A Prayer for the Sane (Danny Schmidt)

Everything continues to be different... ever-changing... in flux.  What is effective one day isn't the next.  Stay at Home means just that.  I am now so deeply in the mindset of social distancing such that, if someone on TV shakes hands or hugs, I gasp, then remember that's not "real life".  Reminds me of when my mom was in home hospice (almost 11 years ago), end-of-life stages, and we (myself, my sister, my brother, her friends) were trying to keep up with her caregiving. A constant battle of troubleshooting and problem-solving. Attempting the most risk-adverse scenarios.  

I remembered that I used to watch the show In Treatment, loving the unique approach of one client per day (25-minute episodes), wrapping up with the therapist seeing *his* therapist at the end of the week.  Made it through all of Seasons 1 and 2, and two-thirds of the way through Season 3, at which time I went up to Atlanta to be with my mom in May 2009, ostensibly for a two-week visit, which turned out to be until her death on July 19, and then another month to sort out the will, her belongings, and the sale of her house (I was executor).

All that to say, I never did view the last third of Season 3 (the final one, it turns out), and I found the series recently on HBO, intending to watch only what I missed, and then decided to start at the beginning.  Remembered why I enjoyed it so much, painful as it was/is.  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One of Danny Schmidt's new songs.  In his words:

I wrote and recorded this song exactly one month ago. It's hard to wrap my brain around how much our consciousness has shifted in twenty eight days. I wrote the song about our political environment, about the cognitive dissonance in the orbits of our worldviews, and about the emotional and intellectual fatigue we've all suffered for the last three years.

We're fast approaching an infection point, and we can't begin to restore a sense of common purpose until our collective conversation is informed by honesty, transparency, and factual reality again. And we must be led by someone who honors the truth, and respects those on the other side of it. Only then can we return to civility and decency. And public health.

This isn't a song about resolving dispute. It's a song about coming back to the table together, and all of us acknowledging that a table has four legs and a surface that's solid (and painful when you smack your head against it.)


SONG:  A Prayer for the Sane by Danny Schmidt

BOOK:  Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb

POEM:  Don’t Tell Anyone by Tony Hoagland

We had been married for six or seven years
when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me
that she screams underwater when she swims—

that, in fact, she has been screaming for years
into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool
where she does laps every other day.  

Buttering her toast, not as if she had been
concealing anything,
not as if I should consider myself

personally the cause of her screaming,
nor as if we should perform an act of therapy  
right that minute on the kitchen table,

—casually, she told me,
and I could see her turn her square face up
to take a gulp of oxygen,

then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious.
For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming
as they go through life, silently,

politely keeping the big secret
that it is not all fun
to be ripped by the crooked beak

of something called psychology,
to be dipped down
again and again into time;

that the truest, most intimate
pleasure you can sometimes find
is the wet kiss

of your own pain.
There goes Kath, at one pm, to swim her twenty-two laps
back and forth in the community pool;

—what discipline she has!
Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages,
that will never be read by anyone.

QUOTE:  "Years and years of therapy taught me to speak up because speaking up is what gets things done and gets your story and your voice heard." ~ Michelle Visage