This morning I logged on to my computer and opened up a video chat session with my therapist — the therapist who successfully diagnosed and treated my OCD a little over five years ago, the therapist I went back to back in March when I felt isolated and incapable of seeking emotional support from anyone in my life. As his face blinked on to my screen, he told me that he wished he could hug me. I immediately burst into tears.
It had been a few weeks since we’d directly connected — over the past few months my therapy sessions quickly shifted from weekly to biweekly to every three weeks to once a month — and I caught him up on the trauma of losing my dad, of the deep sorrow I feel in the wake of his absence. I cried, a lot, but I also expressed hope for my ability to process my grief; to get to a point where I am grateful for the gift of knowing, of loving, my dad even as I will always miss him.
At the end of the session, my therapist and I agreed that I’d made tremendous progress since that day in early March when we first reconnected. I know now that I deserve support, I know that I have a loving community of friends and family and colleagues who are willing to show up for me when I am at my most vulnerable. I have a better handle on my emotions, and more willingness to be present with the uncomfortable ones rather than attempting to avoid or numb them. I am, it seems, on the verge of graduation — I have a follow up session booked for early August, but it’s intended more as a just in case, or maybe a capstone to a successful journey.
As I closed my chat window at the end of my therapy session, I was bombarded with bad news. The Supreme Court has issued another slew of terrible decisions: on top of gutting affirmative action, they’ve now kneecapped student loan forgiveness and given the okay to homophobic web designers (in a case which is apparently completely manufactured?) In New York, the air is currently poisonous and I can’t go outside — when I attempted to yesterday, unaware of how bad the air quality had become, I was bombarded with an abysmal headache that ruined my day.
So things are, you know, not great overall. It’s been a weird Pride month for me generally, what with the loss of my dad, and ending it with a court decision that reinforces that this country does not see queer people as equal citizens under the law is pretty bleak. It is easy to lose hope, and I understand why you might feel tempted to do that.
But still: I am here. And you are here. And that’s not nothing.
One of the things that you learn through therapy — that I learned through therapy — is that bad things are inevitable. It is impossible to avoid sadness, to avoid grief. The world will turn against you, your loved ones will die, your heart will be broken: the only way to avoid any of it is to cocoon yourself off to the point of numbness. You cannot prevent the badness, the pain: all you can learn to do is experience it in a way that feels manageable, to counterbalance it with joy and resistance and life.
It’s a bleak time, and grief is a natural reaction. Grief is part of the cycle. But, so too, is resistance and resilience. You are here, and I am here, and we can experience queer joy in the face of hate, we can visibly, vibrantly, live our lives in defiance of those who want nothing but for us to disappear.
I think a lot these days about how my father’s biggest wish for me was that I be happy: that I find love, that I be fulfilled by my career, that I feel joy every day. I choose to do that to celebrate his life. I choose to do that as an act of resistance in the face of fascism.
Nice writing (& as you mention it, hoping the air quality improves as I am coming to New York from the UK next week for a wedding)
I applaud your words. I, too, felt the need to vent in the face of so many decisions that attack the basic gains we had been making in so many sectors of society.