Talkin' To My Shrink (Part 2)

I've always wanted to have a better understanding of my mind, of myself. Many years ago, I started keeping a journal, but writing by hand was cumbersome. The process got in the way of the thought. I was concerned about legibility and coherency ...so that future perusals wouldn't read as gibberish.

At the time, many people I knew where in therapy and I thought how great to have someone so totally focused on your thoughts. It would be all about you; you could delve as deeply into "you" as you wanted, and there would be someone whose job it was to listen.



You know he's not personally invested in your dissertation, but as a professional, he's supposed to make you feel that he is. However, when you can plainly see that's he's bored to tears and couldn't possible care less about your ranting, it severely undermines the process. So I stopped.

I did want to continue the process, but with someone that [I felt] was as emotionally invested as me ...and that could only be me. So....

I started recording my thoughts. I'd turn on the tape recorder, hang the mic unobtrusively over my head, relax with a glass of wine, put on some background music, and verbalize my thoughts ...my random streams of consciousness. This was a great idea, but the "sessions" were unorganized. I talked about whatever crossed my mind at the time. There was no cohesiveness, no linear progression from one session to the next.

Then came the computer. I'm a good typist, so that didn't get in the way of the flow of thought. Afterward, it was a simple process to correct spelling and grammar without changing the thoughts, and to re-arrange those thoughts into linear threads.

After doing this for a number of years, and transcribing my old journals and tapes, I organized all these random thoughts into a cohesive narrative. I use "the book" form as the structure and I wrote the dialogue as if confiding with my therapist. After a couple of years, I finished. The process was quite cathartic.

It's hardly the "Great American Novel", but its completion gave me such a sense of accomplishment. The next step was to have someone read it. Everyone around me knew of its existence, but I allowed only three of my closest friends to read it ...after all, it was a compilation of my most intimate thoughts and motives.

Since two of those three have died, there's now only one other person on the planet who's privy to the contents of my psyche ...at least up to that point and to the extent that I understood it myself. Aside from being a close friend, he was an English teacher and the ideal person to proofread my "manuscript". I took a real chance in handing it to him, but he was impressed with my effort. And I was impressed that he was impressed.

This process resulted in such discernment and purgation, that I continued writing ...not under the presumption of "being a writer", and surely not with the intent of enlightening a general public. It was for me. I found that I could better grasp what I thought when I wrote it down. So, as with this blog, I continue to write my thoughts down ...with no other intention than to write my thoughts down.

Quote of the Week: "I know you believe you understand what you think I said. What you don't realize is that what you heard is not what I meant."