I remember when I was first doing clinical training we had an advanced psychopathology course every Wednesday after rounds. When we started, we looked at the syllabus and there were a number of familiar texts: the DSM-IV-TR, and Adult Psychopathology and Diagnosis. But sprinkled throughout the texts were other readings: Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Rilke. After we’d had a moment to look it over the teacher said, You will no doubt notice that there are a number of texts that you have not seen before. This is because I assume that your clinical training to be largely complete. Otherwise how would you get here? But now you have to learn what things actually look like. And, over the course of my career, I have found that anywhere a psychiatrist would go a great writer has been there before and has described it better.
Marc Dones
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I can no more remember
What brought me here
Than bone answers bone in the arm
Or shadow sees shadow—
—Billy the Kid, Jack Spicer
The other day I said to someone, The thing about trauma is that it just puts you in this place of chronic mourning. You just spend a lot of time mourning losses that were a long time ago and what you will lose in the future as a result. I was thinking about a time I was sitting in my therapist’s office and felt like crying when I said, What would I be capable of if I didn’t have to spend so much energy managing my own mind? Who could I have been?
...You
look at your face your face
is old but suffering is
older...
—Anne Carson, Red Doc >
The holidays are here again and so are all the articles about what to be thankful for, how to be thankful, the importance of being thankful. I am supposed to be thankful for the job I have (which I love), the winding path that got me here to a place where I am able to do work that I find so valuable. Which means I have to think about all the things that happened to me that put me here. I have to think about the things that were wonderful and the people who gave me so much to feel gratitude for—and I have to think about the people who took so much from me, and in such irreparable ways that I could not do this work without being able to source my passion from my hurt. But it also means that I have to acknowledge, again, the depth of that hurt.
