I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.
— Steven Wright
When I was a little girl, my mother had an enormous tin filled with buttons — hundreds and hundreds of buttons. For fun, I would dump them out and sort them. I’d try to find matching ones or sort them by color and size. I’d do this for hours, never satisfied until they were sorted “right”. In addition to probably being an early sign of being out of my gourd, my button sorting abilities were something I carried on to college with me and resulted in never recieving less than an A on a paper. I’ve always had the ability to deftly sift through my hundreds of button-thoughts and sort them, organize them, form them into a lean and direct narrative.
I’m having trouble sorting the buttons right now, though, having trouble organizing my thoughts into any semblence of, well, anything. I don’t know if I should sort by size or color or texture, and just when I start to latch onto something they jumble up again. Like right now — I’m talking about buttons, for God’s sake.
I keep waiting for the muses to grant me clarity again so I could write something good here. Apparently they’re on summer vacation and I’m going to have to settle for writing some awful. I guess I’ll just talk and hope it breaks something loose.
My first psychiatrist, Betsy, the one I previously wrote about when she was jerking me around, has been canned. Not just by me, by the entire practice. I had decided to stick it out with her just to keep my meds level and prescribed while I was going to a six week group therapy program, then I was going to find a new psychiatrist. The decision to stick with her temporarily was based on a combination of factors: I am sort of anxious about the group thing and didn’t want to add to it by interviewing new doctors during, I didn’t want to make the haul to Ann Arbor (about forty-five minutes away) more than once a week in order to find a new doctor during the group program, and finally, I am lazy.
The third week of the program, I was introduced to a new psychiatrist, Nancy, that I had time to talk with and sort of interview. I really clicked with her, and asked her if she was taking new patients and had any openings in her schedule. She said she wasn’t taking any new ones technically, but that she would like to try and fit me into her schedule. After the group met, I had an appointment to stop by Betsy’s for a quick discussion about meds. It was a half-hour appointment and by the time she was fifteen minutes late, I approached the receptionist and asked her why Betsy wasn’t there yet. She blanched and asked me in a shocked tone if anyone from the practice had contacted me at all, and when I said they hadn’t, I was informed that Betsy had been let go. She (and other people I’ve talked to since) have apologized profusely for the mix up while also making it sound like her departure was planned. But since I scheduled with Betsy a week prior and she made no mention of leaving, I doubt it was.
I was left hanging for a day, wondering how I was going to go about finding a new psychiatrist and how soon I needed to do it, when Nancy called me and told me that she would like to take me on as a patient and that she didn’t have any official openings in her schedule for a month and a half but that she would move some meetings around and make time to meet sooner. We met yesterday for our first appointment and discussed what I wanted from the relationship, and I feel like it went well.
She’s the resident meds expert, and she does talk therapy as well. I feel confident with the meds aspect of it, and we’ve decided to set up three or four sessions to talk and then decide if I want to continue therapy with her or just keep my meds going with her and be referred to someone else for talk therapy.
Nancy is in her early thirties and seems professional but warm. She also laughs at my jokes, which I like. Betsy, and a lot of other doctors (psychiatric or otherwise) don’t laugh at my jokes and it makes me uncomfortable. I try to put myself at ease with humor and when people don’t respond to my humor it makes me uncomfortable. Which leads to more, increasingly frantic and awkward humor. It’s a bad cycle, I promise.
This has felt like mentally swimming through hummus. Buttons.
