ACCORDING TO ZAC

For a minute there, I was mad at my therapist. Not for a breach of confidence or any other kind of unprofessional behavior. No, I was mad at him because he’s right, and he has been for the better part of the three years I’ve been working with him. Change is hard, and the process to develop personally can be grueling. But even if I was mad, it’s not lost on me how lucky I am that I’ve got a trained professional to help me through it all. Most remarkable about what I’m realizing isn’t that this guy has been right all along—I knew he had credentials and a wealth of experience at the outset—it’s that he has allowed this process to be mine , even if it probably (certainly) prolonged the outcome. He has let me move at the pace that’s appropriate for me, even though the path through this maze has probably looked pretty clear from his vantage point. While the endpoint, the goal of getting through this maze, was why I started working with him, the fact that he didn’t dictate anything has meant ...

It’s not uncommon for there to be lulls in conversation during my sessions with my therapist. Sometimes they feel like a bit of a standoff to see who will fill the void first; those are the days that I’m not feeling as introspective, or our previous conversation hasn’t sparked much for me to sort through. But other times the quiet helps me make some sense of what I’m feeling (or reel from being confronted with something I don’t know how to make sense of) and then decide what to jump into next. This week there was one of these pauses, and I’ll admit that I didn’t feel like I was really working through much. But I wanted to wait out the break to make the doc determine the direction we would go. It’s a tricky game of chicken because he will either ask me, “What are you thinking about?”, and that doesn’t always work on a day I don’t have much bouncing around my brain, or he’ll ask me a question that cuts right through me. It feels like there’s absolutely no in-between. This week he leaned ...

My brain is sort of all over the place. The last week has been unlike any other I've ever been through. Thankfully, I'm alive and well (as far I know), although there's global panic over a new virus that no one is particularly prepared for. Grocery stores have food, but lots of shelves are empty. Folks are hoarding toilet paper. We've been told to start practicing "social distancing," or not physically going places or being around more than just a few people at a time if at all possible. I started working from home this week, as did my roommates. I already have cabin fever. This week I saw a post by a rabbi that reminded me that hunkering down in self-protection isn't the whole goal. He suggested that socially distant doesn't mean emotionally distant. For all the times you want to do something you probably shouldn't do, like go out, see someone, or do something, our response should become a phone call made, a kind message sent, or a good deed d...