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This Too Shall Pass

© Faith Hamby

Some weeks, therapy doesn't come soon enough.

You spend your week wading through some psychotherapeutical purgatory where they've set up a couple of fog machines and everything turns into this blind obstacle course where you're just happy if you don't knock into too many corners on your way from point A to point B. You can't stomach your own company, much less anyone else's, and the slick voices in your head sputter and kick in like a furnace, whispering their winter warnings.

You would, though you hate to admit it, eat your pride if you could just talk to your therapist for ten minutes. Less. If what they had to say could slow the merry-go-round of your world enough to jump off it. You need five minutes--just five--for someone outside of yourself to right your mind long enough to know the comfort of having the floor be the floor and the ceiling the ceiling, instead of the other way around.

And then, without warning, you're fine. The sun burns high. The air is limber and clear. So are you. You can no longer remember what all the fuss was about.

Even after nearly a year in therapy, I still find myself racing around that pattern. Except now, I've graduated. My therapy sessions come bi-monthly. And every two weeks, after therapy, I dive into the deep end of the pool and try to swim its length all in one breath. Unless I'm good, unless I'm real good and have practiced, I break the water, gasping for breath, before I ever reach the other side of the pool.

This week, I didn't even make it halfway.

I still find it hard to admit I need therapy. To want something so desperately. And to know I can't have it. To be caught up in a cloud of anxiety and pointless twitching that I, the person who has always been able to handle anything, cannot handle. My husband calls me fidgety. I feel as if my skin could crawl off and walk away, and I'd be thankful for it. I'm insufferable, even to myself, and I can only imagine what it's like to live with me.

Early in therapy, my therapist tried to help me deal with this pattern. A common pattern, she insisted, among patients. She told me the story of Solomon's ring. A story as common as my ups and downs. Of how King Solomon sent his advisor out to find.... Well, here the stories differ. But what the advisor came back with was a ring with the inscription: This too shall pass.

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