“I just don’t think my therapist understands me…*sigh*"
by Rebecca Toal
It’s Monday, there’s a massive tube strike and I had to walk (!) most of my journey. I’ve had a rough few weeks of anxiety from overcommitting myself (read: doing the rent-earner gigs and the optimistic networking ones too and still holding myself accountable to the standards of a ‘normal’ week), and all my therapist wants to talk about though is how much water I drank every day. I get it - she’s an Eating Disorder Specialist and it’s her job to help me eat “better”, whatever that means, and learn to exercise again without becoming obsessed or triggered. Not a big job then, amiright?
Why does being on the receiving end of a “oh god, that sounds so terrible/stressful/overwhelming!” feel so good? For someone to recognise how much you’re going through without having to say that actual damning words yourself. Is it that we want to be seen as more resilient than others, for getting through something that would be absolutely unimaginable for them? Is it that we want somebody else to up-play what we’ve been downplaying? Or is it so that we can feel some sort of validation for how awful we’re feeling in the midst of semi-successfully juggling everything?
I’m urging her to say something sympathetic, almost to the point where I feel like I’m holding up those theatrical "Applause”, “Laugh”, “Aww” signs, but instead she asks me whether, in hindsight, I could have declined a couple of the concerts. I tell her that “yes, I probably could have missed out the fanfare gig and maybe the offstage Pines of Rome that I took because I wanted to say yes to my old teacher. But realistically, I need the money right now.” It feels redundant to try and explain my financial worries to this bronzed, coiffed therapist with the white teeth and the designer (I presume) clothes, who’s showing absolutely no sign of tube-strike-in-the-rain-deshevellment and has almost definitely avoided it by getting in a price-surged taxi. When I start scrabbling for empathy by saying how it’s now more important than ever to make and/or strengthen connections now post-pandemic because I’m competing with musicians who are either more established than me or who are fresh out of music college and the forefront of their professors’ minds. When I apply for auditions now, who do I ask to be a referee? I haven’t played to my old teacher in almost 2 years, and I don’t have any new connections with the right credentials and trust in me. I’m in the music-equivalent of The Upside Down.
I can hear myself half-cohenrently mapping this out to my therapist and her face remains the brick wall that it’s always been. I sound whiny, yes, but isn’t this my 50-55 minutes of entitled whine-time? Give me some goddamn empathy, woman! In the past I might have seen this refusal to indulge with me in my stress as a reminder that there’s actually more to life than The Right Gigs and My Artistic Integrity, and that maybe I should be take a step back into the open arms of perspective. But right now, it’s feel like a replay of how ignored and misunderstood many of us felt during the threadbare months of Coronavirus. Or, to be less dramatic, like the fruitless attempts at explaining your #portfoliocareer to those taxi drivers, distant relatives, other teachers at school, randoms at the pub etc. There’s such a romanticisation and normalisation of the ‘tortured artist’, so much so that even the world’s most non-musical person wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you’re tired and financially struggling, but the fact that we do something ‘extra-curricular’ and hobby-ish for a living surely outweighs our suffering?
BUT, let’s be honest: if I had a musician therapist, I would feel 100% weirder about music-gigs-burnout-networking-existential-career talk. So I guess I’ll keep going to therapy and feeling like an angsty, misunderstood teen that’s got to remember to drink more water.