"What can I make if it doesn't have to be pretty?"

A guest post by my writer-friend who is also a real therapist.

Oct 12, 2023

Once or twice a year, I attend a writing conference in Boston or Atlanta. I go to be around other people who geek out over words, and to learn things, and to meet publishing bigwigs (and littlewigs).

But—and let’s just be honest here—mostly I go for the hotel room. I am never happier than in that moment right after the hotel door clicks behind me and I breathe in the lingering smells of the former occupant’s takeout. In a hotel room, I use more towels than I should, despite loving the environment, and I leave them on the bathroom floor, despite having tremendous respect for the people cleaning the room. I arrive with a dozen books and four or five notebooks, and I spread them all over the king-sized bed, then pull the blackout curtains and dive into it like Scrooge McDuck into his vault of gold coins. I stay up super late trying to watch and listen to and read everything I’ve been wanting to watch and listen to and read for the past six months.

The point is, when these conferences offer social events or cocktail hours (as they inevitably do), I almost always opt to stay in my hotel room reading six books at once while also writing a letter and listening to a podcast, with a feral topknot and the glint of madness in my eyes.

But one time, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I decided to wash myself and go to the cocktail thing, and I’m so glad I did, because I met five amazing women, and one of them was Jen.

Jennifer Robinson is a therapist and a writer. I am always jealous of people like this who are two talented things because I can hardly be just one talented thing, but I also really love the way she thinks. She has a very Between Two Things vibe, so I asked her if she wanted to write something for me to share. It’s our first guest post, you guys!

Here she is.

My job as a therapist is to make a mess.

Most folks, when they first arrive in my office, don’t see it that way. They want me to help them meet their self-improvement goals. They want me to help them become better, more successful, more “put-together” versions of themselves.

But my job is to make things messier.

Or rather, my job is to find ways to live and play in the mess that is already there in the human psyche. To explore, collaboratively, what is possible. To pull at the fuzzy, pink threads and drop them onto old newspaper clippings, to encircle those with chicken bones and origami. To hand my client a collection of oil paints and papier-mâché and ask, “What should we do with these?”

When therapy is at its best, the client and I are collaborative artists, working and playing and rearranging the materials of the human mind.

Today Alicia tells me she’s been feeling anxious, like a thunderstorm threatening, all built-up energy, buzzing around with nowhere to go.

My work is focused on loosening the squeeze of her inner critic, an internalized voice that tells her she’s embarrassing, her body is unattractive, she should have more friends, more success, a cleaner apartment, her own house, a higher degree, a better sleep schedule, a better diet, an exercise habit, a meditation habit, less anger, more politeness, more of someone else, less of her.

It pummels her with messages about her lack of worth in nearly every realm of life. Everywhere she looks she falls short. She doesn’t question this voice’s accuracy and she definitely doesn’t question whether it has her best interests in mind.

Sound familiar? Many people come to therapy with similar complaints (I once did). They feel they are sabotaging themselves, holding themselves back, and that they just need a boost to get across to the other side where they will be better (more loved). They want a routine or a schedule or the right motivation. Tools and tips. Strategies. They hold rigid ideas about who they “should” be and believe they are failing to meet this basic standard.

Their lives have become consumed by trying to quiet that nasty voice. And why not? It’s cruel and it inflicts awful pain. They are exhausted from working in service of it. At times, the voice gets quieter, but it never goes away. In fact, it is in the driver’s seat of their lives. Everything they are doing, they are doing to make that voice shut up.

And I am to “help them.”

But I cannot make it go away either. And of course, I have my own voice that tortures me, as many of us do. I have been on that hamster wheel of self-improvement, never feeling good enough, never worthy of love. Always trying to be prettier, smarter, more likeable, more loveable. I have my own therapist, and my therapist has her therapist—and so on and so on in an infinite regress.

But back to Alicia. At my request, she’s come in with a list of times she felt most like herself. She mentions reading—in her blue bedroom, then in her pink bedroom, then in her green chair. Journaling and dancing with headphones. Falling in love at Stonehenge. Christmas mornings with her cousins, exhilaration at the art gallery, being with people when she doesn’t feel she’s too loud or too quiet, when there’s no goal or purpose except just being.

To quote Sylvia Plath: “I am, I am, I am. That old brag of the human heart.”

These are not things that voice wants for her. It doesn’t want her to sit in a green chair and read; it wants her to track her calories and lose weight. Like, right now, immediately. It doesn’t want her to dance and feel the rhythms and melodies moving through her body; it wants her to go to church every Sunday. It doesn’t want her to scribble in her journal; that would be irresponsible as there is laundry in the dryer waiting to be folded and also she needs to bake cookies for her friend’s birthday and organize all her books and….

I ask what it felt like to read her list.

“Sad.” She looks down at her lap, face reddening. “It’s so far in the past, it feels like those things happened to someone else.” I process a bit of sadness in myself as I connect to her grief over what she’s lost. The joy and vibrancy she’s missed out on.

But I’m not worried. I know she can live it again, even though she doesn’t know it herself in this moment.

We need to do two things to destabilize and de-center this hypercritical voice. First, we trace it back to its origins as best we can. She was not born thinking this way; it is something she learned. We follow the breadcrumbs back to her childhood, to when she was a vibrant and noisy little girl whose father gave her lessons in how to be quiet, who was otherwise overlooked, who was constantly searching the eyes of the adults above her, trying to figure out what she had to do to earn their attention and care, who never actually got it and felt she was alone, unlovable, wrong, a mistake, and therefore not worth their love. If she were just better somehow, she would have been loved. Here we pause and offer that scared and lonely little girl some empathy, some compassion, some re-parenting.

Then I ask her this: how is that voice trying to help you? I ask her to humor me and imagine that it is, in fact, trying to help her in some way. What would it be trying to do? As with most of these harsh inner critics, it is trying to protect her, to help her avoid feeling shame, to help her avoid being judged by other people. It is trying to help her feel loved and acceptable to others, while splitting her off from a truer self, a self which this critic fears would cause her to be even more isolated and alone if it were free.

Once this work is done, she will have learned to hear that internalized voice and to say “Ah yes, I know where you come from. I know who you are.” She will have externalized it, realized it’s not actually the way she thinks, is not in line with her own values or with the meaning she wants to make in her life. It’s something she picked up but that she can also put down. Before she puts it down she can also say, “Thank you.” Then, “I will take it from here.”

And so, she and I have complicated things just a little. We have zoomed out from the critical voice and found there is room for other voices and feelings and experiences to spread themselves on the canvas. And now what else should we put on it? Where is that green chair? Is there room for music and dance? For being lost in a novel for an entire afternoon? For conflicting feelings of love for her father for the way he tried to help her and anger at him for letting her down and failing to nurture who she really was?

Of course there is room for these things, and room for more.

Share Between Two Things

When we zoom out and the negative voice takes its rightful place as a black tangle in the corner of the canvas, we see all manner of other things. As a therapist, this part is always a shock to me, the other things clients paint or glue on their canvas, things they’ve neglected. A snarky and deliciously dark sense of humor that I never would have predicted. An obsession with the history of almanacs. A secret wish to be a mentor for women in male-dominated businesses. An operatic singing voice, hidden away and stifled by perfectionism.

Joseph Campbell once said, “I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life so much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” Isn’t the experience of being alive a complicated web of relationships and perceptions and obsessions and conflicts and desires? I don’t think it is a house, a car, a job, a marriage.

What clients want when they walk into my office is rarely the thing I can give them. At least, not directly. “I need to get out of my head and stop ruminating” (“I am A and should be B,”) turns into an awareness that thinking through all the possible outcomes is a way to help them feel more in control, which turns into the need to tolerate feelings of helplessness. It expands into the realization that their father’s fits of rage made them terrified of feeling helpless and small, desperate to try to control their external environment to avoid such feelings. Ideally, this eventually turns into, “I can be the whole alphabet, if I want to.”

Alicia wished she had a visible talent as a kid. She thought that if she could draw really well, for example, people would want to get to know her. Sometimes, she still finds herself wanting something that people can look at and immediately find "impressive." An undeniable marker of success, like a good job, a house, marriage. In one of our later sessions, I say that a work of art is so much more interesting when it’s complicated, isn’t it? How boring would it be to just look at a painting, be “impressed,” and then move on. I say, jokingly, “I think you want to be a much shallower person than you are!” And we laugh. “You have depth, sorry about it.”

“I don’t want it!” she cries, laughing.

The things that make her happiest are messy and complicated. She says, “I love them so much!” I am shocked when she tells me Klimt is her favorite artist. But I also think, yes, of course. Those paintings are a beautiful mess. They are vibrant and complicated and mysterious and joyful. They contain all the colors, bright and dark.

And simple becomes messy. And messy, it turns out, is closer to the truth of the way things are. Closer to the feeling of being alive.

Alicia has cut back on therapy—she wants to go out and live her life. Good. Like a parent, my job is to help my client develop to the point where I am no longer needed. Meanwhile, she has come up with a guiding question for herself:

“What can I make if it doesn’t have to be pretty?”