Inventing a Therapist

... A dispatch from bewilderness

In my first life, I made headlines and deadlines for places like Time Warner and Conde Nast. We ate my words at every meal and they paid the mortgage, too.

Prolifically not myself, I was an “uncredited writer”— otherwise known as a “ghost.” I spoke in the voices of clients. More a story seller than a storyteller, I was a tool like a broom or a mop. I wrote about places I didn’t go, and things I didn’t do, for legends and icons I didn’t know.

From baking a Bundt cake to buying a car to building a bomb, I knew how to state it and where to stick it. What to put first, what to put last. How to fly to Alpha Centauri and look great in jeans while launching the best-ever start-up, basting the best-ever turkey and hosting the best-ever birthday bash.

pen and ink by Judith Hannah Weiss

For some, transformation takes years of practice. Others just get hit by a truck. I can’t use words like I used to, can’t line them up and connect them, can’t make them do what I need them to do. Words shuffle, scuffle, liquefy. They were repurposed, too. My mind got trashed by a truck. That sounds like a bad country song, but it’s true.

A repurposed object is something that acquires amnesia and forgets what it did before. A “repurposed” human reconfigures any shards she can find of anything she ever knew, like she always just missed a step or a train or a decade, leaving me with clips from first and second life that careen through my current brain.

“Ordinary loss” means you know what happened. You know that someone is gone. Ambiguous loss means you don’t know what happened. Maybe they’ll come back, maybe they won’t. Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t.

I was born a pro at this. My parents were present yet absent, or absent yet present. So were my ancestors – no names, no faces, no places, no legacy, no family lore. And then there’s your injured mind. You see, hear, know something just as it’s engulfed by something else. Everything has the texture of fog.  Heavy fog you can’t see through.

When I invented an Imaginary Therapist, she asked how long I had been feeling this way. I said, “Sometimes, never, rarely, always.” I said things like that a lot to her, and she seemed fine with it.

But when I said it to the Real Therapist, she said, “What the eff is the matter with you.” So I ditched the Real Therapist. Some folks borrow a cup of flour; some borrow a family. Others just imagine one. Or invent a therapist.