If it had not been for the tepid healthcare plan afforded by my latest misguided career venture, I would not have ended up sinking into the pit of a couch I was told had been found on the curb across from a defunct 7-11. The finder, the only mental health provider in the tristate area who bothered to return my call, sat in on the other side of an office no larger than a janitor’s closet in a Papasan chair overflowing with a peacock feather-printed cushion, her muumuu dripping to the pilled carpet.
I had only recently been kicked off my mom’s health insurance – a rude awakening as I blew out the twenty-six candles on my vanilla cake. It was a remarkably inopportune time to finally seek therapy, but that’s what happens when you’ve been alive for over a quarter of a century and you start to realize that your problems aren’t going away and in fact, they might actually be getting worse.
The office of Judy Joplin’s private practice was located on the third floor of a former Fruit of the Loom factory that had been renovated some fifty years ago and largely neglected since. The place was an enigma of building code violations. The buzzer at the front door was broken, so the scratched glass door was routinely propped open with a cinderblock, even in the dead of winter, resulting in occasional snowbanks within the vestibule. My visits began with a bout of anxiety as I ascended the three floors in a rickety elevator last inspected in March of ‘03, holding my breath in the excruciating ten seconds before and after the doors jolted open. More than once I had asked Judy to unpack my lifelong claustrophobia to no avail. Instead, she would redirect the conversation entirely, galloping towards a tangent typically too illogical to bother stopping in its tracks. I would sit back and listen and usually forget what exactly I had hoped to discuss.
On a mid-November day when the clouds were bulging and gray, threatening to vomit torrents of rain at any given moment, I arrived to find the Papasan chair empty. I had become accustomed to treating the place like an aunt’s house. I let myself in, cracked open the single window to air out the lingering scent of Cup-o-Noodles, took up my spot on the decrepit couch, and flipped through the National Geographic magazines and Oriental Trading catalogs addressed to Judy’s upstairs neighbor.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know, I know, I’m late, I’m late.” Judy had a habit of repeating things, an unfortunate tick that significantly ate into our hour-long meetings. She kicked off her platform sandals and threw herself into the Papasan chair.
Judy was the Cheshire cat of therapists. Her ghostly scalp was covered in tightly wound knots of orange hair. Her eyes were tiny and almost entirely consumed by her pupils, an unsettling, indecipherable vortex that made me suspect she might be blind. I once saw her walk into a four-foot-tall ficus and laughed despite myself. At the time I didn't know that one day I would miss her like a phantom limb.
I opened the vast majority of our sessions by hesitantly proposing a topic or present conflict in my life, or further musings of the dormant melancholy that stalked me like a shadow, a presence so stiffly intertwined with myself that it took on the life of a disappointing family member. Judy kept a dilapidated paperback copy of the DSM IV under her chair like a pet cat and she would routinely thumb through the yellowed pages peeling away from the scrappy spine, rattling off disorders like cyclothymia and depersonalization and schizoid personality, glancing up at me to see if any jumped out at me. I never had the heart to tell her that manual was originally published in 1952 and every other mental health professional in the country exclusively used the DSM V.
More often than not, at some point during a session, the conversation would flip, and I would find myself advising my therapist, who evidently found more solace in me than I did in her. But before she could monopolize the start of our session with a longwinded story about why she was twenty-two minutes late, I informed her of my latest problem.
Judy peeled away the skin of a clementine with her red lacquered fingernails. “Is that so?”
The problem today was Judy. I had come early with the intention of ending our brief relationship. “I don’t think therapy is for me.” “We might not be a good match.” “These fifteen-dollar copays are adding up...” I had no idea how to politely express my dejected weariness of ending another chapter of my life completely void of meaning.
I glanced out the window and saw the first drops of rain speckling the window. I wondered who would jump up to shut it first. Neither of us moved.
My next therapist’s office was on the first floor of new development with a Keurig in the waiting room. He had a Tuscan leather sofa and pristine copies of all five DSMs lining his bookshelf and the walls boasted Ivy league degrees in gilded picture frames. His secretary returned my call from five months prior and told me the doctor had an opening for one new client. I wondered what had happened to the patient whose spot I was filling. Our sessions were as brief and impersonal as the room we met in. He prescribed me Zoloft and I floated up into a cloud of contented indifference and I never missed an appointment.
I got a call from Judy many weeks after I ended things. It was an accidental dial, apparently, but she still left a chirpy, rambling voicemail and said she missed me. Later, I drove past the old factory and considered calling her back, even considered taking the elevator up just to say hi. I wish I had stopped.
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