I had therapy today.

I feel much better now.

Guess I just needed to talk to someone about it all. I love you, patient reader, but there are some things that require the active participation of another, and for me, therapy is definitely one of those things.

Heck, therapy is what got me to where I am today, only two months away from having a degree from VFS and hence, at long last, something to show for my time on Earth.

Even if I never get work related to my VFS training (a sad but very real possibility), I will have that certificate on the wall proving I was good enough to get into and pass one of the most prestigious and advanced TV writing courses in the world.

And nobody can take that away from me.

The sheer relief I got out of today’s therapy session really made me appreciate therapy and make me more determined to make sure I don’t have to skip a week ever again. I mean, I was on the ragged edge of madness all the way up until 1 PM this afternoon. I felt very cold and numb and quite frankly miserable.

But that’s not the dangerous part. After all, sadness is not a dangerous emotion by itself.

The dangerous part comes when the flip switches and I begin to feel restless and anxious and trapped in my own skin. That’s when I start to feel really crazy and start to worry that I might do something crazy just to shatter the deadly silence inside me.

The mind knows it is supposed to be feeling things. Thing from the world, not just things from its own complex processes. It knows it just like your foot knows it is supposed to feeling things and cries out in panic when your foot falls asleep.

That might have been too metaphorical even for me. Sorry.

My point is that when the depression gets bad enough, it starts occluding emotional input from the environment to such an extent that parts of your mind experience the same sort of feeling of wrongness you get if input from one of your senses was suddenly cut off.

And over time, that sense of lack – that feeling that you are straining to hear a noise that is not there and yet you can’t stop – can build like white noise of the mind until it roars like a waterfall of excruciating silence.

And that’s when I start to feel not just crazy but crazed. Like a monster in a cage, I rage inside, but nothing makes it out into the world because I don’t want to hurt anyone.

My recent realization that my therapist probably can take whatever I can dish out probably helped contribute to the efficiency of today’s session.

And if he can’t handle it, he will just have to refer me to someone who can.

I am not exactly an easy patient. I express myself in ways that are deep and emotional and which, when I am doing it right, express the deep pain I feel in a way that really transfers some of the emotional substance of it.

That is not easy to take, I would imagine.

On the other hand, I do not resist therapy. That would be pointless. I am not the sort of person who gets mad when poked in a sensitive spot (so to speak). Those sensitive spots are the whole point of therapy. That’s where the pain lies – the psychological equivalent of your GP poking and prodding to see where it hurts.

Time and time again, I have impressed my therapist with my mature and insightful attitude towards my own recovery. Many times he has looked at me, impressed and bemused, and said “You know, it takes most people a long time to come to that realization. ”

I’m not most people.

I know what therapy is, what is does, what is involved in the process, and what I want out of it.  I am perfectly willing and able to open myself up completely (or well, to the best of my ability) and go down into the deep dark depths in search of catharsis.

Perhaps that means I have a somewhat broken sense of boundaries. I can’t rule that out. I know my deeply cerebral mindset is quite bizarre. It leads to thinking of others as minds first. Minds that happen to come with bodies, faces, and so on.

But in a way, it is like I am some sort of black box alien brain trying to communicate with the world across interstellar void, and other people’s minds are islands in the darkness between me and others. Everything else is a dim and unsatisfying background blur compared to this sense of mental connection with others.

There are people who would be quite rightfully horrified if they knew how deep into their minds I had gone. But I can’t help it. It’s how I see the world.

There’s those boundaries again. To me, they don’t exist, or at least, don’t matter. I pass through them as easily as I step out of the social matrix as well. Perhaps I would be better connected with the world if I allowed the walls of most people’s reality to bind me.

But that’s part of how I see the world too. I can (and do) behave discreetly towards others. I am long past the point where I blurt out people’s deepest secrets like they are something that should be obvious to all. So, as far as I know, I behave as though I don’t know these things. And that’s the best I can do.

I can’t help but see but I don’t have to look. If you catch my drift.

So instead of the normal sorts of boundaries, I have discretion. And part of that is the discretion of knowing that for the most part, let nobody know how deep into their mind my perceptions and deductions have taken me.

Damn, I should have been a therapist.

Guess I will have to settle for being a brilliant writer instead.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.