Readingground Blogazine

by Todd Carlstrom

To know that you need help; to accept it as undeniable fact—That Which Must Be Acted Upon—and then, To Actually Act Thereon—that, my friends, that is not for the timid. And apparently, I’m timid. For twenty years, I haven’t gone to therapy. If you’d asked me whether I had an aversion to it, I’d have said no. (That is, after I commented on how presumptuous it was for you to pose such a question.) My first experience with a therapist seemed to have gone well enough. And yet, I’ve never really cared to see one again, despite the good it might have done me in some of those rough patches.
There may be more to it than mere timidity; more likely, it can be attributed to a behavioral tendency of mine so frustrating as to bear personification, Lazy Optimism. He advocates whatever course of action promises the least thereof. How? By waging a subtly nagging propaganda campaign against the more upstanding citizens of my brain, who really should have learned by now to listen more critically to his often tortured justifications for couchlock. “No reason to get up, now. Watch more Supernanny. Life’ll take care of itself.” He assures me every time—right up to the day of deadline—that this blog entry will write itself in an hour. (God, is he fucking wrong. I labor over these things, people.) If but the barest wisps of logic cling to his murmurings, I’ll hear him out. He only need pander to the right hopes. He’s blathered on for over a decade about how it won’t be long before I’m “noticed” waiting tables, and about how taking an acting class—something proactive that could actually benefit me–would be too limiting, too much of a time commitment.
There is certainly something to be said for lying around like a wastoid. And there has been positive upshot from his reign of torpor: Supernanny actually influenced my parenting for the better. Plus, Laz-Op (his rapper name) and I (T-Slope, if you’re wondering) have had good times. Haven’t we? Truthfully, I don’t quite recall them. They’ve all merged to become this genial wash of time too passively spent for me to even recognize as having passed. At my age, being able to remember what I do day-to-day shouldn’t be an alarmingly precious event. I need to tie the fleeting ticks of the clock to specific, unique events so as to elevate their chance of surviving the relentless purge of my stores of memory. That takes effort, a notion situated at the pole ideologically opposite to ol’ Laz-Op. So I’ve taken my time about it, but I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that I need to kill him dead.

I don’t remember personal details about my first therapist. I want to say her name was Karen, but I had a crush on a Karen at the time; I might be simply recalling saying the name a lot in that room. I’ll call her Karen anyway. Karen had naturally curly black hair and sometimes she sat with her leg tucked beneath her other thigh. It was at once endearingly informal and disturbingly unprofessional. I don’t have specific memories of anything I said, though that might be because of the sheer volume—Karen hung back, let me talk myself out of my own corners. My last session came when I realized that for several consecutive appointments I had been scraping the yogurt container to make her earn my mom’s buck. I ran out of material.
The issues that led me to undertaking analysis were real, but not flashy enough to merit, say, an afterschool special. Mom had noticed my lethargy, my defeatist attitude, and the sudden deprioritization of my social life, and figured (rightly) that I might need outside help. Fortunately, I was self-aware enough that I instantly agreed to go, and it seemed to work for me. I guess you could say I was a therapy success story.
Or maybe not. Ideally, one should walk out of therapy armed with the language necessary to overcome the same problem by oneself should it arise again in the future. Of course, I was seventeen then, and not cerebrally equipped to fathom the sticky nexus of the two concepts “future” and “consequences”. In fact, I’m not even sure I’ve learned my lessons now. If there’s a difference between teen Todd’s rut and that I’m in now, it’s which lube oils the gears of my internal procrastinator: today it’s the web, then it was Nintendo. A generation passes by, and I’m back perpetrating the same dismal behavior. Only this time, its patheticness is compounded by the fact that I now have a clearer idea of the negative effects of that rut. Perhaps Lazy Optimism isn’t just a character trait. Maybe he’s actually me. Oh my god! Fight Club!
I simply have to accept that I need help from someone, and I suck suck SUCK at that. Is it the youngest sibling in me, continually striving to prove to myself that I’m capable of functioning independently? Well, going it alone isn’t necessarily a bad idea. I didn’t invite anybody else to contribute on my last album, preferring to serve as my own rhythm section despite not having training or substantial experience on bass or drums. I justified it at the time on financial and creative grounds: as the songs were to be largely improvised while on the clock, collaboration would have slowed things down, and I couldn’t afford to squander precious studio hours explaining what I heard in my brain to someone else. Is that just a long-winded paraphrase of “I don’t trust anyone to help me”? Sure. And creatively, that was just what I needed.
Now, if only I could act so decisively where my emotions are concerned.

The original tagline for readingground was “unique perspectives on the seemingly mundane”, which I always thought hard about before I sat down at my computer for my articles. That tagline no longer explicitly serves as our guiding principle, but I’ve come to miss it as regards my own contributions. For a while now, I’ve felt that my perspective, while necessarily unique, could no longer be identified as originating from a “seemingly mundane” place. I recently found myself digging up my past articles for readingground, and felt mild alarm at the progression in my subject matter over time. I’ve gotten more and more confessional, more purgative. Certainly this entry is the most overtly so. Over the last year or so, despite the noblest of intentions, I’ve become a blogger. How has this come to pass?
Last year, after much discussion with Michele, I flirted with the idea of therapy, going so far as to get a name from a friend and calling to see about insurance. Then Michele’s friend, M., offered to help for free. He’s a life coach in Chicago, so it had to be done by phone, but the price was certainly right. Our conversations went well enough. His particular talent lies in stating the obvious to you when it’s obvious to everyone else but you, and expressing it so matter-of-factly that your feelings can’t really get hurt. I only called him two or three times, though. Ultimately, it felt weird that I knew him, and I caught myself self-censoring. It might have helped had I chosen to address that with him, but I reasoned that for good or ill, I would have probably ended up doing it again down the road. So, I told him I didn’t think I had much to say anymore. He told me to call any time, and I haven’t done so. Again, for good or ill.
Shortly after that began the period of self-examination that altered my approach to this, my only regularly scheduled writing. And thus, this column became my out, my ersatz therapist. I suddenly needed to know why I am who I am, and have systematically tackled different aspects of my personality, thinking that by so doing, I would change where I needed to. I tried to go it alone, and it’s not working.
Which brings me to the present. I have to try something else, put myself in someone else’s hands. I’ve run out of material again, only this time it’s with you, readingground, officially my second (or third) therapist. I’m hoping that in giving my mind a time and space that it knows will be dedicated to spring cleaning, I will reinvigorate my appreciation for the mundane.
If not, this is my last column for the foreseeable future.