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@ -45,413 +45,11 @@ Told in the form of journal entries after long online conversations, complete wi
## Story
I wrap emotions in the cool embrace of jargon to soften sharp edges and take the sting out of ones I feel too keenly. It's why I got into this field. It's why I studied what I did. Of course I care for my patients, and of course I love what I do, but my reason for being here, for being a psychologist, is a simple insatiable need to explain away my emotions.
I've talked about it with my therapist at length - we all have them, therapist-therapists, and you should never trust a therapist who does not. We talk about my need to hide behind words as a way of reducing my vulnerability. They become armor, when taken in this sense.
There's a tension, then, between these two explanations: to put it the way I did at the beginning is to allow words to be a useful tool to define the edges of my emotions and perhaps make them easier to digest and understand in the process.
To hear Jeremy's suggestion, though, my words are a means by which I might reduce my responsibility to actually feel the emotions I try to define.
Thus me, sitting here on my lunch break, writing journal entries on my phone.
Despite the utility I know there to be within the act of journaling, something which I've recommended to countless patients of mine, it's never quite something that I've picked up for myself. I always felt like maybe I was supposed to do something *more* than just write about what I had done during the day, so I'd go off onto long philosophical tangents like this, and then I'd start to feel guilty for not writing about what I'd done during the day. No matter what, it felt like I was doing something wrong, like I was incorrectly doing the thing I knew how to describe to those who looked to me for instruction.
When I'd brought this fact up to Jeremy, he laughed and called me a "fucking nerd" and then talked me through what we thought my goals should be:
* I should write about the feelings that I have during the day until I've finished a complete thought about them, and then stop.
* If an event comes up, I should feel free to record it, but not feel obligated to.
It sounds almost simplistic, but I get what he's doing. He's giving me permission to write about feelings instead of actions, to not feel bad about, as he put it, "leaning on \[my\] upbringing and the way \[I\] think in complete sentences and five paragraph essays". Of course, along with that, he wants me to actually feel things and process them rather than just wrap them up with a label and set them on a shelf. Use the things that are my strong suits to bolster the things that I'm weak at.
So, what am I weak at?
I think I'm weak at processing my emotions in a way that feels like growth. I wrap them up in words and I try to talk my way through processing them, but it's a performative sort of vulnerability that doesn't lead to any growth. As a result, I wind up in one of two situations:
* I feel the same things over and over again with no change in how I process them; or
* I feel new things that I've never felt before, and rather than try to understand them, I shove them off to the side.
The latter is something that I've been making some progress at recently, as I learn to improve my emotional literacy, but the former is a habit that I need to break.
To go along with this task, then, what are my strengths?
I think that Jeremy pinned them down quite neatly. I think that my upbringing, strict as it was, instilled in me a sense of duty - first to my parents, then to my school, then to God and my time in seminary, and now to my patients. Also, he is not wrong in joking about thinking in essays; being so bound up in language is a net positive in that it allows me to take what patients tell me and turn it into something actionable for them, just as it previously allowed me to take the scripture that I read and turn it around through hermeneutics and truly understand it in a way that simply living as a believer would not.
Alright, so how can I build up the weaker portion of myself with my strengths?
I think that the best way to put the goal is to use my language skills to journal about emotions so that I have a record. If I could study scripture and study psychology, then surely I can study my own notes and from there, learn and grow to handle my emotions in a more deliberate and constructive fashion, right? Basically, write what I feel and how I react so that next time I can react better.
All of this, however many hundreds of words, all because I told Jeremy that I think I have a crush on a girl and didn't know what to do about it.
Ah well, I suppose that this has already been therapeutic, in its own way. I have a task I can set for myself, and, knowing me, all I need to do is let my sense of duty loose on it and we'll see if it bears any fruit in the weeks and months to come.
-----
I have noticed over the years that we tend to place benches in the strangest of places. I noticed this at seminary, those years ago back in Chicago. The placement of benches ought to be deliberate. There ought to be some sort of goal in putting them where we do. A bench placed in a part with a careful view across the grass, through the trees, down the street would be ideal. You could look at the kits playing in the grass, the trees moving in the breeze, down the bustling street. Instead, we place them facing buildings along sidewalks.
Or, here at work, we place them facing a parking lot. I know, of course, that this bench is here because it is intended to be a place to wait for someone to come pick you up in our car-ridden town. I *know* this, and yet this bench feels so fantastically pointless. There is one in front of short-term parking which feels far more apt a place for such a thing, but no, perhaps that was not enough: this one is along the side of the building, facing that overflow portion of the lot that on some days sees no use at all.
There is this occasional trend along certain places of the Internet, I've been told, of seeking out so-called liminal places. I think that the term is ill-fitting, as liminality has a very specific meaning. I do not think that many of the places described as liminal that show up on social media and forums on the 'net are liminal so much as abandoned and vaguely spooky. They are not a place between, they are not a place one transits, not a border. They are simply poorly lit or forgotten.
The important thing about liminality, though, is not that a place be forgotten and certainly that it not be in any way scary, but that it should slip and slide beneath your interest. Liminality requires some form of passing through, It needs to be a border that you cross or a place that you enter for the sole purpose of exiting. Abandoned shopping malls are not literal. A barn, canted awkwardly to the side with age, standing alone in a field is not liminal.
A parking lot is liminal. An airport is liminal. A drive-thru is liminal. These are the spaces that exist only to be traversed. They are the spaces where, should you get stuck in them, you will be struck by the unnerving quality of the experience. They are not places that you visit. They are places that, should you visit, you will feel unwelcome because they resist the idea of doing so. They push back at you, in some intangible way, and say: "You are not meant to be here."
I am stalling.
It's perhaps a little strange that I seem to get the most out of journaling during my lunch breaks. To me, it feels as though I ought to be doing something so personal and introspective back at home, rather than sitting out on that awkwardly-placed bench in front of the office in that liminal parking lot, but there is something about the discomfort of that place combined with me already being in the therapeutic mindset that makes this the ideal situation.
I am stalling, though, because I know that it is easier for me to get caught up in words than to actually do the work at hand. Perhaps I am in the mind of liminality because this idea of liking someone, of wanting to pursue a relationship, is so new to me.
I have long since acknowledged that, despite my ability to listen actively and to guide patients through therapy, I am insufferable. I do not mean to denigrate myself in this. It is a fact and I am comfortable with my role in life. I am autistic and comfortable with all that comes with that (indeed, it works to my advantage in my professional life as I work primarily with other autistic animals). I have few friends outside of a professional context. I do not enjoy drinking. I am devoutly religious. I suspect, for some whom I met at university and seminary, even at the boarding school before that, that I am out of place for being so 'low' a species in such lofty places as those, for such are the places for the cats and dogs of the world, not a coyote who has, in their mind, pried himself up from the blue-collar professions of his ancestors or some imagined poverty.
Along with all of this, however, has come with a necessary distance from romance and relationships. This is another thing that I am comfortable with. The celibacy that was in my future at seminary was not a thing that I was in any way uncomfortable with, and when I moved on from that life I saw no reason to change that. I do not enjoy the word 'single', because that implies something 'less than' in today's society. I am happy alone.
Occasionally I will pick up the occasional romantic twinge, and when I do, I will cherish it. I will sit with that feeling and enjoy it, and then I will put it up on some shelf within me to be a part of my life, and yet in some way apart from it. It is not unlike praying in that sense: God is always a part of my life, and yet is apart from it. I do not subscribe to many of the modern evangelical takes on religion, wherein god is within you, but something far more conservative and old-fashioned. God is beside me, perhaps. Above me. He is with me, but not within me.
Another way to look at this is perhaps that these feelings are embers, or the smoldering of paper that has not yet caught fire into a relationship. You can see the faint tint of red crawling along the fibers of the paper, and yes, I suppose that you could blow on it and coax it into something more, but better, for me, to watch it slowly consume the paper, enjoy the beauty of the ember and the delicacy of the papery ash it leaves behind, and then, once it has gone out, acknowledge that it has left me a new person.
That, however, is not what Kay has done. She has flared into my life as a bright spark. It is not the slow crawl of smolder along paper but the bright flash of magnesium caught fire. Unstoppable. Undousable. Inevitable.
This - this and the fact that that we both have what sound like single letters for names, Kay and Dee - is why I brought her up to Jeremy, this brightly burning light in my life that has suddenly claimed me. This feeling is new. I have had what I had assumed 'crushes' were before, but to be smitten is a very new feeling for me, one that I do not quite know how to approach.
Kay and I met during the last year of her undergrad and the first year of my graduate studies at UI Sawtooth. She had taken a job in the campus library to help pay her way through school, working in the interlibrary loan office, a service that I was starting to use more in earnest.
That's three years gone now, though, and that this was not a love-at-first-site situation clouded my judgement somewhat when I started to pick up so intense a set of emotions. When one feels a yearning that saps one's strength, one expects that this is to be fairytale-level pining. Love at first sight. Smitten by looks. Utterly taken with the ways in which one speaks.
But no, when I first met Kay, I had made a mental note that she was a conventionally attractive coyote, no-nonsense and to the point, a fastidious dresser, and almost frighteningly competent. I read in her some of the same facets of autism that I see within myself, and I suspect much of her quiet efficiency stemmed from the fact that she, like me, often found herself feeling insufferable. It has taken me training and practice to soften my voice, to understand expressions, postures, and the vocal tics that make up people. I feel myself to be an empathetic person, a fact which drove me first to seminary and then to psychology, but to actually connect that with those around me on an individual basis took effort.
I freely admit that the ILL office was not necessarily the type of place where one focuses on exemplary customer service, but still, this did not seem to be something that Kay was interested in in the slightest. She was there to do her job, do it quickly, and do it well. After a few visits picking up and returning books, I decided that I would try to befriend her and find out how much we had in common.
Was this some early expression of my feelings toward her? I do not know. I do not remember feeling in any way romantic toward her at the time, yet for me to deliberately seek friendship from someone was not a thing that I might otherwise have done. I do remember thinking at the time that had I asked her to talk over a coffee would have carried such connotations, so instead, the next time I had an order of books to pick up, I simply asked her major.
For some reason, I remember that she had been in the middle of typing something when I had asked, claws clicking on the keys, and that she had stopped and blinked rapidly at the screen, and I imagined thoughts crunching into gear within her head.
"Music," she had said. "Music composition, actually. Why do you ask?"
I shrugged. "I don't know. I just always seem to wind up talking with you here, so I was wondering. You don't seem like one of the salaried employees."
Her smile was wry as she replied, "I'm not, no."
I don't remember if we talked about anything else that day, and there were not any stand-out conversations over the next however many times I saw her in the office, though we soon started talking every time I came by and the few times I saw her in passing both in the library and on campus. At some point, we simply...became friends. I do not know whether we would have done so without me having acted with the intent to do so. Perhaps we would have. I do not remember thinking about intent-of-friendship much after that first conversation, so perhaps all it took was that opening question.
We slid effortlessly into a routine of Friday lunches. I went to a few concerts with her, though she knew far more about the music being played than I and I often felt in over my head as we listened to the instrumentalists on stage. I was surprised to find on the first concert that she wore earplugs throughout. I did not find the music to be too loud, but she explained to me that it kept her from getting overwhelmed.
Finally, I had the chance to attend her senior recital, where several other students from the various departments performed a few short compositions of hers. The music was cerebral and, to my ears, dissonant, but it was as fastidious as her in a way that I cannot explain. I applauded heartily and after the show we hugged and she invited me out to drinks with her family, who all proved quite friendly and much like her. Thinking back, I suspect that must have made quite the sight: four coyotes sitting around a table at a fairly nice restaurant, speaking in essays to expound on whatever thesis has come into their heads.
Spending time with other autistic folks was not a strange occurrence to me, as I had known a few in seminary and had of course met several in my training, but for some reason, that night was the first time I could say that I felt comfortable in that portion of my identity. I felt at home with others, and, strange as it seems to say, rather like a member of their family.
My lunch break is nearing its end, out here in the liminal lot, so I should probably hold off from writing any more, but I should note before I do that it *is* interesting that much of what I describe here in retrospect bespeaks an early attraction that I had not at the time attributed to budding romance or anything like that. Perhaps it was, in the end.
-----
It is a Saturday today and I have no clients, so I am attempting to write at home rather than on a bench somewhere, and am actually using my computer for it this time rather than swiping my thumbpad across a phone screen. I have to admit that I feel very strange writing like this. It feels almost like a violation of a habit, despite having only been at this for a few days.
I have put some further thought into what I wrote about yesterday, about the fact that there may have been some hints at romance or a crush or what-have-you prior to the time when Kay moved away.
I do not think that, at the time, I was thinking in terms of romance, and I also don't think that it was on Kay's mind either. Her parents may have been of the mind that we might have been going out with each other, but I do not know.
However, I am also not sure that my conscious self was entirely in line with my subconscious at the time. I speak now in retrospect, of course, and at the moment I know very much that they often seem to float closer and further away from each other in terms of agreement, so I do wonder whether or not my subconscious was heading deeper into a desire for more than friendship.
This means that there are two possible scenarios to consider:
* My subconscious mind was starting to, as a client put it the other day, catch feelings, and thus the situation I find myself in now has a longer history than expected
* The history behind this current set of emotions has some later starting point and the way in which Kay and I became friends has no bearing on the present other than as an interesting story.
If the former is the case, then I think it is worth some introspection as to what about our in-person interactions might have drawn me to her romantically. As I mentioned, she was frightfully smart. She was kind. She was not unattractive, either, and as a coyote, certainly someone who ought to have been in the market for me (I know that many of the more liberal bent are increasingly okay with interspecies relationships, but, liberal as I try to be, my time upbringing and my time within the church seem to have set me on the straight and narrow path, here).
If the latter is the case, however, then I have to wonder why it is that such feelings did not form until distance became an issue, for less than a month after that dinner with Kay and her parents, she moved away from UI Sawtooth to prepare for her masters at UI Boise and our communication moved almost entirely to email and PostFast messages. I know that we tried to call once or twice, but neither of us is particularly keen on phones.
When I speak with my patients struggling with anxiety disorders, one of the exercises that I have them perform after a panic attack is to walk back to when the panic attack started and write down what they were doing and how they were feeling. Once they have done that a few times, they can look for similarities in the reports, and then they can start walking back further from the starting point of the attack in order to discover potential triggers. Knowing those, they can begin working on coping and avoidance mechanisms.
I know that I am trying to justify to myself my work on this journal so far, but I think that this is part of what I am doing here. I am not sure that I necessarily want to cope or avoid these feelings that I'm having, necessarily, but I do want to at least understand better when they began, and by understanding the past, better understand the present.
So, in that spirit, I think the first time I noticed this crush on Kay was perhaps six months ago. I remember having spent an evening talking with her about music, about which she has been slowly teaching me, both of us sending each other videos to watch and counting down from three so that we could hit play at the same time and talk about what we were both hearing as it happened.
After the conversation, I had gone to bed thinking that there was something about that particular interaction that felt oddly intimate to me, and when I lay in bed, instead of falling asleep quickly as usual, I spent a while thinking back to her senior recital and that hug that we shared after. In particular, I was thinking about the combination of the feeling of her cheekfur, soft and dry against my own, and her scent.
The room, as with most venues, had had quite a bit of scent-block in place, and I know that that sort of non-scent had a tendency to cling to for a while after having been in a room where it had been layered on quite thick.
However, while the audience had been sitting still and watching the concert, Kay had been up on the stage for much of the performance, conducting, playing the piano, and speaking about the music she had written and I suspect that that combined with any nerves she may have felt prior to and during the performance must have had her a bit worked up, for she smelled more strongly than I'm sure I did.
I remember laying in bed, breathing shallowly as I tried to recall that scent in its most intricate details. My thoughts became fractal in my weariness and I found myself refining and refining my memories. Did she smell of exertion? Did she smell of cleanliness? Did she smell fresh? She smelled of all three, so what were the percentages of each within her scent as a whole.
I remember feeling a pang in my chest as I realized that I wanted to experience that again. That scent, the feeling of her cheek against mine. I wanted it desperately. I craved that moment, drawn out and extended.
I am no stranger to sexual fantasies. I have had them plenty in my life, and am not ashamed to admit that, but the thing that sticks with me about this night of fantasizing is that there was nothing sexual about it. I did not fantasize about Kay and I some day having sex, of all the things we might do along those lines. Instead, I fantasized about hugging her, breathing deep, then leaning back and, for some reason, brushing my thumb over her cheek.
I don't know why, but that night, that act picked up a talismanic significance, as though were I to perform the ritual - the hug, the breath, the brush through fur - in precisely the correct way, I might somehow feel a light more intense than the sun wash through me, feel a rush of fulfillment, feel a sense of rightness and completion.
Finally, I remember praying. I remember speaking to God and holding in tension my words to Him and these feelings that I was having. I remember asking Him what this meant. What, O Lord, does it mean to desire fulfillment from another person? I do not want to possess them. I do not want to lay with them. I am not even sure that I love them. I just want to be happy with them, and yet in such a specific way. What does it mean?
The little voice through which God speaks to me was silent. I was not surprised - the domain of God's works are not the petty interpersonal relationships between individuals but rather whether or not their lives are lived in grace or in sin, and whether or not they strive to bring grace to the world around them.
I was not surprised, but I was, admittedly, disappointed. I try not to be disappointed in the ways of the Lord, of course. It's not His job to solve my problems, and to expect him to do so is silly.
I perhaps just wanted some guidance.
-----
I took Sunday off to focus on church, but I have two things of note today:
The first is that I sent the previous entries that I have written to Jeremy. I will include his full response to me here:
> Dee
>
> Good to hear from you, man! I applaud the work that you've done so far here. I know that it can be really hard to buckle down and get to the actual work of parsing your feelings, but this is really great stuff. I like that you are using the journal entries to get out some of your current feelings that don't just surround this crush, though I also like that you call yourself out on stalling. You have talked before about struggling with emotional literacy, and I have to say, I think you're doing a stellar job of improving on your skills. Keep up the good work and try to employ more of that vocabulary where possible.
>
> One thing I do want to mention however, and don't take this as a knock about what you've got down already, is that I think a great next step would be for you to tackle what it is that you're feeling *now*. You've told a really coherent tale of how you got here, and now it's important that you focus on what you're feeling at the moment. Pry at some of those threads and follow them to see where they go. Here are some questions to get you started:
>
> * You mention your feelings on God not providing you the guidance that you wish you had. I here you, and I know that can be frustrating. Perhaps one thing you could look into is your own response to your feelings on Kay within the context of your spirituality. Do you your beliefs influence your thoughts on her? Do you feel that being a spiritual person has an effect on your relationship to her?
> * When last we spoke, you mentioned that you weren't sure that these feelings were "real". What do "real feelings" mean to you? What quality keeps these feelings from being "real"?
> * From the outside, you seem stuck. You don't seem to want to push for something more between you and Kay, and you certainly don't want to pull back from her. The next step in this project should be to find actionable paths forward. Why don't you start by simply enumerating options. What could moving forward look like? What might stepping back look like?
>
> Seriously buddy, this is really great stuff. Not usually what I see in journals, but you've always been a heck of a writer.
>
> Remember to breathe!
>
> Jeremy
>
> This electronic mail message and all attachments may contain confidential information belonging to the sender or the intended recipient. This information is intended ONLY for the use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distributing (electronic or otherwise), forwarding or taking any action in reliance on the contents of the information is strictly prohibited. If you have received this electronic transmission in error, please immediately notify the sender by telephone, facsimile or email and delete the information from your computer.
Jeremy brings up a lot of very good points and I will admit that I am both pleased that he has recognized the work that I have done already (and that he apparently enjoyed my writing) and also a little frustrated that I still have so far to go. However, I recognize that the latter sensation there is a fallacy and the result of me not being mindful and in the moment. The mind is ever drawn to conclusions and finales, when in reality, this is a process, not an end goal to be achieved. He is very careful in his writing there, in that he specifies that I should "see where they go" and "what could moving forward look like". This is very process-oriented language, and something that I would do well to engage with, myself.
I can also tell that he is gently nudging me away from being hung up on the past. I know that that hug with Kay has stuck with me, and that I have done a very good job on latching onto moments when we have gotten particularly close or that she has shown me a level or quality of attention that has felt particularly fulfilling. It is important to have good memories, but it is also important to not stagnate.
The second item of note is that I had a dream about Kay last night.
Dreams are such nothing things. At best, they represent a means by which the unconscious mind adapts to stressors in order to build up defense mechanisms, and at worse they represent random firings of neurons in the sleeping brain --- neurons that perhaps fired rather a lot during the day.
Dreams are such nothing things, and yet to them we pin so much meaning.
I dreamed that Kay and I were back at her senior recital, except that she was sitting next to me in the audience instead of up on stage, and we were watching her works being performed together. We were silent, rapt. The whole audience was rapt. The works were of breathtaking beauty[0] and when they were finished, the applause was so uproarious that she was not able to make it back up to the stage to take her bow. I tried to help her, but she got separated from me and was drawn off.
She did not seem displeased by this, however when I called after her, I, as in so many other dreams we *all* have, had no voice. I was barely able to manage a whisper, and my muscles grew so weak and my limbs so heavy that I fell over and that's when I woke up.
Powerlessness, separation, falling, these are all common features in dreams, and yet I am pretty firmly in the school of dream interpretation being largely bunk. Sleep is a protective action for the body, and dreaming is just the same for the mind. It is unguided, and serves to provide a break from taxing both our physical and our mental forms.
But we are so hard-wired to read deeper meanings into the mindless mutterings of countless neurons. "What does it mean that she was sitting next to me? Does it mean anything in particular that we were separated from each other? Why did I become so weak without her presence?" Some part of me craves answers to these questions and so many more, but there are no answers to be had because they are non-questions. They are questions one might ask the sky supposing only that that is where God resides.
Dreaming of someone that you have a crush on means absolutely nothing, and yet it certainly feels like it must mean a lot. It has left me with a lot to think about and a lot to feel whether I want it to or not.
[0] Not that they weren't very good at the time, of course, though they were certainly beyond my ability as an active listener, and beauty often seemed not to be the goal. She tried to teach me about them, once, but we are not built the same.
-----
It's been a few days, and while the dream has not come back, it still clings to me like a scent. When laying in bed, drowsy and sleepless I will find myself exploring that space over and over again. Did I touch her? Did I smell her? I know that I was attuned to her presence, but did I even get a good look at her?
I do not know. So much left me in the seconds after I woke up that I'm left with the vague outlines of a plot and so many half-remembered sensations.
Today I write because I had therapy with Jeremy, and the skunk and I had rather a lot of time to sit and talk through what has been going on. Strange that I did not start with the topic, despite it being so on my mind, but it felt strange, cliché perhaps, for me to launch right into, "Doctor, I had the strangest dream."
Instead, I picked up a thread from an earlier appointment that we had had. It feels a little strange to write about it here, given that this journal has as yet mostly been about Kay and my feelings toward her, but then, this was never intended to be the sole purpose for it. The goal was for me to use it as a tool to improve my emotional literacy when describing my own feelings. It's why I suggest that many of my clients consider journaling, as well.
The thread we picked up is an old one: I have been trying to sort out my feelings around leaving seminary to head into this field. It's been years now, of course, but guilt is tenacious and difficult to disentangle from shame.
I think the thing that I still struggle with the most is that I left on such a whim.
I do very little on a whim. I plan and organize and I watch and wait until I find just the right moment to act and then I do so, and yet to go from being a seminarian to not in the span of a few short days --- the decision was all but instantaneous, and then it was a matter of paperwork --- to this day feels incredibly unlike me.
There are days in which it feels like a dream, not in that I don't believe it, so much as the lack of engagement with the idea beforehand did not give my mind time to prepare and internalize the enormity of what I was doing, and so even these many years later, I catch myself beginning those internal dialogs, setting up argument after argument for why I should leave my chosen path for another, and then with an electric jolt, or the sensation of missing a stair on a staircase, or perhaps the rush of a near accident on the road, I realize that the thing I am trying to rationalize has already been completed: the battery contacts bridged, the step missed, the red light ran. I have already left and there is no arguments to be made.
And then, as with today, I struggle to try and justify this decision to myself. I have talked with Jeremy --- the skunk is an atheist, but well read in many religions --- and I have talked with my fellows in the church and I have talked with God. The church would welcome me back, I think, were I to want such a thing, and I have not abandoned God. If anything, I have grown closer to Him since leaving the path to priesthood.
But that door nonetheless seems shut to me. I made the decision, however brashly, and there is nothing more to be done. It was the *right* decision, too. It was right at the time and it remains so to this day. Something snapped within me and I realized that the church's insistence on being a guiding force only in the lives of the followers of the church --- a church whose attendance has been steadily declining these last hundred years --- does not mesh well with the message we profess to espouse. Help, yes. Feed the hungry, clothe the poor, house the homeless. But not guide. Guidance comes from God, we were taught at that school, and so any guidance that we as mere mortals might provide must perforce come in the fashion of encouraging believers to strengthen their faith and for non-believers to become believers.
I know that, in practice, many of the clergy do in fact provide guidance on a much more earthly level than they were taught in seminary, but to me, to poor Dee Kimana who follows the rules too literally, that this goal was not stated outright felt like we were being taught to construct a wall between those within the church who were somehow more worthy of learning how to live fuller, more complete lives, and those outside who were, in some unspoken way, not.
The rightness isn't the problem, it was the speed. It was the ease of the decision. How could I possible have known that that was the right thing to do? I jumped ship from my path toward the clergy and straight into a masters program in psychology. Helpful for providing guidance, yes, but what could possibly have caused me to act so far outside the norm?
It was at this point that Jeremy got a strange look on his face and I stopped talking. He said something along the lines of, "Why are you talking about this, Dee?"
I remember shrugging and saying, "It's still on my mind. I've been thinking a lot about how it is that we know what the right decision is."
"Yes," he replied. "But why are you talking about a snap decision when you can't make any decision about Kay?"
This hit me in a strange way. I wanted to roll my eyes and say that this was precisely the problem I was facing, that the problem was that the decision came to me with no forethought. However, a therapist usually does not go out of their way to wrong-foot a client without there being more to the question, and so I motioned for him to continue.
"You are a very deliberate person, there is no denying that. You live your entire life in a deliberate fashion. I think we would both agree that your leaving seminary was sudden, yes, but still deliberate." He paused and waited for me to nod. "But when you talk about your feelings on Kay, all of that falls away. You waffle and equivocate and stay put, never moving forward."
"I'm trying, though. That's why I've been writing."
"You haven't sent me your latest entries --- no, no need to do so now --- but that is what I nudged you on when you sent me the last batch. You're doing good work in trying to put words to what you're feeling and I'm proud of how much you've accomplished in just a few weeks, but none of what you sent me felt like you were getting any closer to a decision."
Jeremy is a very good therapist, and he has an innate quality to his voice that allows him to say things such as that in a non-accusatory way. It is a thing that I have to focus very hard on when talking with my clients. We rarely want to accuse our clients of doing or not doing something, but strive instead to induce introspection. I would have had to add a "Why is that?" to the end of that same sentence to take the sting out of it, but the he can do it just in normal conversation.
"I suppose that there is a lack of conviction." I was speaking slowly hunting for words, which Jeremy picked up on.
"Is conviction what is missing?"
"No, you're right. I do have the conviction that I have a thing for Kay, but I am still missing something."
I was not able to come up with the word for it during the session, but I think I have it now: I am missing the basis for my feelings. They are not grounded in anything. Yes, she's a friend. Yes, we share similarities. Yes, she's attractive and my species and a potential partner.
But there's no real basis for these feelings. All of those things were true when we met. They were all true when we hugged after her senior recital. They remain true today. Nothing has changed in our communications other than them moving primarily online and occasionally over voice or video, and yet out of nowhere I suddenly have this enormous desire for her. Not physical desire, though I would not turn down the intimacy, but a desire for her presence. A longing.
There is a concept that I think touches on this set of feelings, which is that of limerence. As long as I am to work on my emotional literacy, it is best that I start trying to name what I feel. To call what I feel a 'crush' feels inexact. It is not puppy love. It is not new relationship energy. It is not lust. It is an uncontrollable romantic desire.
It is not grounded in our friendship or my attraction to her. It is more of an obsession. A desperate need for her to feel the same way about me. A craving. A pang. A wildness of the heart that is as frightening as it is pleasant.
It is an unmoored, unmooring thing, drawing me ever upwards in lazy, undirected arcs almost --- *almost* --- against my will, ever closer to the sun.
These are things that I am thinking now that I am in my quiet, liminal bench. I didn't have the words then, on the spot in the middle of therapy, but I will have to bring them up next session.
We talked for a bit longer on the subject, but as the time drew to a close, Jeremy suggested, "I think you should talk to Kay soon. Why don't you see if you can bring up how you feel about her some time before we meet next? It doesn't have to be an attempt to start a relationship or anything. Even just telling her that you've been thinking about her would be a good step forward."
So I suppose that is what is on my plate. She and I talk every day, these days, and so I will have plenty of opportunity to do so. Perhaps I will aim to do so tomorrow, as I'd like to see how I feel when talking to her tonight without bringing this up, knowing that doing so in the future is a hard and fast goal for me.
-----
I was not able to do it.
Kay just went to bed after we spent much of the night talking over text, and I just wasn't able to bring myself to bring up the way I feel about her.
It's maddening. I've never been so frustrated by the fact that I felt I was putting on a charade. It is not dissimilar from masking, which I do often during therapy with clients, but have never had to do with Kay until recently. Why would I have to pretend to be some sort of normal around a friend? And yet here I am, pretending I'm not falling asleep thinking about holding her paw every night.
Holding her paw! What garbage.
I talk with her like I talk with strangers, at least whenever we near this topic. I make a stranger out of myself, it seems, though she has not said anything about the way I have been acting. I reread each message countless times before sending it just to make sure that it is plausibly normal, that I am not in some way tipping my hand, that I am being kind without being intrusive, that I am being invested without being obsessed.
I am not comfortable with this change in myself, but I will continue to work on it.
What we did talk about, however, was much of what I spoke about with Jeremy yesterday, about how I left seminary. She knew this fact, of course. I am not secretive about my spirituality, of course, just as she is not shy about her lack thereof.
What she did not know, however, was that I had left willingly. At some point along the way, she had picked up on the idea that perhaps I had been ushered out unwillingly. When pressed as to why, she said, "Oh, I don't know. I suppose I had guessed that you were gay or into out-species relationships or something."
My reply: "Oh goodness, no. Not something I particularly have a problem, but I can confirm that my preferences remain quite straight and quite coyote." This probably would have been the best time for me to broach the topic, but I can point to this spot definitively as where I chickened out. Instead, I continued, "What lead to that assessment? I'm curious."
"I'm not sure. You're a bit hard to read, perhaps, and so I took that as there being some sort of internal conflict."
"I think I'm just terrible at communicating," I replied.
"Also a possibility!"
From there I explained much of what I had talked about earlier, about how I started to doubt the church, rather than my faith or scriptures, and yet how my decision to leave had come suddenly enough to surprise even myself.
Now that I write this and think about her comment, though, I do wonder: the administration of the seminary let me go with surprising ease. The attempts to keep me along the path to the clergy were faint at best, and I was able to simply walk away from the vocation with little impact to my standing within my own congregation and essentially no strife from the seminary itself.
Why was this? In a church whose adherents continue to dwindle, why was there so little attempt to keep me around? Was it because I strove to reassure them that there were no hints of apostasy? Was it because they, on some level, agreed with me?
Or was it because of me? Was it because they did not see a fit for me? For someone neurodivergent, outside the narrow spectrum of neurotypicality that they themselves held to so strongly? Was it because I was a pest? Were I to reapply, would I be welcomed back, even if I have better learned to function within society through whatever masking they might appreciate?
Was I preempting them asking me to leave by leaving, myself?
I don't know how I feel about this thought. I will pray on it, of course, but as much as the church is in service of God, I do not think that this is necessarily his domain.
Perhaps I should get in touch with the school, or maybe some of my old classmates.
I suppose this is just what I needed: another impossible social problem. At thirty, I would think that I ought to have grown out of these by now.
-----
Often times, when I work with a therapist, we converse quite freely and with essentially no friction. I do not know whether that's a thing that therapist-clients engender, necessarily. I've had my fair share of clients who were incredibly easy to talk with. Not that they're likeable, or at least not only because of that, but that our sessions --- me and those clients, and me and my therapists --- tend to move forward with a sense of purpose.
In my clients' case, these ones in particular are there for a purpose. To get better, to understand their trauma, to do the work. Not just take a pill (as I am not a prescribing doctor) or do the meditation and be cured of depression, but to really understand it, unravel it, and wind it back up into something neater than before.
In my case, I am here to do the job of improving myself and Jeremy is here to do his job of guiding me along that path.
My path of improvement, as I suspect must be the case with many of my colleagues, is to cope better with the process of taking on others emotions. A good therapist has to have empathy, after all, and I do try to be a good therapist. We don't simply let emotions slide off of us in order to be some impartial observer, we have to feel a little bit of what our clients are feeling as well in order to truly work with them.
So it is that most often, I work through processing the residual trauma of the past two weeks' clientele with Jeremy. Sometimes we'll get onto something that goes a bit deeper, digs further into the past, though perhaps less often than he would like.
Lately, though, we've been spending more time talking about Kay and, along with that, the friction between us has grown.
I started to feel it in earnest today, and, being the good little therapist that I am, I took a step back and examined my feelings and brought that up with Jeremy: "I feel a little sore that I'm being pushed on this."
Every time I get all therapist back at him, he smiles, which I think I secretly enjoy. He replied, "Why is that, do you think?"
"I think I worry that this isn't real work."
"How would sorting out your emotions not be real work? I think that was one of your stated goals."
"Maybe it just doesn't feel like a real problem. It feels like a very intense emotion that I'm not feeling for any particular reason."
He nodded at that. "You mentioned last time that it feels outside your control."
"At least more so than any other emotion that I've worked on before." I thought for a bit, then added, "Or maybe 'outside my control' isn't quite right. It feels purposeless, in the same way depression might. I like Kay. I think about her a lot. We were pretty good friends for that year, and still are, but this sudden intense desire doesn't seem to come from anywhere. It just kind of showed up and now it's slowly taking over."
"Did you wind up talking to her about this?"
"Not really, no."
"How come?"
There was a silence as I sifted through my thoughts. Despite their intensity, they were difficult to pin down, as though too much lens flare obscured the exact source. "I find myself thinking often that I don't want to say anything to her because I don't want her to feel pressured to reciprocate."
"That's her decision, though. Has she had a problem setting boundaries before? With you or in general."
I laughed. "No, not at all."
Jeremy grinned, but kept on pushing. "Then is that wholly true?"
"I'm not sure. I just don't want her to feel obligated to feel the same way about me that I feel about her."
"Projection, maybe?"
"I'm not convinced it's *that* baseless."
"What is the basis, then? Have you felt pressured into saying yes to someone you didn't want to say yes to before?" he asked.
"I'm not sure. Perhaps. I know that going into seminary was not originally my idea. I liked it there. I believed. I felt myself faithful enough to wind up on that path. Still, it was my parents' idea."
He nodded. "And you felt obligated to go along with the idea?"
"Yes."
"So perhaps a bit of projection." He raised a jet paw to forestall my disagreement. "Both things can be true, Dee. It can be projection, and it can also have some truth to it."
"Alright, I'll concede to that."
"Projection in cases like these often stems from a difficulty in being vulnerable."
I winced.
"I know that being vulnerable isn't something that comes easy to you. You are an earnest person in general--"
"Sometimes it feels like I have no other choice."
"--but when it comes to specific situations, you come up against some internal resistance. Have you been able to be vulnerable around Kay before?"
I nodded and recounted our conversation about leaving seminary for university.
"That sounds like a good bit of forward progress, then. Do you have any other things that you could be vulnerable to her about?"
"How do you mean?"
"Well, if there are a few topics around which you have trouble being vulnerable, perhaps you can work up to them. I still think that it should be an end goal for you to talk to her about your feelings, but that doesn't have to be something that happens right away. You can practice, first."
And so now I'm thinking: what more do I have to be vulnerable about? I'm a thirty-year-old coyote with an awkward social manner, a strongly-held sense of faith, and an otherwise simple lifestyle. My past is unremarkable. My future holds no surprises.
Am I really so boring? Do I really have so little to worry about? Am I that privileged? An uncomfortable thought. It makes me feel shallow.
And yet Jeremy is right. The friction surrounding this particular vulnerability is too great for me to overcome just yet, and I am still not convinced that this feeling is real enough that opening up is something that is even worth doing.
Instead, I wonder if the right thing to do is just to focus on being a good friend. I do not know if this is something that I can ignore, *per se*. That isn't how limerence works. It is an intrusive thought. It is something that bypasses whatever safeguards one might set up to sidle up next to you, press itself close, and whisper wickedly into your ear: "You need them. Doesn't matter how, doesn't matter why, but you need them."
I don't know if I can ignore it, but perhaps I can use it as fuel. I can use it as a spark to just continue to be a better friend for her. A better listener, a better support, a better Dee all around. Am I not to practice my emotional literacy? Can I not use this as an opportunity? Transmute limerence into personal growth.
We will see.
-----
I see a client with obsessive compulsive disorder. She has a tendency to pick at her fur and skin, some troubles with physical affection that make her feel 'gross', a fear of driving that leads her to worry that someone has been struck by the car, and a sort of external claustrophobia that leads her to struggle with the idea of closed-in spaces such as cabinets and cupboards, which we suspect stems from some early childhood abuse.
She also struggles with relationship-rightness with her husband. She worries constantly that he might not be, in some way, okay. It's not particularly that she thinks he might not love her, or that she might not be good for him, but that if there is anything wrong in his life in any way, that she must address it. It goes beyond simply needing to comfort him, and well into the territory of her world falling apart should anything be wrong that she cannot address.
(I suspect that their relationship is codependent, as I think that her husband gets as much out of taking care of her as she gets out of him taking the lead. However, I don't think that it's abusive or manipulative in anyway, simply that this is the way that their relationship works.)
When I brought this up with Jeremy during one of our sessions a few months ago, speaking specifically to the stress that I felt in masking around someone who existed in such a high state of activation at all times, he asked if I had greater trouble masking around those who experienced strong egodystonic symptoms and feelings than those who experienced strong egosyntonic symptoms.
Att the time, I explained it thus. Those egodystonic disorders, the ones that impede upon the patient's life, brushing their fur the wrong way and leaving them in discomfort or pain, often lead to high-stress situations where I find myself struggling with the task of expressing appropriate emotions, engaging that visible sort of empathy that helps so much with patients and which I feel I must practice. I find myself wanting to disengage in order to protect myself. Avert my eyes. Cross my arms. Close myself off from the stressors before me.
Egosyntonic symptoms, where detrimental feelings, symptoms, or thoughts do not disturb the patient's sense of identity, are far easier for me to mask around. It feels much more natural for me to try and engage with a patient with visible empathy if my goal is to try and help them understand that a behavior might be damaging to themselves or others. At that point, masking is a tool in my kit.
I suspect that this habit may stem from my connection with my faith. If an individual sins, knows that it is a sin, and struggles with that, it is far more uncomfortable than if an individual sins, does not consider it a sin, and cannot see the spiritual consequences that they might thus face. With the former, I struggle to mask because it is their goal, their work, their job to find their way back to the path, but with the latter, with the sinner from outside the church, they must be met with empathy, for they know not what they do.
This ties in quite neatly with my reasons for leaving seminary: my instincts were in direct opposition to much of my training. Parishioners were to be treated with the greatest empathy while the sinners from outside were to be shunned and set aside.
Yet are not parishioners blessed with the knowledge of the path that is before them? And are not the sinners ignorant of the path all the more deserving of our attention and care for that?
Ah well.
All this to say that I am starting to come to the conclusion that limerence is the egodystonic form of attraction.
* [o] [01](01) --- Starting to journal
* [o] [02](02) ---
* [o] [03](03) ---
* [o] [04](04) ---
* [o] [05](05) ---
* [o] [06](06) ---
* [o] [07](07) ---
* [o] [08](08) --- Egodystonic attraction