19 Notes on Therapy
On the spaces we inhabit, the work that shapes us, and the quiet negotiations between fear, attention, and the effort to remain present to ourselves.
For a year I went to therapy every Monday at nine in the morning. The time settled into me. It came to feel less like an appointment than a condition, something the week had to pass through before it could take shape. Monday mornings have a particular quality—still close to rest, already leaning toward obligation—and the hour seemed to hold that tension without resolving it.
I arrived most weeks with sentences already forming. I have always arrived everywhere this way. Language comes first, or at least it comes early. I notice things by thinking them through, by placing them into relation, by reading myself against what I have read. This has been described to me as being cerebral. I have never been sure what the alternative would look like.
I did not go to therapy to become less thoughtful. I went because thought had begun to feel crowded. It no longer opened space; it closed it. I could account for my feelings long before I could remain with them. Explanation arrived faster than experience. I noticed this without yet knowing what to do with the noticing.
The sessions did not move in a straight line. There was no progression that could be charted. Instead there were returns: to work, to comparison, to the sensation that life was happening elsewhere, that I was perpetually almost caught up. I spoke often about effort: how much of it was required, how easily it accumulated, how quickly it tipped into depletion. I spoke less about why effort felt so necessary.
Work has always promised a certain kind of safety. It gives shape to time. It offers proof. It allows me to believe that stability can be produced through discipline. I have rarely questioned this belief. It seemed self-evident and yet the year began to show me how easily work absorbs fear without resolving it, how convincingly it can masquerade as devotion.
Comparison surfaced everywhere. It did not arrive loudly, it arrived as calibration. As quiet adjustments to posture, pace, ambition. I measured myself constantly; against other writers, other women, other trans lives that seemed more fluent, more resolved, more visibly assured. The measuring was not cruel exactly, but it was persistent. It left little room for rest.
In therapy, this habit became more visible. Not condemned, simply observed. I noticed how often my sense of self appeared only in relation to something else. How rarely I asked what I wanted without first accounting for how it might be received. How frequently my expectations of myself carried the force of necessity rather than preference.
Being a trans woman lent these expectations a particular sharpness. I was attentive to how I was read, how I moved through space, how much ease I could permit myself. Safety felt conditional, and so I lived conditionally. I delayed affection, I postponed softness, I treated attention as something to be rationed rather than offered.
Therapy did not interrupt this immediately. It allowed it to continue long enough to become unmistakable. The room did not reward urgency. Silence was not filled. I learned to hear myself more clearly in what was repeated than in what was newly said.
Some weeks were taken up almost entirely with work; what I was producing, what I feared losing, how much of myself seemed bound to output. Other weeks drifted elsewhere: into memory, into reading, into the small negotiations of daily life that rarely announce themselves as meaningful but accumulate all the same. The sessions held these movements without privileging one over another.
I began to notice how much reverence I had given to productivity. How readily I treated work as the measure of seriousness, of worth, of belonging. How little reverence I afforded to rest, or pleasure, or unstructured time. These were spoken of cautiously, as if they might evaporate under direct attention.
The year did not teach me to work less. It made me curious about what I was working toward, and what I was working against. It made visible the way exhaustion had become familiar, even comforting; a known quantity in a life otherwise marked by uncertainty.
I read constantly during this time—I always have—but the reading took on a different texture. I was less interested in answers than in company. I noticed which sentences stayed with me, which forms allowed contradiction without collapse. I noticed how often I turned to books not for instruction but for permission: to be unfinished, to be observant rather than resolved.
There were moments in therapy when I felt the urge to declare something: an insight, a turning point, a change. These moments passed. What remained was quieter, a slightly altered attention. A marginally increased tolerance for ambiguity; a willingness to let certain questions remain open.
I suffered most, I came to see, not from external pressure but from the expectations I had absorbed and made my own. Expectations that insisted on acceleration. On coherence. On becoming something more stable, more legible, more secure before allowing myself ease. These expectations did not dissolve, they slowly loosened.
The year ended without ceremony. The Mondays continue. The hour remains what it had always been: a place where nothing has to be proven. I do not leave with a new philosophy, I leave with a different orientation toward my days: more negotiating, less insisting; more attention paid to what I give my energy to, and why.
I am still in conversation with work, with ambition, with comparison. I still think first, often. But the thinking feels less like a defence, less like an extraction. It has begun, at times, to feel like accompaniment.
There is more room now for affection; for people, for ideas, for moments that do not announce their importance. More care in deciding what deserves reverence, and what can be set down without consequence. Less urgency to become, and more willingness to remain.
The year did not resolve anything. It shifted where I stand. That seems to be enough.
WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE
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