the rix mix

My therapist would become exasperated because I wasn't managing my problem like a business. I knew what she meant. The "problem" was - is - depression, & the management wasn't only the depression itself but everything related to it; treatment, available social services, well, my entire life. "That's part of the problem," I'd say. She wouldn't belabor the point. She knew I needed help in many practical matters but, "I'm not here for that," she'd say. I understood what she meant by that, too. She was Ph.D, not social worker. She was very concerned about my lack of a "personal support network" - meaning family & friends in near-proximity who remind you of appointments, go over paperwork with you, check in on you frequently. My therapist had a naivete about her. She protected her own privacy too much. I wish she had just told me more often what she was thinking, or related something I said to her own life. She didn't catch on to important stuff. She rarely tried to squeeze out of me what I was not saying.

By sheer luck I was somehow existing on an impossibly low income job, but it was really a lie. If you didn't ride in the car I was driving, visit my apartment, or see me at work, you'd think I was having a wonderful life. I was pretending to be a Significant Creative Person & a functioning part of the middle class. Then the lie began unraveling - without the assistance of alcohol or drugs, I might add. If you wear clean clothes, shave & bathe every day, & confine the bleakest thoughts to a personal diary or disguise them, who's to know? But you might find out you aren't a Significant Creative Person the moment you stop behaving like one.

The trick is understanding Selective Invisibility. If no one you know ever runs into you at a fashionable venue in or around New York City, they don't realize you're not there. If it ever does occur them that they never see you anywhere, they assume you don't choose to be there, not that you can't afford it. They never see you carrying a brand new laptop. There's no network that tallies & connects your absences at more private social occasions if you never created one. You skip parties because they are an enormously draining mental task. When you do go, you withdraw into a cocoon with a quiet, amiable exterior (never drink yourself out of it), arrive alone & leave early. Because the impressions you make are so forgettable, after awhile people just forget to invite you at all. Those who think they know you really don't. A few friends do, & they actually worry about you. These are persons you've hung out with in diners, leaned on when women walked out, showed raw poems to the day they were written & before they were revised into neatness by deleting the first & last stanzas.

Reason tells you the world is divided into the few who think you're worth saving & the many who are indifferent. You waffle between the two. In the former mode you help yourself, in the latter mode you sabotage the former. Survival is matter of not letting the latter completely prevail. Ambition is about changing indifference into opinion.

Necessities, duties, debts & obligations keep a lot of people propped up, but that doesn't mean they aren't suffering very intensely & very privately. They believe they are invisible. But I try to see them now, not just the ones in the waiting room at the clinic. Sometimes they find me. I've been sad for weeks.