His pants are too short, and I stare at his white socks while I search for the correct answer. Fine, I tell him. I feel fine. Haven’t felt anxious, haven’t stood on the banks of any bodies of water and contemplated jumping in, haven’t felt as if life were gripping me and squeezing the air from my lungs. I think the medication is working already, I tell him, even though we’ve both been down this road enough times to know that it’s way too early for that to be happening. But, hey, there’s no harm in trying to bluff my way through this entire process. He nods and scribbles something on his notepad.
“Now, the last time you were here, we were talking about . . .”
He says “we,” but I did all of the talking. Psychiatry is bullshit. I know from experience. You sit there and talk and talk—about your feelings (“How does that make you feel?”) and about your childhood (“You mentioned your mother there . . .”), about your fears and hopes and all of that jazz—because you just want the hour to be up, because you don’t want to be sitting in an overstuffed chair in some stranger’s office, looking at the carefully calligraphed diplomas he’s hung on the wall behind his head, because you get the sinking suspicion that all of this is a gigantic waste of time.
But mostly, you want the hour to be up because at the end, the doc is gonna write you up that prescription, and everything will be okay. But the thing is, he knows that too, so he makes you work for it, just makes you keep talking and talking while he jots down notes and rests his head on his chin and tries to look interested. And if you’re not talking, he’ll just keep sitting there, staring at you, and the whole thing goes a whole lot slower, and you might not get your prescription at all, or, worse yet, he might refer you to another doctor, and then you have to start all over again. Like I said, I know from experience.
So, really, the best thing to do is just talk. After a while, you probably won’t even know what you’re talking about, you’ll just be looking at those diplomas while your mouth runs on and on, and suddenly, you’ve said something you don’t mean, and the psychiatrist will lean forward in his chair and say something like “That . . . go with that,” and you have no idea what that was, and all of a sudden you’re rambling on about problems you didn’t even know you had, or, worse yet, problems that didn’t even exist until you made them up and spat them out of the hole in your face. And then you start freaking out because maybe you’ve just uncovered something big, dredged something out from deep within your soul, and now you’re gonna be about fifteen times more screwed up that you were exactly one minute earlier.
But those moments never happen. I want to say something that will blow his mind. I want great epiphanies. I want him to leap out of his chair and thrust his arms heavenward and go “That’s it!” and pronounce me cured, or, if I say something really bad, I want him to drop his notepad and stare at me with wide eyes, his face going white as he stammers something all slow and drawn out like “What . . . did you say?” as he realizes that he’s sitting in a room with the next Ted Bundy. I understand that’s probably not how psychiatry works, but it would be nice every once in a while. Maybe I watch too many movies.
I’m thinking about all of this and muttering about something when he asks me what my girlfriend thinks about my seeing a psychiatrist. My mouth stops moving and my brain locks up. Panicked, I gather myself up in the chair, run my hands down my knees, cough a bit. I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve never had a moment like this. Maybe it’s an epiphany.
“She, uh . . . ,” I stammer. “She’s fine with it.”
“You know, because she’s studying psych at Columbia,” he says. “We talked about Her in our last session, but it never occurred to me to ask what she thinks of all this. You say she’s fine with it?”
This guy’s good. He’s actually been paying attention.
“The reason I ask now is because