mf

I have a new therapist.

I broke up, so to speak, with my former therapist, in the summer of 2019. I'd been feeling weird about our sessions for since the previous summer, when I'd lost an office job in a way that had felt very personal and traumatic. My former bosses had just promoted me and given me a raise, only to fire me a month later citing communication problems. I was sure that I'd been fired because of my personality, and I felt persecuted, but I went to therapy almost religiously, because I also really really wanted to change, to fix, what was wrong with me.

It wasn't the first time I'd been fired. I've had trouble with keeping jobs for as long as I've had any kind of gainful employment.

One of the things I worry about, when talking about employment, is how to convey the feeling, the experience, of lack of financial autonomy. I've always been bad at supporting myself, financially. I have a patchy work history and I've been supported by other people for a significant part of my adult life. Sometimes it came with emotional abuse. I guess that if you know what that's like, then you know, and if you don't, I don't know how to convey the feeling.

Anyway I went to therapy hoping to figure out how to be employable. The therapy sessions felt kind of aimless. I thought that was part of it.

I got a new office job at the end of May 2019, nearly a year after getting fired from the previous one. The timing was bad; I'd picked up a lot of hours at the music school over the year and my students were just about to finish their exams and recitals. There were other factors; I'd undergone some testing for ADHD and had gotten an adderall prescription, but I hadn't gotten a formal diagnosis yet, didn't know where to go for help, and my training in my new office was an ADD nightmare scenario. I was fired after a month.

It felt like the last straw. I remember the metro ride home vividly, so vividly, like saturated colours and sounds with too much reverb and feeling simultaneously numb and overwhelmed. When I got home I sat on the couch and had an experience I'd only ever read about before: feeling like I'd just sat down but when I looked up two hours had passed.

I described that to my therapist in a session I'm still struggling to process, now, in 2021. I tried to find words for how scared I was, how confused and hollow and meaningless I felt. I don't really remember what she said in response. I just remember the way she looked at me. I asked her for the contact information of someone who could do a formal assessment of me, for an ADHD diagnosis. I'd actually asked her for this several times by then. She always promised to look into it but never followed up. That time, I insisted; got a name and a phone number. I never went back.

I got a formal diagnosis in the form of a 17 page document I've never managed to read all the way through. It's a distressing read; the psychologist made me do a bunch of tests but he also did a long interview, and the resulting document contains a lot of stuff about my adolescence. Which I don't like thinking about, let alone reading about.

Which was actually my starting point when I met my new therapist. I'd never really talked about my adolescence in therapy before. Like, I mentioned it, mentioned facts or anecdotes, but I never talked about it. I get freaked out when talking about it; the one time I had a dissociative event was after having a long conversation about high school with someone who had been to the same school (though not at the same time.) We'd talked about all the teachers we could remember and at first it was pretty funny but at some point in the conversation something in her face shifted, somehow, something about her attitude or her vibe went from friendly, to aloof. It had reminded me so much, I suppose, of a certain kind of rejection, one that happened maybe one too many times in high school. When I'd gotten home, later, I just remember walking into my apartment and seeing all the items in it and not understand why they were there.

My new therapist talks to me about fitting in; about square pegs and round holes and about what happened to your brain when you try too hard and for too long to conform. But the thing I keep thinking about is dialogue.

But it's unbelievably late and I think I should pick this up another time. I'm not good at judging the vibe of things I write, so just in case this entry sounds sad or worrying: I'm ok! I'm ok, I've just been meaning to put some thoughts into words.