Unless you are a survivor of rape, abuse, torture; suffered a meth addiction, an eating disorder, cancer; you are a sociopath, a psychopath, have an addictive or split personality, I boxed “normal” people who went to therapy voluntarily to overcome their “depression” as either petty drama queens succumbing to existential panic attacks or weak, bourgeois bitches of consumerism, double-choking on their decadence.

I was above depression and therapists were racketeering blood-suckers looting your bank account.  Breastfed on Marxism and schooled at rallies, I was armed with the laws of dialectical materialism and educated to apply scientific methods—not divine intervention--to understand social conditions, from the economic to psychological.  Because of my political childhood and activist adult life, I marched with a false consciousness that I was bullet-proof against alienation.  If I understood the material basis of alienation and depression as an aftereffect, I could definitely spurn its advances.

I lived in a proletarian fool’s paradise.  In the summer of 2007, there I was, battered by shame, unable to escape the aftermath of my last sexual train wreck, on my way to my first counselling session.  My casual sex partner, based on our last encounter (He: sober.  Me: a hot mess, verbally abusing him) was about to dump my ass.  Forget my tower of debt, the possible venereal diseases germinating between my legs, the probability of being fired, my recently-acquired pack-a-day smoke habit, the alcoholism that was rotting my liver.  They were stupid little distractions.  My fuckbuddy was going to leave me.  The apocalypse was upon us.

I tracked my first therapist through a provincial directory of counsellors.  A forty-ish plump woman, she specialized in depression, anxiety, stress, divorce, trauma, eating disorders and major life-changes; she did couples counselling, but the majority of her patients were women.  Her practice was around my neighbourhood.  This was a perk since my hangovers kept me from absorbing sunlight and travelling beyond a five-block radius, until she suggested that if we ever run into each other to just ignore her.  This would avoid discomfort and would fall in line with doctor/patient confidentiality.  One of us would have to move, I figured, for this relationship to work.

Her office was in the basement of a two-storey character home.  Its garden was bedazzled with gnomes and pastel knick-knacks from Wonderbucks.  The sparse furnishings and muted-coloured walls neutralized neurotic electrons, pacifying stress triggers. She offered me a glass of room-temperature water and positioned herself in a starched, white armchair.  Setting the timer, cautiously turning its face away from me, she gathered her notebook before asking politely what I’d like to discuss.  I cried more than I talked, blubbering incoherently, hiccup-ing a sentence between tight gasps.  53 minutes later, somewhere after the shallow breathing steadied itself and before wiping away thick snot and hot tears on a crusty, rumpled tissue, my therapist commended my efforts and proposed that we spend the next session exploring the issues I brought up.

She also suggested I eliminate “I’m sorry” from my vernacular.