Madi > Recent Status Updates

We may want others’ forgiveness, but that comes from a place of self-gratification; we are asking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.

I think about how it’s the not knowing that torments all of us. Not knowing why your boyfriend left. Not knowing what’s wrong with your body. Not knowing if you could have saved your son. At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we’ll never know why.

I remember something I learned during my internship: “Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.”

There was an unspoken irony to all of this. People wanted a speedy solution to their problems, but what if their moods had been driven down in the first place by the hurried pace of their lives? They imagined that they were rushing now in order to savor their lives later, but so often, later never came.

On Julie, a patient with cancer:

Then I feel the tears well up. Laughter to tears-grief. I'm going to miss Julie and I'm having a hard time with this myself.
Sometimes the only thing to do is yell, "Fuck!"

I saw images of her receiving a prestigious award, smiling at an event standing next to a handsome guy, looking cool and confident and at peace with the world in a magazine photo spread. Online, she bore no resemblance to the person who sat across from me in that room.)
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(If you ever want proof that what people present online is a prettier version of their lives, become a therapist and Google your patients. Later, when I Googled Michelle out of concern—I learned quickly never to do this again, to always let patients be the sole narrators of their stories—pages of hits popped up.
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It’s a common belief that people’s sex lives reflect their relationships, that a good relationship equals a good sex life and vice versa. But that’s only true sometimes. Just as often, there are people who have extremely problematic relationships and fantastic sex, and there are people who are deeply in love but who don’t click with the same intensity in the bedroom.

Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void—words, words, and more words—something important rises to the surface. And when the silence is a shared experience, it can be a gold mine for thoughts and feelings that the patient didn’t even know existed.

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I understood his frustration. In movies, therapist silences have become a cliché, but it’s only in silence that people can truly hear themselves. Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions.
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That’s right—sometimes hell is us.
Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

Remember Sartre’s famous line “Hell is other people”? It’s true—the world is filled with difficult people (or, as John would have it, “idiots”). I’ll bet you could name five truly difficult people off the top of your head right now—some you assiduously avoid, others you would assiduously avoid if they didn’t share your last name. But sometimes—more often than we tend to realize—those difficult people are us.

Of all my credentials as a therapist, my most significant is that I’m a card-carrying member of the human race.

The eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said this:
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd,
to avoid facing their own souls.”

But he also said this:
“Who looks inside, awakes.”

Snow. White, fresh, virgin territory for us to scar and scuff as we please. How much I want it. I realize I have never thought of forgetting in this light. I have feared it, fought against it. And yet, the freedom to forget, to rewrite, to heal. Is this not a mercy that Humans allow themselves? Do I dare take that privilege for myself?

“It won’t be like at the Hospital. It will only be a slow fading, a fogging of what happened. Humans do it all the time,” Cook.ie says. “Deceive ourselves, forget, rewrite. It is a way of making our lives bearable, a natural function, like tears.”

To think how excited I would once have been to see the ocean. How far my calibrations of longing have shifted.

To be Human, seems to me, is to be in pain all the time, and to believe that the pain has been put into you by someone else. Yes, Humans seem to me now more programmed than I am.

“All is fair in love and war, as the old saying goes, and our work is surely situated somewhere between the two.”

Really enjoying this book. It's such an interesting and unique story concept, and very much reminds me of a modern day Handmaid's Tale.

I turn up every receptor as far as it will go, filtering information down to the finest granules. It possibly isn’t a good way to live. I find myself disoriented, skittish.

. . . Jealous. Is a word I will not use, because such a word would technically be a malfunction.

After reading so much hype about this series initially, I'm now second guessing everything. This is just awful so far, and I'm almost done so I don't have much hope it'll get better.

Grit your teeth in the face of your thoughts and for God’s sake be more obstinate, head strong and wilful than the most stubborn peasant or shrew. Indeed, be harder than an anvil … If necessary speak coarsely and disrespectfully like this: Dear devil, if you can’t do better than that, kiss my toe.

‘Kiss my toe, OCD’, that’s what I should have said. But I wasn’t ready. Not yet.

Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century German priest who inspired the Protestant Reformation and suffered from obsessive thoughts, gave the advice:

Continued..

It was cliché but necessary that Angela found enduring solace in the stars. She did not contemplate the presence of mystery or infinity. Instead, Angela appreciated the cosmos’s relative constancy.

Wren could not easily walk away now, because she had lingered past the point of invisibility. Her identity was crystallized to these people, and once she allowed herself to become solid to other human beings, she would be seen. After being seen, Wren risked being known, and being known came with the risk of loss. Even this small interaction cost her too much.

I could move back home to Texas! I could teach!

Yes, he could find personal significance by helping others find theirs. He could give people the comfortable space to try, and if Lewis was an expert in anything, it was trying.

When Wren finished her assignments before her peers, the teachers allowed her to read a library book until the other students completed theirs. In books she could experience different realities and learn from the people in them. In books, Wren saw how people made mistakes. She decided she would not be one of them. Somehow, some way, she would grow up to be perfect.

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School came easily to Wren because she enjoyed knowing how things fit together. She also had an extraordinary ability to memorize anything quickly. She spotted her teachers’ mistakes and inconsistencies but was reprimanded for remarking upon them, so Wren became the quietest girl in class.

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