Erma was my first and best therapist. Like Whiskers being my point of reference for a good cat, Erma is my point of reference when deciding if a new therapist is a good fit for me. In the thirty years since I first met her, I’ve sat down in those grown-up offices with dozens of therapists and can usually tell in a matter of minutes—maybe seconds—if I’ll be coming back for a second session. Everyone’s looking for something different in a therapist. For me, it’s a knowing look in their eye that speaks to a good mix of compassion, strength, and warmth. I’ve had good therapists who I didn’t click with who I only saw for a couple of sessions and not-so-good ones where we sat in silence for fifty minutes. Fifty minutes is a long time of silence, especially when you’re paying for it.
The point is, it’s important to find a therapist that you can find a rhythm with, and not to get discouraged when it takes a few tries. Just as you’re not going to become best friends with every person you meet, you’re not going to click with every therapist you meet. But when you find one you do click with, just like when you find someone else who loves murder and will talk with you about it for hours over tuna melts and black coffee, it feels fucking fantastic.
8. A diagnosis ≠ disaster.
I’ve been diagnosed with many different things throughout the years, but I’ve come to the conclusion, with the help of my current therapist and psychiatrist, that my mental ailments are a delicious mix of the following:
Georgia’s Brain Cocktail
1 oz. generalized anxiety disorder
½ oz. depression
2 tbsp. ADHD
a pinch of OCD
• Pour into a shaker filled with ice and shake until well blended. Pour into a beautiful vintage glass and garnish with abandonment issues and 25 maraschino cherries.
I know a lot of people who freaked out when they got diagnosed with anxiety or were told they’re bipolar or whatever. Here’s the thing, firstly, most insurance companies require a diagnosis before they approve treatment, so keep in mind that your therapist might just be generalizing or rounding up to the nearest common demoralizer. Second, I’m a big believer in finding out what the hell is wrong with you so you can start working toward relief. Just as you want to locate cancer in the early stages, the sooner you find out what’s going on with that brain of yours, the sooner you’ll be able to find the proper treatment so you don’t let your issues reach critical mass.
ADHD, hypochondria, depression … these are all diagnoses that, if not treated, can lead to you running your fucking life amok and just being a general bummer to be around for both your friends and yourself. But! They’re also all diagnoses that respond incredibly well to treatment. So you have a choice. Either find out what the hell your major malfunction is and then go about trying to make your life better and worth living, or don’t do that and keep your head in the sand and then complain all the time to anyone who will listen about how annoying it is to have tiny rocks in your fucking teeth all the time.
7. A diagnosis ≠ a comfy jacket.
The truth about depression is that it, for me, can sometimes be comforting. It’s like an old familiar jacket that you know you should get rid of cause it smells like mothballs and Cheez-Its but it just fits so well and you’ve had it all your life so it’s sort of nostalgic and soothing, even though it stinks. Sometimes when I’m super overwhelmed by life and need an excuse to shirk all my responsibilities, I find my inner monologue telling me how depressed I am. So even if I’m not currently depressed, if I’m just stressed or tired or in the mood to eat cookies and watch TV all day, I’ll metaphorically throw on that stinky coat and wallow in its itchy, familiar fabric.
Is this making sense? Basically, instead of labeling myself as someone who suffers from depression or anxiety or whatever, I have to remind myself that I’m actually trying to thrive with depression or anxiety or whatever. I can’t use my diagnosis as an excuse to throw a protective barrier over myself or an invisibility cloak to hide from life. It’s time to throw that coat, and this coat metaphor, away and use more productive tools to cope. Ya know?
6. You don’t need motivation.
To be fair, this was said to me by a life coach, but same diff. I had never considered calling a life coach before because my overly cynical self winces at anything hippie dippie and New Agey. To me, a life coach was just for people who didn’t have the balls to go to real therapy and face their real problems.
But then I was talking to a successful lady friend of mine about how depressed I was about never getting anything done. Now listen (look), I’m a hustler and I work hard, but being a lazy person is my default. It’s what I do best. I’m a champion napper—I’ve even taken a nap in the Louvre among other weird places. I love chilling and day drinking and taking it fucking easy. But as it turns out, I’m not retired just yet, so I try my best to go against the lazy grain, which is why I always have multiple to-do lists going. Otherwise, I’ll to-don’t with everything and take a nap instead.
So my friend, who by all accounts has no problem with getting her ass into gear and taking care of business, told me her secret weapon: the life coach she’d been working with for the past year. Being the self-care junkie that I am, I had this life coach’s number in my phone within seconds and called her later that afternoon to set up an appointment.
At our first of what would be many sessions, I was bemoaning the fact that I just couldn’t seem to get anything done and I was using the tired excuse of not having any motivation—to go to the gym, to write, to get out of my pajamas some days.
“I just keep waiting and hoping that the motivation to do all the things that I genuinely want to do, that I should do, will hit me so I can stop being depressed about being so lazy,” I told her.
Her response was a slap in the face of obviousness that was so true it had never even crossed my mind: “Motivation isn’t necessary,” she said. “You just have to do it.”
Yes! That makes so much sense. I can drag my ass to a spin class and hate every moment of it, but I still did it. I’m writing this chapter even though I just downloaded the audiobook of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and all I want to do is listen to it while I paint my nails, but deadlines are a thing, so I’m writing down the top ten biggest therapy epiphanies of my life like a boss instead. I’m not motivated, but these words! They just keep showing up on my screen!
Point being, you don’t have to bound into every situation ready to kick ass, you just have to show up, and once you’re there, you might as well do your best. But fuck it all if you think I’m not taking a nap afterward.
5. Be kind to little you.
There’s this Instagram-famous girl that I’ve met a few times who’s gorgeous and kind and has really pretty hair who would post a #tbt pic of herself every Thursday throwing back to when she was a chubby little girl with some kind of cruel caption making fun of herself for how fat she was. And it broke my heart. The little girl in the photo looked so innocent, and there was something about the look in her eye that reminded me of my own low self-esteem as a child, and the thought of that little girl, who probably got made fun of a lot, finding out that her gorgeous, grown-up self with really pretty hair would also be making fun of her someday just didn’t seem right.
And I do it to myself, too, but in a different way. At some point in my childhood, I learned to be very mean to myself. I regularly call myself a “stupid fucking idiot” in my head when I’d do something as simple as take a wrong turn, forget my sunglasses, or can’t think of a third example in the book I’m writing. But then my therapist helped me understand that the impatience and exasperation I felt toward myself was a learned behavior that I picked up from a childhood of being treated with impatience and exasperation by outside forces, but I didn’t need to continue that cycle.
She told me to picture little Georgia, at five years old or so (when this behavior was learned), and imagine calling her a “stupid fucking idiot” for making a mistake. It made me want to cry. Five-year
-old Georgia doesn’t deserve that; she deserves understanding and patience and to know that mistakes can be made without them making her a broken person. And so when I berated myself for that wrong turn, I was perpetuating the narrative that Georgia doesn’t deserve to be treated with kindness. Even though I didn’t start it, the only person who could stop that cycle was myself, and a great way to do that was to picture myself as a little kid when I was being cruel to myself. It’s taken some time, but I’ve definitely been kinder to myself since I learned that.
And I commented on internet-famous girl’s Instagram account that it made me so sad that she was mean to her little self, and you know what? She stopped posting mean comments with her #tbt pics. I’m really glad. Little her, and big her, didn’t deserve it.
4. Beware of the altars at which you worship.
My current therapist Kim,3 who specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), is sweet, soft-spoken, and generally very chill. Our sessions are discussions more than hard-core psychoanalysis, which means she doesn’t often give me her opinion unless I specifically ask for it; she just leads the conversation to a point where I understand what’s truly going on. So it was really surprising recently when, after doing her signature staring off while mulling over my response, she looked at me and said, “Georgia”—which is always jarring when your therapist directly says your name—“you worship at the altar of doubt.”
I felt like I’d been hit by an emotion truck. That one little phrase encapsulated so much of what I had been showing up with for the year and a half that I’d been seeing her. I subconsciously make sure I never believe in anything, like a forced nihilism, because doubt feels so much safer and reliable than faith and optimism.
Stupid people are optimistic. Positivity is for cheerleaders and youth group leaders. I’m negative and cynical, man. It’s part of who I am. It’s punk rock and gen X, and it’s someone who can’t be fucked with. But it turns out it’s a defense mechanism so I’m never disappointed, just pleasantly surprised when good things happen.
We all have our core beliefs that protect us from that which we’re too scared to admit we want, like love or money or happiness, as if we’ll somehow jinx our lives by thinking it. It’s fine to not want to scream it to the sky, but make sure you aren’t cursing your own happiness by believing more in something never manifesting, by worshipping at the altar of doubt, or negativity or obliviousness, than actually trying to attain that thing.
3. Look for the proof.
“I’m lazy and incompetent.”
“Everyone hates me.”
“Everything is hopeless.”
These are all easy things to say to yourself when you’re depressed, but when you let a therapist know you’re feeling this way and she asks for the proof otherwise, it’s usually pretty easy to spout out a list of all the ways these negative thoughts aren’t true.
“I worked my butt off today and watched one episode of something on Discovery ID. That doesn’t make me lazy.”
“I have an active social life and close friends who care about me.”
“I have no idea what the future holds, but so far the future has been pretty good.”
When you stop and hold yourself accountable for those negative thoughts by challenging them, they hold less weight. The more often you prove them wrong, the less control they’ll have over your mood.
Having anxiety makes it so there’s a running tally in your head, kinda like a stock-market ticker tape, of all the things you’ve done wrong, will do wrong, how things can and probably will go wrong, and just general ways everything is fucked. It becomes really hard to live a life that has any semblance of normalcy when that tape keeps fucking tickering at all hours of the day.
I know very few people who don’t have some level of anxiety, however miniscule, and my husband, Vince, is one of them. He falls asleep when his head hits the pillow at night, instead of lying there for three hours worrying about not falling asleep like I do, and he wakes up every morning and starts fucking singing instead of worrying about everything he has to do that day! Singing!! Thank god opposites attract or he would have been terrified of me. He thinks logically—he looks for proof—and so far in his life, logic has proven to him that everything is going to be OK, even when everything is currently very fucking shitty.
2. You have to balance the negative with the positive.
I’m allowed to be negative and cynical and worried that I’m going to get hit by a car or that a stranger on the street is going to throw acid in my face, but it’s only fair that if I’m going to give those thoughts time (give the doubt and worry a voice) that I then have to give the opposite (the positive) the same amount of time.
For example: “My career is going to implode in my face and everyone will hate me.” Yeah, OK, but you’re resilient and strong, and your husband and family and cats will never hate you. “An airplane is going to crash into my apartment building, and the flames will slowly engulf me and my cats.” Airplanes rarely fall out of the sky, and the likelihood that it’ll happen to you is statistically zero. Plus you’d die on impact, so the fire part wouldn’t matter. “Vince is going to realize what a nut I am and leave me for a normal girl who doesn’t worry that he’s going to leave her for someone else and also remembers to eat breakfast every day.” Vince knows you’re a nut and actually likes that part of you! Plus he’s a little nuts in his own special way, and you think it’s charming and cute, so that’s probably what he thinks about you, too.
OK now you try it.
1. It’s OK.
Recently I had plans to meet up with my mom. We were going to have a fun lunch at a cute café where we’d drink a few glasses of crisp white wine, get table fries, and I’d tell her all the awesome stuff going on in my life and ask good questions about hers. But instead of her being at the designated place at the designated time, she ended up getting very lost. And I got increasingly pissed off when her phone kept cutting out as I was trying to tell her which way to go and she refuses to use GPS cause she doesn’t trust technology, and she couldn’t figure out how to turn on speakerphone because she wouldn’t pull over and get her bearings cause she’s impatient. I was there at the cute café, but instead of bonding with my mother and housing some table fries, I was screaming into my phone, “PULL OVER, PULL OVER!” and ended up yelling, “JUST GO HOME!” and hanging up on her. I got back in my car and turned the radio up really loud and scream-cried to whatever was playing on the radio. Green Day, I think, which is very good music to scream-cry to, it turns out.
When I saw my therapist after the scream-cry lunch incident, we broke down my anger and impatience at my mother’s behavior that day. What it boiled down to for me was simply lateness. Specifically, my extreme, soul-crushing fear and hatred of lateness.
I was late a lot as a kid—to school, to temple, to my own grandmother’s fucking funeral.
It was always “FIVE MINUTES UNTIL DEPARTURE” as my mother ran around the house like a lunatic (and you know how we feel about being a lunatic…).
Then, on our way to wherever we were late to, she’d bring that lunatic business into the car, speeding to make up the time we’d lost. She’d apply her makeup while driving, so she only kept one un-mascaraed eye on the road while other drivers would honk angrily at us and cut us off in a rage. It was terrifying.
When we would finally show up—twenty minutes late minimum, which my mom simply referred to as “Jewish standard time”—whatever we were arriving for would’ve inevitably already started. The image I have filed away under “lateness” in my mind is everyone turning around from something—their desks in my classroom, the synagogue pews at temple, the funeral service of my beloved grandmother—to stare as we quietly, embarrassingly shuffled in and mouthed our apologies to the people who knew how to get places on time.
Twenty years later, I was running late to therapy with a tough-as-nails woman I only saw for a couple of sessions. Running late, as you’ve probably guessed, is one of my biggest anxie
ty triggers. I’m pretty much never late, but it doesn’t matter; I’m stressing out the whole way over and probably making some pretty dumb and dangerous maneuvers while driving to avoid being late. The honest truth is normally when this happens, I end up ten minutes early to meetings, sweating, and then have to wait twenty minutes for the person I’m meeting because I’m the only on-time person in LA.
So when I arrived five minutes late to therapy, sweating, and over-apologizing, my therapist said, “Georgia, I don’t care if you’re late. You could be forty-five minutes late. You’re paying for the hour, so you can do whatever you want with it.”
I told her about how cruel I was to myself when I was late or even just thought I might be late, calling myself my standard “stupid fucking idiot” and generally admonishing myself in a way I would punch someone in the face if they said the same to me.
She looked at me wisely and said, “What do you think is the mentally healthy thing to say to yourself instead?”
I guessed wildly, because the answer seemed so obvious and I should just fucking understand: “Calm down! Dude, chill the fuck out!”
With each guess, she shook her head.
Finally, I gave up, and she said in a soothing, calm voice, “It’s OK.”
I started laughing at its simplicity and how it had evaded me. So now I use it all the time. When running late, “it’s OK.” When I have a million things to do and not enough time to do it, “it’s OK.” When I get stuck in a fantasy about plane crashes or normal girls, “it’s OK.” It’s my mantra when I need to override the voice that tells me that nothing I do is OK.
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