the rix mix

Thursday is usually a library/supermarket late afternoon for me because I can get a ride over there. I had to stay close to home. The temp & humidity is slightly more bearable, but the National Weather Service Severe Thunderstorm Watch is alarming & the storms are popping up rather than coming in across as solid front. It's was no day to risk walking home carrying a a small folding umbrella & backpack filled with food & books.

I have an SSD re-evaluation application due next week. I've never filled one out -it was filled out for me one previous time by health professionals, I didn't even receive it in the mail, my therapist verbally asked me all the personal questions, the clinic supplied all the treatment documentation (which they'll do this time, too), & I signed it. My therapist wisely kept it from being a big deal. SSD is like a job I don't particularly like, one that has advantages & disadvantages. But I've experienced the alternatives & know why I'm receiving it & what would happen if I didn't get it, & that shields me from the criticism of a few people who think it's like a sixty-grand no show job at the medical school in Newark & who ought to know better. & when I started receiving it, I wasn't even aware that my left eye had been wrecked by a surgeon who hadn't bothered for obvious reasons to tell me he had botched the surgery. If he had, I'd probably be quietly residing in a nice trailer park in Cape May now & writing beautiful poems about egrets & Jersey shore pirate stories for children. The eye problem doesn't even factor in.

Then, 4 years ago I learned what occurs when one doesn't come clean with one's therapist about unraveling practical matters & bleak thinking. Even Ph.D psychologists are not psychics. Although the structure of my private life was crumbling, reflected in the disaster area my apartment had become (it's messy now but you'd recognize a music lover's filing system), I was still showing up for sessions shaved, bathed & well-dressed. I was so glad to be going to therapy, so enjoyed seeing my therapist, that if I was depressed when I started out for the clinic, I arrived at the session in a good mood. This was unfortunate. I had been a rock musician, a podium poet, an alternative radio DJ, & the amicable overseer of an art store book dept; the outside world was a stage. Both of my parents were remarkable public actors. So was I. When I had a substitute shrink a couple of appointments ago, he concluded the interview with, "Good, you seem to be maintaining, come back next month," & signed the topmost page in the mysterious, thick binder holding my case file, a book that tells its own story.

Labels: mental health