Fools for rules

Feeling ever more brave about heading out into the real world, as more people I know get vaccinated and as my appointment for my BioNTech (Pfizer to you Americans) shot nears on Tuesday, I’ve started checking about getting out of the house a little more. Perhaps the second-most therapeutic thing I’ll try to do next week will be trying to get to see my therapist for the first time since October (the most therapeutic thing will be getting a haircut for the first time since December).

Clearly, I’m surviving OK despite six months of not meeting with a therapist. At the same time, there has been a certain lack of, shall we say, course-correction without regular meetings with my therapist. I fill the gap with these blog posts, turning all y’all into honorary therapists for me, but you still kind of want a paid professional sitting down with you from time to time, because he’ll tell me when I’m being an idiot. OK. Several of you will as well, but you sugar coat it nicer.

And you do want to know what’s going on. And I know that Dr. Kehrer isn’t going to solve all my problems or answer all of my questions. I’m having random moments where, out of the blue, I’ll feel on the verge of crying. If there’s a link to Colin, I haven’t figured it out yet. There might be a link to moments when I’m editing a particularly depressing story at work, but I can’t be sure of that either. And, given everything that’s happened, I don’t know if a momentary feeling of sadness is all that strange. But you still want to know what a person thinks about it. And why those are happening more often, but actual dreams where I’m hanging out with Colin – I had one this week: He was filthy, in a good way … like we were walking down a dirt road and, like any pre-schooler, decided to bring half of it home with him – why are they so rare?

So, it’s good that I’m going to see Dr. Kehrer, assuming I’m not one of those lucky ones who gets the vaccine and then spends half a week feeling like I just got a flu and a half. But it also reminds me that our time is limited.

Dr. Kehrer had told me last year that the insurance company was only going to pay for a few more sessions and, more importantly, it was probably time for me to move on. So, we’ve got like three sessions left. By all rights, we should have been done months ago, but then I started having breathing problems in the autumn and we decided to give it a rest so as to risk the chance of me infecting him (though it just turned out that I was having a pulmonary embolism, not Covid-19 (and I suppose it’s a good sign that I just had to look up the word for ‘pulmonary embolism, so maybe that trauma is at least fading)), and then Covid-19 case counts in Germany went through the roof and it just seemed safer to forgo in-person meetings and, if we only had three left, I was going to do them in-person, and not online.

So I contacted him and he set the appointment, and then told me how lucky it was that I had thought to reach out since, by German law, had we gone two full quarters without meeting, all the rest of our appointments would have been nulled and voided. Oh Germany: There are always rules here and, it would seem, no exceptions, even for pandemics. So, I sidestepped that problem, but it means I’m stuck with the new problem.

Three sessions left. And again, I don’t know why I’m letting it weigh me down, because I just did fine for six months without a single session. But still. Having a therapist feels like it’s become almost part of my identity.

“Oh, your child died.”

“Yes, but I have a therapist working with me,” seems like a good response to that. Like it’s the responsible way to be.

“Oh, my sessions ended” or “I’m back on the hunt for a new therapist,” just doesn’t feel like an adequate enough answer. And then there’s the fact that I really do like Dr. Kehrer, and I imagine professionalism will require that we don’t meet up for beers in a few months, so it’s sad to contemplate another friendship ending.

But at least I’ll get three more sessions. I suppose you take what you can get.