Discussions with Myself

July 11 - Boxing Identity

         Two days ago I started sorting through some things... throwing out mounds of papers and packing old clothes for charity. It took me two full evenings to finish but it was a satisfying excavation; my dig revealed (gasp) a well decorated bedroom that might actually belong to an adult, not a student (albeit the bed was still unmade).

         But tonight...sigh. I started my mission in my office space with the same tools: music, tall white trash bags, cardboard boxes, and a purpose. Everything was going well, I was gleefully filling bags with the refuse from semesters past and anticipating filling a few more boxes before bed. Then reality ran up behind me and choked me like dust off desk shelves of unread textbooks.

         I know what did it. I was trying to decide which books I wasn't going to need in this time away from grad school and when I started looking at the books I was pulling off my shelves I realized that they were all the books of my trade...of the only life, of the only me, I've known for a very long and tumultuous time.

         I brushed it off and continued because I was still excited at the prospect of a computer desk where you can actually get to the computer without contorting yourself around piles of paperwork and junk. Then came the program manual... the blue binder holding a detailed description of all of the "badges" a grad student in these ranks must earn. Even more striking was my realization of all the ones I already display on the uniform of my transcript and have tucked inside some folder in our director's office. I was going to box THIS? HOLY SHIT-I'm not going to be in school in the fall! DOUBLE HOLY SHIT- I'm not going to be a therapist anymore! What the hell did I do?

         I couldn't bring myself to put away my diagnostic manual... the head shrinker's bible of disorders and the code by which we make our living. THAT is just too much commitment. What if I put that symbol of all of this work, all of what I'm leaving behind for the time being, into a little cardboard enclosure? I might not take it out again...and then where (or who) would I be?

         Yet the decision has been made and pack I must, if not that book, scads of others... Subject after subject... a virtual flipbook of my time here-from not having a clue how to even ask "So what brings you here today?" to the point where even my increasingly adept therapy manuvers make ME feel like I should be the one on the proverbial couch and finally to this situation I'm in now, having heeded the tortured whisper from my absolute raisin of a soul to get out. Intriguing (ok, more like TERRIFYING) that I must find myself by boxing my identity.


"Well-behaved women rarely make history"
-Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

         
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