We Sit in a Circle Judith Claire Mitchell (bio) In January 1981, when I was twenty-eight and two years divorced and there was no internet or serotonin reuptake inhibitors, I sometimes opened the Providence yellow pages — that voluminous if inert search engine — and scanned the eclectic array of addiction specialists, adoption agencies, junk haulers, and housecleaners who’d paid to have their businesses listed under the inchoate category of help. Or I’d read the help wanted ads in the Providence Journal and look for my name. In both cases it was as if I hoped for a listing that said, Judy: Call this number and we’ll fix everything. When I had the energy, I sought less magical but equally non-productive means of rescue. I made appointments with a series of psychologists but connected with none. I went on dates, so many dates, usually spending the night, but almost always grateful to part in the morning. There was also a man I saw somewhat steadily, a bankruptcy lawyer whose girlfriend, a nurse, worked nights and weekends. Just good times, cocktails, and sex, I reminded myself when not only the gin but oxytocin began to flow. [End Page 425] I was weepy, felt empty, had nothing but my office work, which I did from nine to five, and my drinking, which I did when I got home. I’d once had writing, the only thing I’d ever been told I was good at, but I had faltered without deadlines, assignments, community. This season of my life, these doldrums, might have been a good time for an MFA — Brown, a half mile from my apartment, offered one — but that would have required planning and gumption. The only writing I did was in a personal journal, daily multi-page scrawls of frustrations and disappointments and self-recrimination that I didn’t think counted. “If you write something that nobody else reads, is that really writing?” a professor in college had asked us, fledgling novelists in a seminar room. Yes, we chirped, but she shook her head sadly and told us the answer was no. 1/6/81 Today’s new therapist looks over my forms and asks what I need to cure my depression. I’ve never been asked that before. I say I don’t think of chronic depression as something curable exactly, the way headaches can be cured with aspirin, but if she’s asking what might mitigate it some, then maybe a committed relationship with someone I like who likes me. Love is what I mean, but it’s also a word I don’t like to use in public. It has come to sound babyish to me. In any case, my answer is not only wrong, it’s offensive. She literally rolls her eyes and tells me I should not need a man to be happy. Also, if I really wanted a relationship, I’d have one. Finding a man is not as difficult as I’m making it out to be. Women meet men all the time. Women meet men every day on the bus. “Well, that must be my problem,” I say. “I walk to work.” This therapist, an icicle wearing a blue suit from Talbot’s, glares and asks why I’ve chosen to deliberately deflect her point. I tell her I’m sorry, but I’m a transplanted Jewish New Yorker [End Page 426] and joking in moments like this is something we do. I want so badly to add that relationships are not as easily come by as she thinks, that, in fact, the only thing harder than finding a good man in Providence is finding a good therapist in Providence, that in both cases you know within five minutes it’s not going to work, but you still have to sit there for a reasonable amount of time, blithering out your life story, as I’m doing now, forty-six minutes to go. And so, for my New Year’s resolution I forced myself to hunt down a writing class. The one I found was an adult education course called “Keeping a Journal for Creative Writing.” I expected...
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Oct 3, 2022
Timothy Joseph Sowicz + 7
Open Access