The obvious thing

The obvious thing is that I should be in therapy. I am a therapist. I know what the research says about this. I have said it out loud to supervisees. There is a version of me that gives a short, warm, extremely persuasive speech about why clinicians need their own work and I have given it more than once. I have not been in four years. And as I write that down I notice, for the first time, that it is the same four years. I stopped in the autumn after the Feldman year. I told myself at the time it was money, which was true — we were paying down the loan and sixty dollars a week was a real number that year. And then the money got better and I did not go back, and the not-going-back has never had a reason attached to it, it has just been the arrangement. Four years of being extremely well informed about the thing I am not doing. I think the reason is that I would have to start by describing that year to somebody, out loud, in order, as a thing that happened to me rather than as the ninety-second version. And I have not had the ninety-second version challenged by anybody in four years because I have only ever told it to people who had no reason to push.

The drawer. The ninety-second version. Not going back to therapy. Saying soon. The appointment I have not booked. I did not know that list existed until you asked me to write it.