Pause the Therapy Treadmill

After several months of traditional psychotherapy examining the navel of my psyche, I think the only thing I really learned was that I’d rather be applying a quick Occam’s Razor than ferreting out precise root causes, so that I can then put more time and energy into pragmatic actions.

I’m pretty sure that means it’s been worth it.

But yeah, I’ve decided to take a break of indeterminate length (at least with the individual therapy). I know it’s supposed to be time consuming, and take a long time to even gain any traction. But at least with the therapist I was seeing, it just doesn’t seem like the goals I came in with are even on the horizon.

I’ve been trying to do more self-help reading too, but that is slow going. The book I’m on now has so far spent all of its digital ink describing the benefits of mindfulness. I can only assume that information about actually achieving increased mindfulness is coming later. But it’s been making me drowsy almost right away, every time I start reading.

Bleargh.

I’ve got that “The Holidays” style funk where you think you should really be feeling much happier than you are, and so you get to feeling down just about the discrepancy. Blasted introspection, sometimes I think I’d be better off without my frontal lobes.

And incidentally, I’ve decided that I whine way too much in here, which arguably indicates that I whine way too much in general. When will I do something about that? Apparently not today. 😛

I got a contract job at IBM. I’ll be on a team of editors working on their developerWorks site. I’m excited about it, I’m sure I’ll be learning a lot. I start next week.

In other news, my 15th high school reunion is coming up. I haven’t been in touch with anyone from my high school at all, pretty much since graduation. That’s mostly because I expect that a lot of these people probably still think of me as a doughy, spoiled, somewhat judgmental prude. And sure, I’ve probably just been mostly paranoid about it anyway, but it hasn’t been worth it to me to find out. To the extent that this opinion of me was based on anything real, I would feel embarrassed to be around these people, and to the extent that it wasn’t, I would feel indignant. Either way, it’s meant no class reunions for me, at least up to now. But when I look at myself and how much I’ve changed since high school, and realize that everyone I knew back then could very well have changed as much, that does make me kind of curious. I can’t go anyway because the timing is bad with the new job, but I do have the chance to get in touch with some old classmates, so I am. If I don’t even give them a chance, I’m the one who’s being unfair.

I went out to Missouri this past weekend for the baptism of my twin nephews. I am now Sam’s godfather. I doubt I’ll ever really be called upon to give him much active spiritual guidance, but if I am, we’d all better get started praying for him now.

Alex (my singleton nephew, age 1.33 years) has developed a lot since Christmas. It took him a while to warm up to me, but I’m told it was partly due to his cold. Letting him play with my cell phone was a real icebreaker.

We also went to see the house I grew up in, which is now for sale and had a timely open-house showing. Well, the “grew up in” part isn’t quite true, because (a) I’m not sure how grown up I am even now, and (b) I was even less grown up at age 16 when we moved out of it. But we lived there for about ten years, which is twice as long as any other residence I’ve had so far. It looks pretty different now, but it felt so familiar, not at all like someone else’s house, in spite of all their stuff being in there. Some rooms seemed a lot smaller than I remember, others actually seemed bigger. The walkthrough sparked an odd assortment of memories, including some total surprises. Like the first time I was busted for swearing. Or playing wiffleball in the backyard. Or singing with my sister on our makeshift stage (the downstairs fireplace hearth). I’m really glad I got the chance to go through and remember these things.