Argh!

(Note of apology to the friends of this blog who have heard all of this before. I started writing it before inflicting it upon you in person.) 

Normally* I look forward to Mondays because that's the day I see my doctor. In some phases I haven't thought much about each session beforehand, in others I've spent swathes of the time leading up to Monday on carrying out extensive, lavish mental rehearsals of what I might say. After seeing her I almost always go away feeling heaps better about things - having a fresh way of looking at a situation does that, even when neither the situation itself nor the underlying tendency to make things more difficult for myself than necessary can be altered by our conversations.

But last Monday was so strange that I am dreading the one to come, or I suppose I might be looking forward to getting it over with. Last week was a mess of wrong notes, all tied and blurred together, but coming down to this:

- A comment which was so head-scratching to me that it actually seemed like she was thinking of a different patient for a moment there
- A little group of comments which seemed to point to the doctor having been lurking in my social media worlds. I know exactly how paranoid that sounds. I felt so uncomfortable that I was unable to ask her about it. I said to myself afterwards that I would take some time this week to consider how put that question, but I haven't figured it out
- I described a recent conversation with a friend who happens to be a lesbian, and that triggered a whole lot of very loaded questions about how I feel about my lesbian friends, what kinds of thoughts I entertain about their relationships, whether various things I've told her about have unfolded the way they have because of how my lesbian friends are peripherally involved, whether craft camp** is really, in some sense, Lesbian camp, and threaded through all of this, how I feel about the doctor. Am I in love with her? Argh!

This last line of questioning kept harking back to the first session of the year, when I told the doctor about a conversation I'd had with D. on new years' eve, about the proposition that nobody is entirely straight. D maintains that he is (which is fine - who am I to doubt him, or to care actually) but I wouldn't say that I am. A spectrum, or even better, a matrix, makes far more sense to me than two fixed points. The thing that seems to have startled both D and the doctor is that I plumped for the figure of 20% to express just how gay I might be. I thought this was low, but they both seem to think it's high, and what's more, that it actually means something. I think it's quite meaningless. I don't even know whether I meant that I feel lesbian towards 20% of women, which would indeed be worthy of reflection and perhaps comment, or whether I feel 20% attracted to all women, which I must say seems quite lukewarm to me. Anyway, the point is, it was a throwaway comment, and it annoys me greatly to have it made into a cornerstone of an interpretation that is nonsense.

Argh!


*Ironic.

** Craft camp is the most brilliant institution ever created: a group of women stay for a few days in a country house which is equipped with a large, well-lit, clean studio and some of the equipment you need for sewing. It's just the best. There's easy sociability, a cooking roster, tea, wine, snacks, gin, sewing, and absolutely no pressure of any kind. And, it should go without saying, if it really was lesbian camp as well as craft camp that would be absolutely totally OK.