Last Day

            Last September I returned to work after a three-week vacation.  At that time I knew that right about now my life would be changing, that I would, for all intents and purposes, be closing my practice.  In many was this was one of the longest years of my life.  The only things I can remember that rivaled these feeling of waiting, day by day, and noticing time moving, click by click, was when I was working to finish my dissertation, and waiting for the birth of my children.

            It still amazes me that something can seem to impossibly far away, and then, here it is.  Time passes. No matter what.  It really does.

            I saw the last six patients today.  Some I will see again, briefly in a few months, and a few I will follow by email, but really, my days of being a practicing psychotherapist are over, after forty-two years. 

            That’s enough.

           

            There are so many different feelings that it is difficult to sort out. This time it is about me, which for a therapist that’s different.  I have just spend the last few weeks saying good-bye to people, and being very concerned about how they were dealing with the change; with the loss.  I think I had prepared people very well, and most of the folks did very well.  Only two didn’t show up for their last appointment.  They both left messages saying they felt it would be better to just not go through that.

           Today, for the last tiem, I drove up and back in the heavy traffic that now fills the lanes between my office and my home during the three hours of rush hour that happen each morning and evening.  It was one of the very few times that I enjoyed the traffic.  Inching along, trying to get around the drivers on the phone or texting, who make things even worse.  This would be my last day of driving to work in traffic.  The lines and lines of exhausted, bored people wasting their time would no longer include me.

            Over the thirty-three years that I have driven to this small mill city the traffic has gotten much worse, much more tiring, much more aggravating.

            Won’t care any more.  I might get up early some mornings and drive two exits on the congested highway just to appreciate not having to go anywhere on time.

            Driving home, thinking about it all, what came to mind most vividly were the people who were the hardest to treat, who wouldn’t/couldn’t make the obvious changes that were necessary, but who continued to come back and frustrate me. I guess I am blessed with, or suffer from a high Zeigarnik Effect. And I really don't know what happened to them.

            So now, except for one or two more days of paperwork, I am very ready to see what is next.  I am sure that many reflections, ideas, and sentences that I never had time to finish will come floating up to my mind.  I have this delusion that I will now have the time to reflect on the last forty-two years.

            I hope to be writing a lot more in this very space.  So tell your friends and neighbors to come and join the discussion of a nameless psychological blogger with a pinball mind. If I don’t have to think about all the patients any more, I can begin to think about what I thought about all those patients, and what I really thought about the way I thought (got that?).

            Or maybe I won’t.  Maybe I’ll just do the shopping, do the cooking, take out the garbage and fix the sink.  But I don’t really know how to fix the sink.

            I’m sure it’s on YouTube.