In therapy the other day I prefaced a statement I was about to make with, “This is going to sound insane.”
I’ve been going to therapy for a long time. I got my first therapist when I was 16. It was at my parents’ suggestion - I was a pretty depressed kid at a time when kids were propped up to be limitless and full of nothing but potential. This was 1994. I was part of that “You Can Do Anything” generation. Those kids who fell between millenials and the more disaffected Gen Xers. Our parents weren’t exactly boomers. They missed Vietnam and didn’t really have particularly strong feelings on it. They voted for Nixon when they reached voting age and started realizing they were being lied to during Reagan’s time. Being depressed, acting out, etc...it wasn’t what their kids were supposed to do. We were supposed to be presidents, somehow. All of us.
My therapist’s name was James Dean. I thought that was cool. I thought therapy was cool. None of my friends went to therapists. I’d pretend like I was smarter than James Dean until he one day told me that I equated love with physical things and not necessarily with emotional things. I never went back.
When I say I’ve been going to therapy on and off for 25 years I’m not saying I experienced therapy. A lot of the time, I just sat there being big and being smart and honestly lying quite a bit until the person sitting across from me said something real; and then I stopped going.
About four years ago I started taking therapy as seriously as one possibly could. It was after a panic attack, after a suicide attempt, and after I decided that I wanted to be alive. And taking therapy seriously meant never lying and always listening and sometimes prefacing what I was about to say with, “This is going to sound fucking insane.”
This time, though, what I was about to say sounded more fucking insane than anything I’d ever said: at a certain time of my life, on and off between the ages of 19 and 32, I seriously believed there was a chance that I’d find out I was the second coming of Christ when I turned 33.
I put that out there like a grenade and watched as my therapist helped me find some truths. Turns out what I said wasn’t insane; it was a small piece of a larger picture of loneliness.
A good therapist can spend years listening and then help you put the pieces together. It’s not that I thought I was actually gonna be a Messiah. It’s just that I had spent my entire life imagining a different, less lonely life.
My childhood was spent constructing whole worlds with dolls and action figures. Taking hours to set a scene for hundreds of individual toys, to play out elaborate epics where I was one of the characters. Glomming on to Jim Henson’s every creation. Writing small poems and stories that turned into books upon books of big poems and stories, each one about myself. Imagining myself in a world where I was the one who had created the things I liked and was in control of how people treated me. Feeling entitled as I got older, feeling like I DESERVED. Getting to a point where I misconstrued my knack for spotting an opportunity for hearing the voice of actual God. And in the meantime, when things went sideways in my personal life, I’d lie about it to people while trying to fix it. When people went bad in my life, I’d lie about them while trying to fix them. When I went sideways, I’d lie about me while trying to fix me.
I never felt like I was part of something, and so I invented worlds that centered me, and lived life as if people were missing out on what I had.
I can explore the ways in which I never felt like a part of something for thousands of pages. For now I’ll just say that I was always on the periphery, which in some ways is worse than being on the outside. I always had a best friend, but I was never a best friend. There was always a little bit of hope, but there was also a constant reminder that I wasn’t part of someone else’s hope.
And man, did that carry into my relationships. I couldn’t bring myself to end any of them. My therapist from four years ago told me that I have a habit of picking up strays; that I can’t end toxic relationships because I have a need to fix them. But, I don’t pick up strays. My current therapist helped me realize this.
I was the stray.
I needed someone to need me. I had a sense of what it would feel like, and I chased it. I wanted disciples. I wanted to be a messiah.
I never found a disciple. But I did find friends. I found someone who loved me.
I’m not very lonely these days, and I can look back on my life and realize what loneliness really feels like.
