Untangled

Before I tell this tiny true story that leads to a sort of bigger true story (and the purpose of this post), I need to say that my husband is the best one I know. He supports me and makes me feel beautiful and wanted. I feel like this build-up implies that I’m bracing you for some awful marital rule he’s broken and this couldn’t be farther from that.

Ok. So one day we were at Chacho’s. Husband’s book was released that day so I was driving him around to stores in the city so that we could see them on the shelves. Three stores in and no books. He was visibly frustrated and for good reason. We stopped at Chacho’s to refuel and after ordering at the counter and taking our seats, my phone rang. Phone calls of any sort send me into a bit of a tizzy, but when I realized the call was from a potential client who’d found me on google it was like ALL SYNAPSES FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

I motioned the “be right back” finger while I said some probably dumb words to the client on the phone and walked to an empty area across the restaurant. A few seconds later I hear “BOO! BOOOOOOO!” I spent zero time wondering who the Boo was for – after almost 18 years, I knew that Boo was mine. Still talking to the client, I say but don’t say “Dude…I know your eyeballs see me on the phone” and he hears the silent sentence and responds by telling me that they called for our order and he wanted to get it but my purse was on the chair.

I quickly come up with at least two solutions to the stated problem -none of which involve yelling – while still trying to sell my work and talk business to this stranger. My pitch has fallen completely apart so I walked over to the table and ended the call on a very welp note.

So here’s the thing. I always assume that any time I see a phone to my husband’s ear, it’s important for one reason or another. If I walk into a room while he’s mid-call, I quietly exit. If the phone rings and he answers, I immediately tell the kids to get quiet and they actually listen. We operate under the truth-based assumption that whatever voice is on the other end of that phone is an important one because he does important things and talks to important people.

So when I awkwardly ended that call and sat down to my nachos, I realized that this assumption did not apply to me. I realized that at that moment to my husband (and probably at most moments to my children), no exchange of words between me and the voice on the other end of the phone was even as important as nachos. And not just nachos, but nachos right the eff now. And I realized that I was not okay with that. But the real gut punch was the realization that it was me who’d lost sight of my own value and purpose outside of being a mother to my children and a support to my spouse

I don’t think for one second that these thoughts ran through my husband’s head when he yelled my pet name across the restaurant. But they went through mine and they made a tiny little home there over the next several hours. The next morning, I made my first ever appointment with a therapist.

I’d been struggling with some issues in the weeks (ok months) (FINE, YEARS) preceding this little thing that happened. I guess I’d describe it as a general lack of direction and confidence and a hushed-but- always-there fear of what life beyond caring for small children would look like. When I felt this very same feeling six years ago, I took the GRE and decided to go back to school to pursue a Masters in Psychotherapy. Then I got pregnant.

I don’t ever ever ever want to be pregnant again, so I decided to take a way cheaper and far less painful route to moving past these issues and contacted a therapist. That email was the scariest email I’ve ever sent. I may have started clawing at the computer screen to “take it back” the second I hit send. To find this email recipient, I’d searched something like “therapist for women in Houston” and a directory of about 4 million counselors popped up. I made it through 5 or 6 then landed on a lady who had my favorite Ikea rug in her office photo. That’s how I chose my therapist, y’all. A rug.

It didn’t matter. I just needed to talk to someone because a) I had that itch to obtain a “real” career as a therapist again but realized I had no idea what a therapist actually does and b) I knew if I’d waited even another day, I’d settle back into my fog and find a thousand reasons not to waste energy trying to lift it. We met the following week and I knew I’d done a good thing.

I grew up thinking that therapy was just not a thing that Black people did and sadly, our numbers support that idea. For a host of reasons, minorities receive mental health care treatment at a rate of about half (even less for Asian Americans) that of Caucasians. For most of my life, I’d held the belief that you have to be a total wacko or have suffered from horrible abuse or struggle with addiction in order to benefit from therapy. This is just not true.

The changes I saw in just a few sessions were remarkable. Those sessions led me to write again. They helped me move past writing for any motive other than the fact that it’s a thing that I truly love to do and a thing I’ve known from a very young age that I need to do even if my own eyes are the only eyes that ever see the words.

They helped me narrow the gap between the good others see in me and what I see in myself. They taught me how to unstick myself from those stuck places – those places where your heart wants to move in the direction of something…anything, but fear plants your feet. They equipped me with an anxiety toolkit for those moments when I feel myself spiraling into the irrationally terrifying future I’ve constructed in my head.

And honestly they just felt so good. It felt good to toss it all out there to a completely unbiased someone who for 55 minutes had only my best interest at heart.

A part of me felt like I didn’t deserve that because I’d never suffered from depression and didn’t have any “real problems”. But I do deserve it. You do, too. Everyone deserves a shot at accessing their best self and sometimes it’s only our tangled thoughts holding that person captive. The way I see it is, therapists are the people we call on to help us untangle them.

So I’m grateful for that day at Chacho’s. It brought forth change – change I may never have made without that something that was really nothing. I didn’t mention how I felt that day because it was his day and we make a point to keep our own sh*# at bay when we’re celebrating the other person. In fact, I didn’t tell him about it until two weeks ago when I told him I needed to write this but didn’t want to sound like I was attacking his character in any way. We played around with the idea of using a different lead-in but ultimately agreed upon telling the whole truth.

I’ve suspended my sessions until I feel the need to continue them. Who knows when that time will come, but it feels good to know that when it does, I’ll be brave enough to send that email.

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PLEASE feel free to reach out or message me or start a conversation about any of this. I shared this experience with a few of my close friends and every single one of them expressed that they too had either visited a therapist or always wanted to but felt weird about doing so. Let’s make this normal.