As I read that book, Hemingway in Love, the line hit me like a puncture wound, somewhere above the gut, somewhere close to home.

“And when Mary urged him to see a psychiatrist, he said hell no, he already had a psychiatrist, his Corona typewriter.”

I tried to reassure myself that this was a medieval way of thinking about things, the idea that a man, a writer especially, had to keep everything for himself until it was on the page, that he couldn’t seek help, that assistance through anything but strokes on the keyboard was tantamount to death. I told myself that this was the sixties, when psychology involved electric shocks to the brain, and that anyone with any semblance of understanding knew that such things could not be good. I even went so far as implore myself to remember that in the final year of his life, Hemingway went to St. Mary’s - twice. That perhaps if he had seen a psychiatrist in his younger days, or his older ones, he would not have pulled the trigger on his 12 gauge Scott, he would not have lived his final days in misery. I told myself I was doing a good thing. A healthy thing. But does health coincide with good writing? That is a hard question to ask one’s self.

My psychologist’s name is Bob, Bob Snell (fake name, obviously). The seventh in a line of therapists I have seen over the course of my life. He is friendly, he is kind, he has an outstanding belief in the ability of people to get better, as he says, to rejoin the world. He focuses on many things with me, things I will not get into, but suffice to say, he is adamant, he is incorrigible, he is a stone.

I have been seeing therapists, on and off, for most of my life. My first therapist, Rob Snail, I saw when I was five years old. He played card games with me, gently prodding my conceptions and wounds, as I threw eights down on top of queens and told him to pay up.

It was when I was twenty that the slew began. The slew of therapists, psychologists, and analysts that became so consuming that I sometimes forgot why I was going in the first place, and began to see it just as a way of life, a necessary ingredient of the recipe that had become my days as I trudged forward on this seemingly despondent road that I often wondered how I had let myself wander upon.

Dr. Schell.

Dr. Smell.

Scott.

Dr. Skill.

Bob Snell.

These were the five therapists I saw between the ages of twenty to twenty-five, without real break. There were times in college where I told myself I didn’t need to go to therapy, or I felt fine enough to shrug off the little room with the painting on the wall, but for all real intents and purposes, I was in counseling all the time, for five years.

The hardest was my time at the hospital. I joined the ranks of the meandering in 2017, just after finishing college, and stayed there eight months, when I had originally told myself I would not be there longer than three.

It was a strange place. Listless, and with an overlying feeling of futility that permeated the walls and seeped into the buffet-style lunches. Imagine yourself eating baked haddock and potatoes twelve times a month while you walk in and out of therapy and tell me that the mental health system in this country doesn’t have a tenuous grasp on what is good and healthy.

I spent my time in my room, in the connector between the patio and the dining room, or in the library, trying to recapture the vivacity of life I had once found so ingrained within me that going to a mental health facility would have been an adventure, instead of a reason to clutch my head in my hands.

The people were intelligent and stubborn, and constantly afflicted by what seemed to me as a washing current of book sense that felt inescapably linked to an answer to the desperate cry and yawning abyss that held us all in its fist.

It was there that I saw Dr. Skill, and I spent an hour a day, four days a week, berating him with the conviction that I had destroyed myself.

He was exceptionally bent on getting a handle on what was going on, going so far as to ask me if he could write about me for an upcoming book, a few days before I left. I said yes, and sometimes wonder if that was a mistake, but do not dedicate too much time to this question, as I know that I cannot know the answer until later in life, perhaps never. But Dr. Skill supplied me with his own strange thoughts as a way to help me see that not everything that springs into mind has the life-wielding power that I attribute to it, and listened to my catalog of confusions, hurts, and convictions about universal insights with a determined insistence that I appreciated, even if I felt it was not helping much.

I left the hospital in November, and started working with Bob within the week. He told me that he was entirely full in terms of patients, but that he had made room for me because he felt a duty to help, since he believed that he could. This was rather startling to me, but I don’t think the full impact of what he was saying has really penetrated my self-obsession until now. This is a man who knows he is only going to get a measly sum from my insurance company, who is already stretched thin by his numerous patients, who doesn’t need to see me, and yet, does, because he believes that he should.

As children, it is easy for us to say ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’. As we get older, that line clouds and blurs, sometimes vanishing for periods of time. But some people find it again, and for those people, that strength is all the stronger for being lost for a period of time. Sometimes I worry that that strength is gone from me, but that is not the matter of this, or if it is, it doesn’t need to be said.

I used to write in color. My writing was full of innovative ways of storytelling, not to douse myself in ribbons, but my writing was full, it was brightly painted, and it was marked by moments that I describe as looking into the bottom of a well and seeing the pool of water at the bottom. Over the past few years, I feel that that has not been the case. I blame it on school, I blame it on my mental health, I blame it on my thoughts and my experiences, I blame it on therapy.

I know that therapy is helping. I see in my day to day, I hear it in the jokes I make, and in the moments in between episodes of anxiety. I live the results of my therapy. But sometimes, I wonder if my writing will ever be as colorful and hit as hard as those stories I wrote when I was nineteen. The Hawaii stories, as they seem outlined to me in my mind. Maybe they will not. Maybe that color is something that cannot withstand the effort and the work that goes into growing up. The one thing that keeps me standing up is the knowledge that I am still writing, even if it isn’t as Neverlandesque as it once was. Even if my stories now pronounce the day to day, instead of the world to world. It is not a terrible thing, to go through something. It must be good to talk to someone. I don’t think that anyone ever died from going to therapy. I hope that the realness remains. I hope that the beauty and mystery of life is not gone. And I plug away, knowing that no matter where I am going, I am going somewhere.

Type type type. Type type.