Therapy at 3:00 on 1/28/19

Prose passage based on a therapy session

I kick off the session as I always do: saying specifically what’s been bothering me, stumbling for the words, trying not to cry, crying anyways. Today it’s about my lifelong fear of failure, which is too big of a topic for one hour-long therapy session but hell, I can talk fast and I might as well try to get my money’s worth.
I start slowly, with the trivial weekend events and weak attempts at millennial humor sprinkled into my expressions of my deepest-rooted insecurities- because if I have to be here, I’ll be damned if I don’t make an attempt at light-heartedness. After a few minutes I transition into broader anxieties that keep me from functioning on a day-to-day basis: if I don’t keep writing then I’ll never be good enough, and if I’ll never be good enough then I’ll never amount to anything, but nothing I ever write will ever be good enough, so if I’m never good enough then what’s the point in writing at all? It seems that a fear of success comes with a fear of failure, which makes the whole situation ironic.
Then it’s on to my struggle with my ethics class, which I’m pretty confident I’m going to either drop or fail (or both quite frankly). I talk about the pressure I put on myself to get good grades because if I don’t get good grades then I won’t get into graduate school, and if I don’t get into graduate school I won’t get the job I want, and if I don’t get the job I want then on and on and on until I end up either dead in a ditch or worse: living with my parents.
“What if that’s all bullshit?” My therapist looks at me with her head cocked. A small part of me acknowledges that this isn’t something a therapist should say, but we’re well past that, so I echo the question back to her. She nods and continues to look at me. I sit back and hope the couch swallows me whole so that I don’t have to consider the question, but it doesn’t grant me that mercy, so I consider it. What if my preconceived notion that if you do everything right, then you’ll get to where you want to be in life, is wrong? Fuck.
“What if you get perfect grades, have the perfect friends, and do everything right and still don’t get published?” She continues. “Sure, it’s scary. But it’s freeing, isn’t it? That not everything is in your control?”
I sit up to try and gain some kind of control over the situation, but damn it she’s right and that cheap couch is terrible for my posture. I relent. “I guess. The people that tell us that to get to where we want to be, we have to do certain things- they say that so that we think about tomorrow. The problem is that they say it so much that all we think about is tomorrow. There’s a difference between living in the moment and living for the moment.”
“And do you live in or for?”
“In. Or at least I want to.”
Time’s up for today and she relents with a smile that I’ve gotten pretty good at getting my money’s worth.