Oy, such a friggin’ day I’ve had so far.

Wait, am I allowed to use both “oy” and “friggin'” in a sentence? Let’s ask the judges.

(Quick cut to the Panel of Jewish Newfies (Jewfies) who all give a thumbs up. )

Phew. Thanks, gentlemen. Mazel tov!

Anyhow, so, today I had therapy. But I am not going to talk about what happened in therapy. Not yet.

First,. I gotta tell you about what happened on the way to therapy.

I leave the apartment with plenty of time to get to our stop in time to catch my bus at 1:13 that would get me to the intersection near my therapist’s office at 1:24 to arrive at my therapist’s office at 1:30, which was the time of my appointment.

And immediately, I am, stopped, because at the intersection of Cook and Cooney, madness and chaos reign.

Well, OK, not madness. and chaos. But the whole intersection is ripped up and surrounded by people wearing hardhats and orange vests, and for a delicate soul like myself, that’s practically the same thing.

First, I try to cross the normal way, but a flagger^[1] stops me, tells me the sidewalk is closed and I have to go around the long way, crossing Cooney, then crossing Cook, then crossing Cooney again just to get to the bus stop.

The bus stop I normally only have to cross Cook once to get to.

So I waste a minute silently fuming before making that insane manuever,.

And by now, of course, I have missed my fucking bus.

So now I am sitting at the bus stop, stressing out because I know I am not going to be on time for my therapy appointment now.

Turns out I didn’t know the half of it.

Another 405 bus finally shows up at around 1:33. I get on, and relax. That was stressful, but at least it’s over. I’m on my way, and that’s what’s important.

So the bus goes up 3 Road, turns onto Lansdowne, and stops. Why?

Because the intersection of Lansdowne and Buswell has ALSO been ripped up, and that forms a bottleneck on Landsdowne by blocking one lane of it.

So now my bus is stuck in line, so to speak, waiting to get through the bottleneck. Every time the light turns green, maybe 3 vehicles get through.

So it takes 15 frigging minutes just to get through that intersection. On a journey that was supposed to take 14 minutes total. And we’re not even a third of the way there.

Long story short (too late), I got to my therapist’s appointment at around 2. When my appointment was at 1:30. And he had another patient after me, so it is not like he could give me any more time.

New patient, too. Saw him on the way out. Seemed like a nervous wreck. Poor guy. I was like him once. Get well soon, dude.

Anyway, that is the saga of my getting to therapy. Now let’s talk about what actually happened there today.

I think the fact that I arrived there a bundle of stress and nerves, plus the fact that I didn’t have a lot of time, actually ended up helping because it made me focus on what I wanted to talk about the most as determined by a quick scan of my psyche for whatever I could think of that had the deepest roots in my psyche.

So I started off talking about my mother. I need to talk about her more because my relationship to her define a lot of what came later in my life.

So I talked about how I grew up in a household that brooked no large displays of emotion. Nobody enforced this. It was part of the culture of the family. Big uncontrolled displays of emotion were something that “just wasn’t done”.

I call that the British Disease. TO lose control and have a big emotional response would be dreadfully embarrassing because the understand baked in to the culture is that people should be more in control of themselves and thus avoid making everyone around them feel awkward, embarrassed, or sad.

Kind of gets in the way of empathy.

Thus, you have a household where any number of intellectually hefty ideas or experiences can be talked about over the dinner table as easily as some families might talk about the weather, but our lack of God forbid that you should cry around others.

Especially if you are male.

When I told my therapist about that, and said that I thought the number one problem for white males was emotional constipation, he said “But you’re not emotionally constipated, are you?”

Seems he had forgotten that how I behave with him is not how I behave in the world. With him, I am as emotionally open as I know how to be. But that’s nothing liek how I am out in the world, with my social mask firmly in place.

In the real world, I always feel like people are barely tolerating me, so the last thing I would do is share anything dark or deep that might make people sad or upset. That would be asking far too much of people and they would drop me like I was live plutonium and I would be all alone again.

Instead I try to be funny and interesting so people will stay around.

My brother, out of the blue, texted me to say he loved and missed me. I, of course, replied in kind. But it really got me to thinking about this negativity of mine.

And the madness.

Because despite overwhelming evidence. I still find it very hard to believe that anyone actually wants me around. That my presence means something to them and has value.

That I am not a liability to all.

I learned of my worthlessness and how unwelcome I am on the planet at too early an age for it to be changed by mere facts.

It’s going to take a long time and a lot of work before I am out from under that.

No wonder it’s so hard for me to feel love.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.