Some exciting days, part I

I am feeling more upbeat about my future than I have in years, and this makes me a little apprehensive to write about it. I worry that trying to pin down exactly why I am more hopeful will fix the feeling down in mundane language and kill it, somehow. Nevertheless, I really do feel like saying something about the last couple days. I am two days into my three-day class on psychotherapy as a career option, and even though the class has been a flawed one from my perspective, I just feel re-energized, somehow, by the experience of being back in there in the flow and exchange of ideas, and re-awakened by the fear and anticipation of possibly going back to school and starting a new career. All my worst fears came true: we DID have to hold hands, and we chanted sayings at each other, and drew with our left hands, and meditated, and stood in a circle making spontaneous sounds and movements. Our teacher told us she has clients try to remember their own births. On the theory that we might not have been welcomed properly into the world, hence our psychological problems, we all held hands and welcomed each other. It was kind of nice, or it would have been, if I weren't so lame and always using irony to distance myself from heartfelt emotions. I can see that there's a big following for this kind of "right brain" activating exercise, and I honestly don't mean to denigrate it, but it's just not me. I have to believe there is room in the psychotherapy world for me and my more "left brain" ways--though I also think I can learn and improve my spectrum of responses by opening up to some of these new ways.

Despite the activities that just didn't fit me, I feel, overall, more hopeful about this career path than I did before. I met a few students in the class who are more like me, and even whose stories about how they got to this class are quite startlingly similar to mine. We went around the room telling our stories, and after I told mine, one woman spoke up, saying she really felt she should go next because hers was so uncannily like mine: she had gotten a history Ph.D., had a father who was a history Ph.D. who had had a great influence on her choices, had discovered that the academic life wasn't very comfortable for her, and now has a one-and-a-half-year-old daughter and is interested in possibly embarking on a career as a therapist... and this daughter has a flower name like mine. AND: we ordered the same lunch, two days in a row, without consulting one another.

The whole experience of going to the class has been so... re-orienting for me, so bringing of new energy. I have loved getting up in the morning and going downtown on the Geary bus to the building where my class is held, and mixing and milling with all the people downtown-- so different from my usual days out here in a quiet, less populated part of the city. I have loved listening to other people, and taking notes, and thinking and feeling unexpected things-- even the uncomfortable or critical thoughts I've had have been welcome, as getting my brain moving again. I've enjoyed the lunch breaks and imagining myself part of this energetic downtown workforce, as such a different kind of life than any I've experienced. I missed Daisy, but I've also greatly enjoyed the bus ride home at the end of the day to see her again.

This experience has convinced me that whatever I end up doing, I need to do SOMEthing different. I was vaguely aware of being a little depressed, even though I do adore my time with Daisy, but I now feel much more certain that I need time devoted to cultivating my own self, as separate from Daisy. It has just brought me so much energy and hopeful feeling, and I'm sure it will make me a better mother, too-- because when she's had a hard time, I haven't felt as frustrated with her or as despondent, because there's something else going on for me that lifts me up, instead of feeling like however Daisy's feeling on a particular day completely makes me or breaks me (if she has a crabby day, then I usually feel crabby because my entire sense of self-worth is invested in how I'm doing as a mother). When she was crabby these last few days, I didn't feel so entirely cast down by it, and although I wanted to help her feel better (of course), I still felt happy because of other things that are going on in my life right now. I wasn't crabby, in other words, just because she was crabby.

And now only one burning question remains to be resolved: what should I do with my left-handed pastel drawing? I will never be able to throw it out, since it is the emblem of my "rebirth." Maybe I'll hang it on the wall next to Daisy's fingerpaintings.