This is the first letter I wrote to my analyst to try to get him to back the blazes off the painful probing questions … it didn’t work.
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Dear Dr. Nachman,
I lay on your version of an operating table day after day, protected by nothing but the dark hypnotic of black velvet and muted lights. I am at once patient and intern, scalpel-ing myself from sternum to pubic symphysis. You’re the voice in my head, my mentor, teacher, frightening taskmaster, asking me what I see, telling me to touch, and terrifying me out of my mind with the things that I don’t even know hurt until you point them out.
I bare my soul to you, yet you won’t allow me the comfort of a hug that would bandage the psychic wound you insist on re-opening every time I walk into this room. How can I survive in the world until my next session, eviscerated and bleeding? Interns are taught to suture wounds, to apply gauze and tape, but not me. I get less than five seconds of an embrace from you, and then only when I invade your space and insist. The patronizing taps on the shoulder and an obvious avoidance of anything near the waist send a pretty clear message. Are you terrified of my ostomy, too? As I am? As I know all others will be if they ever get past their lecherous lust?
I have had quite enough of males masquerading as men, little boys pretending to be friends, seductive lies, and words that have no substance and no rescue. If I am expected to rescue myself, then I think I deserve the common courtesy of remuneration from someone. I am sick of being an unpaid entertainer in the drama that is my life. It’s time to make a living, to be someone, to do something.
What else is analysis but a third cancer surgery? If I refuse treatment, I continue to die, little by little, a painful, ugly death. Yet what is there to life but more unrequited crap? For God’s sake, doctor, give me a freaking hug once in a while. Even my surgeon does that. He also puts Dermabond over carefully constructed sutures. We don’t suture in here; we leave granulation tissue without the advantage of iodoform packing and non-occlusive dressing to ease the sting.
I struggle to find a way to create my own bandage, but I fail. All ideas seem too much like the self-protection that cannot exist if changes are to be made. I am a chimera, a zebra, and I carry a virus worse than genetics—I carry a cancer of the soul. Deadly. Intractable. Introspective. And sad.
I simply cannot go on this way.
Help me now, or let me die.
