If This Were an Anti-Anxiety Potion, I'd Be Fine

I'm a better flyer these days. It helped immensely to have my therapist point out to me that it didn't seem that I suffered from a true phobia of flying. Repressed anger and grief,she told me, and I saw how much better I felt after I screamed and cried and told Mr.Ex everything I had to tell him in her company. I killed him a couple of times, too. "It doesn't mean you are actually going to do it for real, but do it here," she'd say, "or all of those bottled up emotions will hurt you."

So I try now to think of healthy things I can do for myself while I fly. Communicating is the best thing. When there's Internet, I don't feel alone. I can email and blog and hang out on Facebook. Without the Internet, it's harder. I try to concentrate on a book or a podcast,but if I'm a little nervous, it's hard to focus.

I'm in the air right now and I'm doing well despite the choppy air, because I feel connected to those of you who read this blog. So, thanks for being there.

The man who loves me always asks how it went for me up in the air. When I told him about the first flight I took without a sip of gin, and that it felt okay, that I was able to use my cognitive powers to soothe myself like my therapist said I would, he told me he liked knowing that there was this new version of me that Mr. Ex would never know.
I like that too.

Dreams, Real Life, and Writing

A couple of weeks ago (about a month after I started going to therapy) I began to feel as if I'd had surgery-- like some poisonous little thing had been snipped out, and I was all sewn up and tucked in for a long recuperation. A little later I began to imagine my situation as an untangling. Somehow my  sense of wellness and my view for my future had gotten knitted into the same garment as the financial settlement of my divorce, and now we'd pulled the whole thing off the needles for a thorough unravelling. I still really, really want to get my half of the joint assets, but it don't feel like I'm wearing it all the time.


Then Sunday I went by myself to a poetry reading in Santa Monica. My friend Sharon Charde had come all the way from Vermont to read with a group of other poets who'd all been published in Rattle. Somewhere on the 10 West the muse slipped into the passenger seat unannounced--not comfortably settled in exactly, but an idea or two rose up out of somewhere, and it occurred to me I should jot a note. I don't really jot down notes anymore, I thought. So I didn't bother to rustle around and find the pencil and the post-its I keep in the center console.


But there were more ideas, and finally during the poetry reading intermission, I pulled my index card notebook out of my purse and wrote something down.

And the dreams. I'm having dreams and remembering them. My therapist, who's trained in Jungian dream analysis, listens to me while I read my written record of my dreams, and then she reads them again herself, and we discuss them. When I was growing up in Iowa imagining that I'd meet my one true love and stay married forever, I'd never have predicted that 40-some years later I'd be divorced and dreaming about my ex and telling the dreams to a therapist and feeling better about everything.

I keep dreaming about light.

And I've had two dreams about cats--cats that I, at first, thought were other animals, and then, Presto! The rabbit turns into a cat.
The fish turns into a cat.

I hope I'm turning back into a writer.