Going To Therapy Pt. 1

[insert the precarity of Black life]

Image | Getty

Happy October First. I’ve been traveling the last few weeks and busy with life. Thanks for sticking around; reading and liking older post. This summer I spent a lot of time with family and thinking about traditions. In a series of three pieces published through Detour via The Sacramento Bee, I wrote about summer family traditions in relation to place. The first is an essay about traveling solo, the next about observing gendered exceptions at family gatherings and the final about queering family traditions. Though I wrote each piece separately they are all connected (in my mind).

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and it sadly coincides with the anniversary of the passing (because of DV) of my childhood best friend, Jannette Lawrence, aka B.G. DaQueen. It will be eleven years on the 11th. I write about her death, a lot. Grief, and mourning will do that to you. Below is part one of an essay about how her loss galvanized me to initiate working on my emotional and mental health. Part two will come out on Wednesday. If you haven’t already, subscribe so you get Tiny Violences delivered directly to your inbox. You can read the essay, Going to Therapy: [Insert the Precarity of Black Life] Pt. 1 below.

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The first time I saw a therapist was in the blur of years after the murder of one of my very close family friends.  She was 30 years old when she died. I was 25. It was the kind of prolific tragedy that lives on the periphery of the lives of women who are black and who look like me. Common, and horrifying.

I coped as best as I could, since this was a grief shared by so many, for many reasons. Someone hipped me to the idea of seeking help, and so I did. At that time in my life, my mid 20s, I had very little money, and so I had to contort my desires for healing into whatever shape I could afford.  This would just be another humiliating bullet point on a long list of experiences where my class informed my quality of living. At any rate, living in the very moneyed city that I live in, I found a few places looking for people like me.  There were two sliding-scale psychotherapeutic collectives that I came to. At that time, I didn't know how to make the distinctions between the various modes of therapy. I just knew I wanted and needed to talk to someone.

It was summer, and balmy and sunny. I wore a cotton triangle scarf printed with jeweled-toned abstract stripes of color on a canvas-colored background- as a shirt and dark denim mid-rise Bermuda shorts. My hair was blonde, short, and natural, in a tapered cut. My shoulders, brown and shining, a combination of coconut oil and sweat. The building was in a colonial townhouse in the West Village between the Avenue of Americas and 5th. The tree-lined street soothed me as I stepped down into the entrance. I waited in a dark vestibule, then was greeted by a middle-aged white man with dark hair and a cleanshaven puckered face.  He had a French first name and wore a navy-blue blazer and chinos. We sat in a room facing one another.

“I've been struggling with depression.”