diagnosing the instrument
Most of the thinking that a therapist might find relevant to making a diagnosis i do in the dead of night. It is not by choice, this arrangement I’ve made with my life. Sometimes it starts with parenting, by which I mean escorting a wayward woken child back to bed and, hopefully, back to sleep. And then I settle into settling accounts, prognosticating, tending to anxiety and resentment and exploratory myth making. But it also comes unbidden, emerging from a dream interrupted, or just an interior monologue rejoined in medias res as I come to.
Sometimes I am replaying conversations that actually happened, as they happened, or as they might have happened, had I a chance to edit and redirect them from whatever sordid conflict-escalating path I put them down. Other times I am anticipating conversations that might happen and but soon, and obviously there is a fair bit of projecting about exchanges that don’t have even a puncher’s chance of breaking into the real or seizing on some jaunty picaresque scene from the past or from the vault of paths not taken. Examining the unlived life and dissembling the lived one.
It is not wise, this thinking in the dead of night. Easy words to say, hard word to live by. It is useless, unproductive, and often untethered from what I would recognize in my normal waking hours as the normal cognitive patterns of a productive, tax-paying, responsible self. That is a personage that I inhabit (sometimes thoughtlessly, sometimes uncomfortably, as though it were a form-fitting corset or worse straitjacket, being put to strictly utilitarian ends) and the inhabiting occurs at times other than when I am doing this thinking. And it seems readily apparent that what is normal in the day is not what is normal here in these insomniac vignettes, that I am not normal in how often and how completely I succumb to and am bound over to them. The idea that sleepless rumination highjacks what would otherwise be an unremarkable self, something in the middle of the curve, extending just to the mean and the medium of everyday life and no farther - that idea gains purchase at the same time as I give in to habit that self be highjacked. I am uncertain which is more expressive of me, more - as we are all now wont to say - authentic.
I no longer fret so much about what is real or about how the Real is an engine of subliminal viscosity. I have become accustomed to the thought that we are what we do, and that one thing I do is sabotage a normal day by letting it begin with this, shortly after midnight or 1 am. But like a dog worrying over a bone, I am. And so this happens.