Today (December 4th) I broke up with my therapist.
It was not planned. I debated on doing this, off and on again, for months now. It’s been two years in these sessions that were desperately overdue. I always said that therapy, like medication, was a tool: one I could use to move forward and take control of my life for once, instead of letting life happen to me and dealing with the consequences. But this was not permanent, and I did not want to keep using a tool I didn’t need anymore.
The reason I was hesitant is because there is so much anxiety simmering in me, within my personal life, largely due to a call for change. Very soon, faster than I can imagine, we will enter 2024. Soon after it will have been one year since my breast reduction, the surgery that saved my life. And then two weeks after that it’ll be my 30th birthday, always quick to come past the new year.
I don’t have a fear of getting older, but for a long time, it was hard to imagine myself past my twenties. I certainly won’t miss them. But it’s the strategy around aging and the eternal conflict I feel tugging at me, the pull between wanting to succumb to capitalist ideals (because money is everything) or to hone in on being a person who carves out a new world (because money is nothing). It’s hard to do either when you don’t think of yourself in the future as someone who exists, or even worse, who doesn’t deserve a life worth living. That was my modality before therapy.
Lately, I’ve started to believe that I can do both. Or try, at least.
That was largely the work I’d done throughout the bulk of it. It took years after 2020 to get back to the starting point I felt hopeful for before regressing. Then it took another year to process all the events that transpired. Now here I am on the edge of a new decade, the one I’d imagined I’d have my shit together by, very much realizing my shit is still not together (and may never be, at least in the ways I want it). At 18 I thought being this age would feel different, but by and large, I feel mostly the same, only with more memories in between myself and the nervous girl graduating high school.
My Granny always reiterates that sometimes, she looks in the mirror and is shocked to see an old woman. I never used to understand that, but now I think I get it: when you allow life to happen to you and remain complacent because that’s what you’ve been taught life is, or that’s what you think you deserve, it is so easy to wake up and realize holy shit, I’ve now reached the last decade my mom would live in.
My mom was 37 when she died and when I realized how close that is to me, who continues to process so many issues surrounding her death, it broke my heart specifically because of how young I still feel. 25 years ago, that was old to a little girl. But to look at 37 and say oh wow, I have friends and peers who are this age, if not older, than she ever was and ever will be; and soon I will be too. It stung a bit.
This was another thing I expressed to my therapist during our last session: that this decade made me nervous as I approached it and felt my grief intensify instead of wane, like how it’s supposed to. And it depressed me to reach it and still be in this game of managing the emotions of a four-year-old who watched her mom die and then never really talked about it at all, until 2021.
As much as I missed and longed for her as a kid (and had very limited outlets to process this) I find I miss her even more now, the closer we get in age. I long for advice, about learning her incredible skillsets I’ve always envied, about leaving your twenties (which, hers sounded like a fucking mess) and entering your thirties, where she would reach my idea of a dream career before having a pulmonary embolism at the gym. I long for reassurance. I even long for fashion advice, something I never accept from other people. But as I continue to watch my closet grow and change (went kinda crazy this year with shopping), I find myself imagining her opinion as the first person who ever dressed me, whose hands designed and sewed Liv-sized clothes for her job. It’s a sobering reality, but one that makes me feel closer to her instead of further away.
At the end of the session, I asked for a retrospective from my therapist’s point of view, and he said this: that I was someone who went through a large part of my life not only without direction but no guidance around how to be a functioning adult at all. This went on long enough that I’d convinced myself that because I was doing so poorly I didn’t deserve kindness, not only from other people but from myself. But through talking in therapy we chipped away at that idea to the point where I don’t immediately self-destruct every time I am faced with disappointment, or when something bad happens. We arrived at the point where I could even do that without him, too.
So, despite knowing there were a few other things we could work on, I decided it was important for me to choose to stop therapy. If I stayed waffling decisions forever, nothing would happen. And that was kind of the problem, wasn’t it? So, I said let’s stop.
I told him that before him I was a log and now, there were curves shaped out. I had taken a knife and hulled out the bark, whittled the wood smooth. I was carving myself out into the person I wanted to be. And even if that person is still hard to see and I haven’t created a figure yet, they are forming a shape in my mind; and that becomes clearer every day.
Life too, now, is different. When my mom was 30 it was 1991. So much of the landscape, fashion, job, or otherwise, is not the same. When I daydream about our conversations, I can already hear me groaning about her outdated advice. That’s where I can decide for myself that I know what’s best for me: because I give myself the grace to do so. The self-image only sharpens more each day.
And so we try!
And so we try.
stunning work, Liv