xi
prev.cont.Today I watched someone else’s therapy for the first time. It was a patient I’d met back in the psych ward. Her name is Amanda. She tried to kill herself, and her psychiatrist is pretty sure she’ll try again.
I remembered something I learned from my own therapy: it isn’t some kind of mystical process that fixes your inner problems. It’s two people talking to each other for 45 minutes and deciding to talk again in two weeks.
At the end of the 45 minutes, the therapist asked me if I had anything to add. I started to sweat. "No, not really," I said. "Just that it’s okay to take up space in the world, because we’re all supposed to be here." Amanda wrote that down.
What’s it all for? The human condition tends toward destruction, no matter what medicine has to say. If they give you the cure for something that was going to kill you, something will pop up that makes you want to kill yourself. If you don't kill yourself, you'll get heart disease and die anyway.
The bottom line is you have to die. It seems like it might be a better use of resources to find the cure for the terror that will overcome you when death comes.
I’m preoccupied with death, but modern medicine affords me the luxury of casual detachment. I know that if I get an infection, there’s antibiotics for that; if I get hit by a car, they’ll fix me up in the ER; if I get cancer, they’ll give me chemo. I could get myself into a lot of trouble, but medicine will be there to rescue me.
But I'm on my own after that. What will I do now that I’ve been hit by a car? I survived, but now what? Nothing’s been done to address the conditions that led to my getting hit in the first place. Maybe I’ll get hit again, and they’ll crush a vital organ this time.
Every time, without fail, the act of life-saving puts the saved life at risk of needing to be saved again. Amanda tried to kill herself, and she got sent to the psych ward, and they “saved her life” by zapping her suicidal thoughts away with meds. But now she has to go to therapy every week, and I know from my flashcards that the number one risk factor for suicide is a past attempt. And her psychiatrist really thinks she's going to try it again.
By intervening so consistently, doctors show us that our lives can and will be saved when they’re in danger. Does that not lead to a weird relationship with life, and a weird concept of death? When it comes time to die, when you finally realize that you can’t be saved this time, won't you feel too betrayed to enjoy the end credits?
Doctors don’t have time to encourage their patients to embrace the strange beauty of the dying process. They’re too busy trying to prevent death from happening, because that is the single goal that we, the people, value most of all.
I think I might be in the wrong place. I’m only a few months into the weird year, and I’m already feeling “called” to leave. I suppose the best way out is still through, isn’t it?
When the time comes, I can do something different. I won’t have to pretend to care about treatment algorithms. I won’t have to pretend I’m not utterly disinterested in extending the lives of people around me like I’m trying for a high score.
I just have to get by so I can move on. I hope I don’t die in the meantime.
exit