Dear Dr C:

Today when I left your office, I had to get natural bug spray as I walk at the State Park at least once a week and I usually forget to use it for the mosquitoes and ticks…Well, I went in, made a beeline for where I thought the display would be (having really no idea, I had to traverse the whole store before I found it, unfortunately, given that people there — as I told you — were talking and thinking about me and looking at me and wanting me not to buy or to buy certain things as usual…). ButI found it finally. Luckily there were not too many choices and the choice was made for me when I saw the word “local” and “made in Connecticut” as I knew that would please the “locavores” who were monitoring my purchase — a locavore being someone who eats only from local sources.

Despite the fact that it was the most expensive bug spray on the shelf I took the bottle and found the shortest line…No, actually, the line I stood in was the one where the woman before me actually looked at me without a frown, and in so doing gave me permission to stand behind her. I paid with my last ten dollars, though the cashier made everyone wait, impatiently I am sure, because he didn’t believe it cost $9.99 and he “didn’t want to overcharge me.” Hah!

Finally, I emerged from the store safely, shouldered my bag, and headed for the car. But as I stepped near the curb, a red Mini- Cooper drove past me and I understood immediately that this was your car, Dr C, and that you recognized me coming from Whole Foods. This seems entirely reasonable to me, since there was not another patient waiting in the waiting room when I left, so it seems likely that you were heading elsewhere after I departed…And suddenly a red Mini-Cooper seemed only rightly and properly “your car.” But somehow this conjunction boded very ill to me and I immediately became apprehensive, or what my sister, Dr O and my friend Josephine all called paranoid.

On one level I see what they were saying. But on the most profound level, I KNOW that what I know is truer than their objective observations. I was/am certain beyond the faintest doubtful smudge that you are in with Them, capital T. Who are They? They are the osteopaths of H_____, who have had a conspiracy against me for years.

Lynnie – Carolyn — told me I should talk about this with you, so here you are: this is only one of the big problems I have with you at the moment. Another one, which may be insurmountable in the end, is that I want to know why you sit where you do, I mean, way across the room from me. I do not want you to change. Do not suddenly get up and sit elsewhere. I just wonder why your natural choice is to sit, what is it, 10 feet away? Do I, as I fear, repell you? (If yes, is that because of the Osteopaths and what they have shared with you?) Do you fear me? Fear something? I can barely see you. I feel like you cannot see me, which is more to the point.

I need…I need…Oh, Lynnie tells me to do something different from what I “usually do” – be brave enough to ask questions when I should then sit still and listen to the answers, and ask for clarification if I still haven’t understood. To discuss what I feel rather than letting my paranoia get the best of me, not simply accept it and go with it full speed ahead. But I do not know HOW to fight the absolute certainty that things are going on, nor the special knowledge that I have. Zyprexa helped more than anything, but that is utterly unacceptable. Nothing else has made a dent. Except possibly the 35mg of Abilify, which I went back on tonight, just in case…We’ll see.

Enough is enough. I hope you don’t mind that I wrote this. I didn’t want to leave a message on your phone nor ask to have you call me. In fact, though, I may keep this until the 13^th and give it to you then, as I am afraid you might consider it a burden to read a letter “off duty.” 

Sincerely,

PW

Now, that is what I wrote him, after the incident recounted in the letter, but in fact, I have found and called an APRN therapist, a female, who sounds and “feels” more to my liking, though I have not yet met her. Maybe I simply get on better with women than men? But that is not true, as I have had male docs in the hospital I preferred over the female therapists by far. I think, as I discussed it with Dr O, I found Dr C not so warm nor “safe” in the end, nor responsive to what I said. I had trouble talking with him, because he did not actually talk with me, only listened, which is not what I want in a  psychiatrist. I do not want that sort of “therapy” — I don’t want to delve into my past or my inner feelings. I have a hard enough time dealing each week with what is happening in my life, let alone the deepest darkest secrets that my mind hides from me and in which I have no interest…My goals in therapy are mainly two: to gain some self-esteem and self-confidence, which despite how I may sound here, I have almost none of, and two, to somehow, somehow, if possible, learn how to cope with and not be so chronically paranoid. Of course, those were Dr O’s aims with me all along, I imagine. But perhaps if I myself commit to them and learn how to work at them, more headway can be made. I sort of think, now that I know what paranoia is and how to recognize it, finally, that I need concrete exercises to practice how not to succumb to my tendency toward it. Ditto self-esteem, which tendency is just as strong, if not stronger, since it produces as much paranoia as grandiosity does. I cannot imagine what form such exercises might take, but I can imagine that they exist. I cannot be the first person to need them, after all.

WE MAD is at the printers but apparently it takes a month to come out from there, so it won’t be finished until May 28th! Geeze, and I thought it would take a week at most…This is going so slow. I cannot see how they could possibly have gotten the book out in February, even had I not been ill and taken a “month off”. At best they would have gotten the book out in April! I should have known that anything a publisher says with a deadline has to be taken with a grain of salt. But I cannot seem to get that through my thick skull and so I still keep on expecting things to be done on time, and keep meeting deadlines that no one else ever does.