Therapy

My therapist said i should start a journal for my thoughts. I'm paying him $500 an hour for him to tell me to write my thoughts down in a book- since when did therapy have home work? I'm not doing too well with the therapy to be honest, maybe it's my sceptical attitude that it wont do any good or maybe it really is what my therapist claims it is, that i am just not good at sharing my feelings. It would make sense i suppose, I mean my parents never shared anything and they didn't do too badly, until the divorce. To be fair though that didn't really have anything to with them not sharing things, it was more to do with the cocktail waitress from the Plaza.
I guess my problems all sort of stemmed from that event. During the divorce proceedings my parents were so wrapped up in themselves that they paid little attention to me and i decided to go off the rails. I started smoking. I thought i was a real cool dude and strutted up to the front of the school like a catwalk model on drugs and lit up in front of my friends. Suffice to say i managed to make a complete prat of myself, which included the walk and the part where i tried to light the wrong end , which I try to forget as much as possible. You would think that this would tell me i was clueless and not to carry on but through my blind panic at my stupid mistake i managed to drop the lighter twice and then, as i took a drag, cough and splutter like a car in dire need of an MOT.
After that fiasco i didn't try smoking again until a week later, alone this time at the bottom of the garden at my house. It was all worth it though. At school i was accepted into the gang of the school bad boy Jake, mostly because i had a car and the others were still riding their BMX bikes to school. Sometimes we would break into stores and steal things but mostly we would hang out at the park, drinking and smoking, thinking we were the coolest guys on the planet. This all ended after i moved schools. My mum married some rich lawyer and we moved to an apartment on the Upper East Side to live with him. They sent me to a prep school. I seemed to be a hit with girls. The only problem was that i was only interested in one. My stepsister. This didn't go too well when my mom and keith- her husband found out and so i was sent for my first session of therapy.
The therapist was a bit of a whack job herself, more interested in promoting her new book than actually giving me any guidence but i wasn't that bothered; as far as i was concerend i didn't need to be there. After several weeks of therapy, except the week she was away on her book tour, she declared me to be a borderline schizo. I was shocked, i had no idea where it had come from but it brought with it the label of the 'unstable' one on the family from which point on everyone who got within twenty feet of me kept sending me nervous glances as though i was a ticking bomb and could go off at any second. That pissed me off. I mean what right did they have to look down their nose at me when they were probably all in therpay themselves. I saw Mrs Summers from the apartment on the floor below us one day as i was leaving one of my sessions. She was reading an old copy of Cosmo and didn't see me. I wondered what she was having counselling for on the way home. My guess was that she was an alcoholic. Her husband had left her for a younger model and so she tried to reinvent herself. She had liposuction but she still had a fat arse and the only person who showed even the remotest interest was fat Mike, the janitor in our apartment building. When you think about it you couldn't really blame her for turning to the bottle.
I wasn't sent to therpay again until my last year at university: my mum thought it would be a good idea for me to work through what she decided were success issues. I didn't have the heart to tell her that the reason i was flunking all my classes was because i didnt actually go to any of them. That i was too busy getting stoned or sleeping with my lit professor. After my last therapist wrongly decided i was a nutcase who kept hearing voices in my head you can imagine how i anxious i was to end my second stint in therapy as quickly as possible. Who knows what they would come up with this time. 'Yes Mrs Evans, i'm sorry to tell you that your son has hydroipilterpus' or some other mental illness that noone can pronnounce. The problem with diseases that no-one can pronounce is that everyone seems to think it is actually more serious than it actually is simply because they dont know how to spell it. Any kind of doctor including therapists should use scientific terminology with great care. Slip it into s sentence when speaking to someone playing with two cards short of a full deck and they will probably believe they have some incurable flesh eating disease when really all they have is chicken pox.
My mom and dad were paying a lot fo the therapy bust she can't have been very good. I lied through the whole thing, making up the 'issues' i had and letting her tell me what she thought i wanted to hear. I was surprised she couldn't tell i was lying, i thought it was their job to tell you when you were in denial and all that crap. I was pleased all the same when after three weeks she decided i had overcome my problems and no longer needed to see her.
My latest stint in therapy however is something quite different. I put myself here for starters, it wasn't my parents who forced me into going, in fact they dont even know I'm in therapy. It's taken my mum this long to realise that i might not be a schizo after all and that the therapist might have been wrong about that and i am not ready for another 10 years of curious stares from the neighbours over the road when they think i'm not looking. Another difference between this time and last time is that this time i really do have a problem. I dont even know when it started; it wasn't soemthing i was concious of. All i know is when i realised it was a problem. I decided this would be a good place to start the journal so i wrote on a fresh page and underlined the date neatly.

8th January 2004


I will always remember the day my problem became apparent to me. I was sitting on the subway cheking out the legs of this girl from behind my paper when an old woman came and sat next to me. She tapped me on the shoulder and asked for the time.
"8.30am" I told her after a glance at my watch.
"Oh, i could have sworn it was later than that. No matter it will give me time to have a cup of coffee and a cake at Grand Central before my appointment, thank you dear," she said to me. The old lady got off at the next stop, same as me. I overtook her as i walked to my office across the street from the station. Five minutes later i was at my desk, having a quick cup of coffee before my 9am appointment with a client. I got a call from an old school friend asking if i would like to meet up for lunch later that day but i declined telling him i had a business lunch with a client. Throughout the morning i seemed to be bombarded with calls but i told them all i was busy, as i had a department meeting with my boss. The thing is, i didn't have a department meeting with my boss. I didn't have a business lunch either, and when the old lady asked me for the time she was right, it really was later than 8.30, it was 8.50. I brushed off the lying about the business lunch and the department meeting. I obviously only said that becasue i wanted to get out of them, but the old lady bothered me. What reason did i have for lying to her?
I don't usually let things bother me, in fact, in a singles column, i once said i was a fun loving laid back guy. But this really freaked me out. I was hyper aware of it for the rest of the day and everytime someone would ask me a question i would analyse in my head if it was a lie or the truth. Like when the guys who make the coffee run to Starbucks came to take my order, and before you ask, yes we do have a coffee machine, but i dont thin coffee is what comes out, lighter fluid is probably closer. Anyway they asked me if i wanted the usual but i said no. I don't know why becasue Starbucks cappuccino with cinammon on top is one of the best beverages ever created by man. After saying no i would look an ididot if i changed my mind so in the end i ordered a caramel cream based frappacino. You know the ones that come in those stupid plastic cups with the dome on top and a straw that you have to suck through unless you want to get the mountain of cream and caramel on your nose. Having to drink that instead of my usual cup of heaven was enough to convince me i needed help. I mean, what if the same thing happened every day and if they asked me if i wanted the usual, i would say no? It was too horrible to think about so i found the name of this guy in the yellow pages. I picked an ad without a picture becasue in my experience an ad with a picture adds at least $100 onto the price of whatever it is they are trying to sell, and called him up.
They say that the hardest part of therpay is admitting you have a problem and i already knew what my problem was: I was a compulsive liar. I was the living embodiment of that guy in the Jim Carey movie, the lawyer with the really hot wife and the plaintiff with the big breasts, except i didnt have a hot wife and i wasn't a lawyer so a plaintiff with big breasts was also out of the question. I figured though once i admitted my problem the therpay would be a piece of cake, in fact i was willing to bet it would be my shortest stint yet.
As it turns out i apparently have more problems than i thought. It was difficult to get anything out of me at first, i was kind of unwilling to share. But after several sessions he finally made me see soemthing i had been blind to my whole life. The reason i lied was becasue i had trust issues. It was all to do with an incident with a cop when i was five.
When i was only four my dad bought me a kitten for my birthday. Mom wasnt impressed, especially as it had a thing for shitting all over the new sofa, but one day when it was about a year old it didn't come home. As i was four i was really upset and so my parents reported it to the police, i have no idea why and i'm still not sure why the cops bothered to come round seeing as it is not in their jurisdiction. I would just have assumed it was a prank caller and told them to piss off. I kind of wish they had thought it was a prank and not shown up as it would probably have saved me a lot of money in therapy bills. Anyway this policeman came round and promised me that they would find my cat and bring it home. They never did. I used to spend all day sitting n the window waiting for the cop car to pull up but it never came.
Then one day i was walking past this house and i saw the sop on the steps so i ran over and asked if he had my cat. He said he never found it but then his daughter came out of the house and she was holding my cat. The cop looked at me and he knew that i knew it was mine but he just told her to go back inside, even though he knew he had my cat and he could have given her to me right there and then. He had taken the spiderman sticker off the collar too; i think that's what bothered me more than anything else. I had saved up my pocked money for two weeks to buy the sticker and i remembered my dad had taken me especially to get it. It was rare that my dad would ever do anything with me so i had been looking forward to it all week. We went early around 8am and we spent an hour there choosing it. I remember crying for days afterwards, i dont think i've ever cried that much since. That's why you should never trust cops they're prewtty much always out to screw you over"
"So that's Graeme spelt G-R-A-E-M-E?"
Suddenly the room came into focus and i remembered where i was, i looked down at the table at the salty drops blurring the words on the letter in front of me and back up at the bland walls and two way mirror, my eyes itched.
"Yes officer"