all the king's men
I am on my third call of the day to try and get an appointment with a therapist. This time last year, I had an intake call with a no-nonsense psychiatrist who interrogated me over Zoom about eating habits and thoughts of suicide while I, holding her up on my phone screen, kicked through piles of dry leaves in my neighborhood’s sleepy residential streets. That intake call led to a referral to group therapy: more Zoom, friendly faces who I sometimes see around campus. We give each other small smiles, furtive recognition.
I’m not in group anymore. After a few sessions with an older psychologist with a psychoanalytic bent (What does this sound like from your childhood? and You’re turning him into your sister, repression and integration and splitting off), this psychologist duly refers me out to the insurance company that the university contracts with to provide third-party mental health support. I see her again once after the referral and she says, We could make another appointment, but I think that’s going to cause you to stall on following up.
I follow up, calling the insurance company. They send me a .txt file with a list of providers who have open appointments. The list includes MDs, who I learn are not actually eligible for coverage under this plan. I ask for a new list. The first one I call does not accept this insurance, nor does she have an opening. The second one has a full voicemail inbox and does not return my call. I give up for a month, then ask the insurance company to send me the first available appointment with a provider who is a woman of color. A week later, they do.
I call the provider to set up the appointment. It goes straight to voicemail. I leave a detailed message, including a code from the insurance company.
The provider’s office assistant calls me back. The code I was given is insufficient. They need another code, one that translates to a 60-minute appointment and not a 45-minute one. The office assistant asks, Do you have a pen and paper?
I do. I’m sitting outside, staring at ants crawling up a stone wall. To the right, there are all these undergraduates sprawled out on the grass lawn, and to the left, the giant library that looks like a church. The architect of the library wanted it to look older than it really is. The rise of Collegiate Gothic as an architectural style for American universities had to do with racism and WASPyness, my History PhD friend informed me recently. (Also, The Atlantic.) A set designer I met last year told me the university feels like Disneyworld, how fake it is. Did you know, he said, that the shingles on the roofs are smaller at the top? It’s an old trick to create the illusion of more space than there is in reality, because the smaller shingles seem further away than they actually are. And to make stone look older and more weathered, they applied hydrochloric acid.
Over the phone, the provider’s office assistant gives me a long number. I write it down next to the other numbers: the original codes, my member ID. Like a passcode to a speakeasy. When I call the insurance company they say, This will remain confidential unless there is a possibility of harm to yourself or others, or a child being harmed. Do you have any questions about that? Are you having thoughts of harming yourself or others? Are you being physically threatened at home or at work?
I know, I know, I want to say, I was just on the phone with you guys, but I dutifully answer No and no and no. The insurance company representative dithers on the code, I say firmly but politely the provider is refusing to schedule an appointment unless they get the new one, the insurance company says they’ll send over a new code.
I call the provider again, leave a message.
The office assistant calls me back and says she’ll send over some forms. Is there a specific reason you’re coming to therapy, anything you wanted to focus on? she asks. I glance around at the other people studying at the outdoor tables, the undergrads on the lawn, and when she says, You can also just wait to talk about it during the session, I say, Yes, that would be great.
I look up the woman I’m supposed to talk to on Friday. She looks friendly, I guess. She mostly does cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Doesn’t everyone who deals with the skeptical, young, educated, the kids who are scared of eroticism and mothers and dreaming, hungry, instead, for worksheets and counting, mindfulness and noticing. 5-4-3-2-1: Acknowledge five things you can see around you, acknowledge four things you can touch… You can’t touch neoliberalism, patriarchy. The listening is nice. It’s all very considered and considerate. I think about how my reactions to certain events are the products of cognitive distortions reinforced by past experience. Sometimes I get frustrated with my own nodding. Mmhmm. That makes sense, I say. Then 50 minutes are up. I know when time is close because I watch the clock: I don’t want to introduce a 3-minute anecdote at the 1-minute mark. Every time I say the word should I can predict an immediate reaction. I think all my therapists really liked me. I say this as a confession not a flex. Being liked is really not the point.
It’s an unoriginal point to say the 1:1 therapeutic model will never be able to solve collective action problems, structural injustice, but there are times I wish I had more faith in its ability to even patch me up. I told a former therapist, Sometimes I feel a little bit in pieces after we talk, like Humpty-Dumpty, and I’d like it if we could take time to sort of, glue me back together. That became our shorthand — Humpty-Dumpty — as in, I’m feeling a bit Humpty-Dumpty. I’m not a vase or an anthropomorphic egg, but I keep returning to the metaphor of being a brittle, breakable thing, ripe for the shattering.
When I go for the intake with this new therapist I know she’ll ask me — as everyone else has asked me: in the room with a water feature and a Buddha statuette, in the room in a nondescript building on Bowditch Street near the Sichuanese restaurant, in the little windowless office in the engineering building, in the three-story Victorian near Trader Joe’s that rented out offices to psychologists, on Zoom, on Zoom, on Zoom — that question I deferred on the phone call with the assistant, What makes you seek out therapy? and I know this is the wrong answer but I go to therapy sort of dutifully, the way some people go to church when they no longer believe in God. I get off the phone and walk into the library built like a church. The woman in the mural at the end of the nave could be Mary. She holds, where you might expect a baby Jesus, a book.
image: Teletherapy by Rebecca Ness, 2021.
a book I loved reading this summer was Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir, a psychoanalyst.