Personal note, as free association

My life is changing right now.  That is obviously the most important presence in my subconscious as my good ideas for posts – “Greyhound therapy”; adolescents who have contempt for their parent – feel transparent, insubstantial, and work even feels a bit derealized.  Is there anything to say about the change?  My wife is moving permanently out west to find employment in her new field.  I remain behind, assumedly for many months while I prepare to take the national exam, save some money, seek licensure in the new state, and let the lease expire.  I don’t like her being gone like this, but it seems absolutely necessary: Liz has wanted to leave Ohio for thirty years, and at this point in our virtual old age any more delay would be descent, surrender to failure.

Maybe what feels meaningful is a mystery: These events feel like the carrier of change, but I really don’t feel that anything is changing.  And I want it to.  I want us to, in our new life, be more responsible with money.  I want the end of the crapshoot practice, where sixty-five percent of new clients (it seems) don’t really want therapy, but rather quick answers and solutions or circumstantial conversation and of course meds.  I’d like this blog to spread out a little wider within the country’s specialized readership (not to turn up my nose: Google informs me that fifty-one people in the Ukraine took time away from politics and mayhem to read my posts).

And yet again, I may want to feel a change in myself.  That, however, is probably just existential angst or malaise, wanting to have meaning that eludes so many of us.

A confession: I no longer like to read psychology.  In fact, I almost assume that most people do, and should, find psychological theorizing, topics du jour and the endless supply of personal case histories sickly effete and boring.  While I don’t say this doesn’t include my blog, I do keep my aversion to generic pap always tuned high, and only write things that I have come up with on my own.

A disclosure: I hope someday to get to the place of extreme old age, or desperation, or safety or courage or shamelessness, where I can write the most personal and harrowing (pessimistic) insights about the psyche that I have found.  Those that would say too much about me, but would help parents know what they are really doing to their children, what happens instead of the adulthood that we think happens; and more.  I mean it completely when I say that what I refer to, I have never seen written in the psychological literature, though I am sure some of it is in novels and plays.  That writing would be my swan song, and I’d leave it to a handful of posterity to ignore it or let it be a small but poignant stain on the pantheon.