by those I love makes me feel I don’t exist for anyone.
2. I find this to be a paranoid state brought about by trauma. This knowledge gives me no relief.
3. If you are chronically ill, disabled, and home all day, the form acknowledgment takes is some kind of online recognition.
4. My sister A., with whom I communicate only through Instagram “likes,” has stopped giving me likes. She got angry at me at the beginning of the pandemic then (allegedly) stopped being angry, so at least responds to my IG comments. Still, she won’t like my posts or ask me anything about me.
5. The rest of my family, so active on Whatsapp during the beginning of the quarantine, has gone back to life as usual, which means no contact (I am in close touch with my mom; everyone else acts as if I don’t exist).
6. My mom told me that my niece had a fever. I wrote a Whatsapp message to my sister S. to inquire after my niece’s fever. She replied that it was all okay for now, it wasn’t high or anything. I said Ok good, love to everyone! No answer.
7. I go to a place where I think, I did this. They hate me because I am hateful. They don’t like me because I don’t make enough of an effort to be in touch with them.
8. I can’t let go of this massive sense of abandonment.
9. I can’t let go of this massive sense that people abandon me because I am bad.
1. Tell your therapist you love her madly.
2. Tell your husband you love him madly.
3. Tell your girlfriend you love her madly.
4. Call your mom and tell her you love her madly and forgive her absolutely for all the ways she fucked you up.
5. Call someone scared and tell them they won’t die of COVID19, then tell them again until they believe you.
6. Call someone who is going under financially or in other ways and tell them, “I am here,” and mean it because after this is over the world will be a newly communal space and we will be all there for each other and the silly things will no longer matter so you can definitely share a bowl of soup.
7. If someone’s car battery dies help them jump start it (stay at 6 ft of distance from them while you do this because no one needs to get sick while jump starting a car). If they need a car, lend them your car because this is not a time to hold on tight to a car or anything silly like that.
8. Tell your dog he/she is a good dog, such a good, good dog. Same to cat, pet rabbit, pet snake, etc.
9. Ask your friends, “What can I do for you?” and mean it because chances are they won’t need anything other than to hear you say that.
10. Forgive everyone.
11. Do your bit for a world based on decency, love, and cooperation. Do your bit to save the planet. Then, when you have done your bit, be at peace because this is literally all that is asked of you.
Art by Shepard Fairey, posted today on his Instagram, @obeygiant
1. Some in my family are leaving our all-family Whatsapp group and I am the cause. Everyone is in Italy so I thought it would be safe to bring up my president (Italian politics is high-level verboten). I thought it would be safe, two weeks ago, to say “We who live in the US are in really bad hands and I am scared.”
2. It wasn’t. The one of us who sees things in terms of individual choices and therefore (how does that follow?) supports right-wing politicians was all over me. She is always so disciplined, so good, so kind! But people had been dying for weeks and she hadn’t worked a day and no sick leave for her because she works for herself, so stress (I assume) got the better of her.
3. We argued, I and this person I love, for hours. Everyone else was quiet. We argued well into the late afternoon here and the night there. She was condescending. I was furious. Eventually, in the dead of night Italian time, I lost it and said the things one says when one is angry, which are not what one thinks but what one knows will hurt.
4. I watched the season finale of This Is Us last night. If you have seen it, you know what I’m talking about. Untrue words said in rage can only be taken back if both parties agree that they are indeed untrue and said only because, in rage, we’ll say what hurts.
5. My very loved one who believes that everything is individual choices also believes that rage leads us to say what we really think. She now believes every word I say, and, given the basis of her believing it, there is no talking her out of it.
6. But here’s the thing. I expected the whole family to be angry at me for my lack of control and meanness. They weren’t. They have tolerated my loved one’s right-wingness for years. I was suddenly the hero who said it like it was. They, too, believed my words.
7. Relations are now broken and it’s my fault. Relations are now broken and it’s my loved one’s fault. Relations are now broken and no one can see a path to forgiveness for my loved one except, paradoxically, me, so it’s their fault too.
8. The last time my whole family sided with me I was 9 and something really bad happened and they were on my side because it was just too egregious even for big-mouthed, easy-to-lose-her-cool, troublesome, designated-problem me.
9. But I don’t want them back like this. I don’t want them loving me, now, because we are all united against our loved one who hasn’t been working for more than a month and has ideas that don’t jibe with the rest of us but who is also always there for everyone, always there, always there.
10. And I think of all of us who are fighting now because people are sick and dying, because politicians fail us, because we are not working, because we are working and it’s killing us, because we are stuck together in small spaces including small virtual spaces, and all I can say is, peace, fellow humans, peace and ask forgiveness and give forgiveness and please peace.
Art by Lourdes Sánchez, detail. Via art-Walk.
This is very, very good. There is hope, and hope is the hope for a utopia, and utopias are not silly dream but goals. We hope, we set goals, we strive, we believe, we cheer, we lift our hearts. We look forward. We cuddle the dog.
It feels a little risky to hope right now, but I find myself doing it anyway.
This is not because I’m a particularly optimistic person—I’m not. In fact, I’ve often found comfort in the theory that, as we evolved as a species, pessimists may have been more likely to pass on their genetic material than optimists [*shrugs]. And I’ve often thought that, since the dawn of vaccines and the long absence of wars fought on U.S. soil, some people have forgotten how much we need a functional government and one another.
As our lives have changed in order to (we hope) slow the spread of the Coronavirus, I find myself hoping that our world, our lives, our society will be different for those who remain after… whatever and whenever “after” is.
Here are some of my hopes:
I hope we finally build the healthcare system that our country needs, and…
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1. I fight for the right to be little.
2. Little is the place I inhabit most comfortably.
3. Little is a place of joy and furious love.
4. Little is happy.
5. Little is free.
6. Little is capable of being loved.
7. Little is thirsty for play and giggles.
8. Little knows she will be kept safe.
1. I regret telling my therapist she should read more literature by people of color, that enough already with the White authors.
2. I regret humiliating her.
3. I regret ever making her suffer.
4. I regret making her work so damn hard.
5. I regret that we chose to have therapy during the plague.
6. I regret not having told her “thank you” enough.
Painting by Atsushi Fukui via What Jane Saw
inside(r) psychoanalysis 