“I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you as myself” ― Joy Harjo

I have always feared insanity, my own and others.  It seemed the worst thing that could happen to me (the thing I said I feared the most when we went around the circle in my women’s group) would be to realize that I was insane and that I had been so for quite some time.  That I had married, had a child, divorced, had lovers, had jobs, friends, several careers and homes, that I had traveled, and written and even read my writing out loud to rooms of people and that somehow it had escaped my awareness that all that time I had been batshit crazy.

Everyone else had known it, in my worst nightmare.  It had shown through the look in my eyes, the way I dressed, the decisions I made; that in my writing, right under the surface, was the stark raving lunacy I had come to know in my mother, in her mother and probably in the line of mothers that preceded them.

I have been afraid to find that I was no different from them; that I just thought I was.

So I became a therapist.

And a writer.

It was not my intention to become either.  Writing began as a five year old – The Snow Monkey- a picture book poem that I wrote for my mother which went something like:

There was a snow monkey

He lived in the snow

But he was white so

You cud not see him

I drew a picture of him on the front of the book; it was a black dot (his nose) and nothing else.

I look back on that now and think it had as much to do with me becoming a therapist as a writer.

It was always hard for me to let myself show.  I felt as though there was something wrong – too big, too strong, too smart, too much, not enough – that comfort and safety lie in blending into the periphery of whatever life circumstance I found myself in.

The problem was, I didn’t blend.

Becoming a therapist was like making a profession out of being me.  It grew out of an insatiable interest in how other people made it, blending or standing out. And becoming a writer has come from wanting to know even more.

Both have saved me, in their own way; being a therapist has pushed me to reach for healing, toward understanding myself and others.  Why do we (I) do what we do, feel how we feel, say what we say.  Being a writer has pushed me to come out about it.  To, as Amy Liu encouraged us to do, use my words.

I would be a different person today without either of them.

And if it turns out that if I have been crazy all these years, at least I’ve had company.  And that makes it all way less scary.