Waiting for Godot

For unknown reasons, I am feeling stupid and dull lately. With clients, I’ve been living in this visceral inscrutable mood and mental effeteness where all issues feel two-dimen­sional and I feel useless. Oh, you were abused as a child. Yep, wife is OCPD and drives her husband nuts. You’re a depressed teen. Even a good jab at a long-term client – having her realize her cruel and sociopath early-teen children are that way because of her own Borderline-based cruelty toward them – felt bromide-like, like just inserting a well-worn term into an algebraic equation.

Honestly: I don’t know if this is old age (will be sixty-nine soon), or hormones (men have them, don’t they?), or even too much experience melding into beige twenty-five-year-old oatmeal. Good coffee in the morning hasn’t sharpened or piqued me. There isn’t any additional dysthymic or other depression: I’d know that. Is it the smoke from the California fires wafting over to southern Nevada? Is my body or God telling me that I finally must have the long break from shit that I’d needed (we’d all needed) in childhood: parents driving the car, adult-level routine in elementary school, the wheels always turning when you just need to look, wonder at existence?

What this is making me do is look at this client on the couch and both go through the motions and open up my molecules to mystery. If I’m placid and accepting of my altered state, possibly my depth will reappear or even something greater will appear? I realize, now, that I may always anticipate or hope for even deeper discoveries than the client’s present discom­fort, his dominating childhood roots, his birth- or pre-birth trauma. It’s the feeling of beginning the writing of a poem, sitting back (in the whole universe) and opening oneself and waiting for the world to be especially interesting.

Oddly enough, that may be my one kind of optimism.