A fourteen year old is better at this than I am. OR, my therapist is going on vacation. Thank God!

As I've alluded to, I've found the therapy process difficult and frustrating lately. I dislike sitting in a room with and talking to a relative stranger about my feelings once a week, and paying for it. Mostly, I dislike having feelings at all. And now that I can actually feel them, I find that most often, I don't want to, because what I feel is angry, bitter, sad and/or scared. If only there were an emotion beginning with "y" that would fit conveniently between bitter and sad. Then I could have an acronym, and it would be appropriate because I have no idea when I'm going to stop feeling this way.

One Wednesday evening, I was doing a cost-benefit analysis on this during my session. What, I wanted to know, would happen if I didn't feel all this stuff? If I just suppressed it as I've been doing all these years? The answer I got was: "These feelings will fester and run your life." OK, but since then, I've been letting myself feel, and it still feels like they're running my life. For instance, most of the time I feel sad to the point that if I let myself relax and actually feel it, I'll cry. I won't cry in a loud, violent way like I did as a child. I'll weep.

I even weep on airplanes now. I've been spending a lot of time on planes lately, because I've been traveling for work, and since I don't feel like reading, I usually just sit and do nothing, and try to relax. This means that I then end up feeling (instead of thinking), which means I feel sad. So I sit there and cry silently.

Yesterday, I flew back from Atlanta, and had a three-hour layover in O'Hare. Sitting in Chicago for three hours left me feeling bitter and sad. And I have to go back there in June for two days. Bleh.

I don't want to feel this way. I want to be over all this crap. I don't want to still want someone, or miss him, or wish he would call me. I don't want to think about my childhood anymore, or how I didn't get the support I needed, or how often I was criticized. I don't want to try and analyze why I feel like it's safer if nobody touches me. I don't want to realize how angry I am at my dad or my brother, or how much I resent my mom. I don't want to think about how bitter I am about men, because they always seem to get exactly what they want from me, and I never get what I want. I want to be done.

Sometimes, I think that's why I wanted to kill myself: because if I were dead, I wouldn't have to feel anything anymore. All that anger, bitterness, sadness and fear would be gone. Problem solved. And right now, I don't feel like I have much to look forward to besides a lot of vague promises of having the life I want. But, I know she's right. If I don't deal with this stuff now, I'm only delaying the inevitable. So I keep going. Every Wednesday night. But I get the 9th and the 16th of April off, because she's going on vacation, and because I'm going to be in DC for work. I'm actually looking forward to it; it feels like it will be a vacation from all this emotional stuff. Like any vacation, though, my work will be waiting for me when I get back.