Unnameable

May 2022

I don’t have anything to call myself anymore. All the things I used to call myself evaporated, or burned away or simply became incompatible with what felt true. Sometimes I find this terrifying. Sometimes I find this liberating. Liberation always has a thread of terror woven into the cloth - which is why so many people recoil from it.

I once had an old laptop that began to stagger and stumble. One morning I opened it and saw the blue screen of death with some undecipherable code scrolling from right to left with one sentence of recognizable English embedded in the middle that read in all caps:

“I NO LONGER RECOGNIZE MY OWN NAME”

and then the screen went blank.

I get it old laptop. I no longer no how to name myself either.

There is a long list of things have have never and will never call myself. These are things that I have never been and never will be. There is also a list of names that I used to call myself, that feel indelibly imprinted on my identity but no longer describe who I am in my daily life, names that faded out of use. Here are some: Daughter. Student. Waitress. Actor.

And there are names that I’ve actively left behind because they no longer describe what I do, or what I believe. These are names that came to feel reductive, stifling, impossible, unsustainable. The most recent names to shed themselves like an old skin: Psychotherapist. Social Worker. Community Organizer.

I don’t have words to replace these with. When forced to describe myself on drop-down menus I now check “Other” and write self-employed or sometimes consultant in the blank. In introductions to strangers (and lets face it, through this pandemic I have not been chatting that much with strangers) I say things like “I facilitate workshops” but that is only a piece of the pie that describes my labors.

I mean, of course I am and always will be a psychotherapist in my bones, but I don’t do much psychotherapy at all any more, just a little on the side for some precious people I started the process with decades ago.

I dabble here and there with calling myself a writer, but I don’t care about the things most writers do - such as selling or publishing or making a living from writing. And there are so many people who care about writing itself, as a craft, and for me it is only the by-product, the off-gas of some other processes. I am in a strange way, operating out of the deepest parts of my psychotherapeutic being when I write. I try to identify collective dilemmas and examine how they live in me, how I participate, condone, am complicit in our larger cultural pathologies. I try to find words for extremely personal psychological and spiritual processes that move through me, sometimes describing them in minute detail, and share them for free as I feel led. Like in a Quaker meeting (I am also, it may not surprise you, a Quaker who does not attend Quaker meeting).

A therapist who doesn’t really do therapy. A writer who doesn’t really write. I am all up in my own spiritual life and the spiritual practices and processes of others (I work with nuns and religious sisters for Lord’s sake) and feel most worshipful when I stand fully upon my agnosticism.

I am not a Jungian, and no Jungian would claim me as one. I have not had a Jungian analysis, didn’t attend a Jungian institute, and don’t hang out with Jungians. I am appalled by many of the stances and oppressions that are embraced by those who publicly identify themselves as such. That being said, I must admit that I have spent the past twenty years or so autodidactically studying and arguing with Jung, and it is a weird thing to engage with a dead white male theorist so regularly and for such duration and to love him and hate him and hold him accountable. I mean, obviously, I have some big old Daddy-hole and fighting with a long dead theorist allows me to both receive and reject something that I didn’t have a chance to elsewhere.

I don’t call myself a “cancer survivor” as I am not sure I have or will survive it, and putting it in the past tense feels to me like it is tempting fate. I have been told at various times and in no progressive order that my cancer is chronic, incurable, manageable, undetectable, in remission, likely to come back, unstageable, a fluke, and that it doesn’t make sense that it showed up how and where it did to begin with. I usually say that I “live with cancer” because I don’t know what the fuck to make of what happened to me for ill and for good and most doctors don’t either.

I don’t bother to tell people what my actual diagnosis is because everyone who thinks they know a little bit about cancer enough to care about the name mine was assigned are incapable of making sense of a blood cancer that was never detected in my blood or my lymph but only in my cerebrospinal fluid and along my spinal chord.

I have lots of friends who work as various kinds of coaches and I respect their labors profoundly but I am not a coach. I just can’t. I don’t know why. I’m not being snobby because of my past training and former professional identity. It just isn’t what I do.

I don’t give a crap anymore about all of the various mental health profession turf-wars that I was once so heavily invested in. I’m fine when folks in these professions exile me as not evidence-based or psychoanalytic enough, or whatever bee they have in their bonnet. Its fine. Don’t recommend me. Don’t refer to me. I’m good with that.

I once heard Ram Dass say in a podcast that he thought RAM as his name was probably an acronym for Rent-A-Mouth. People would ask him questions and he could usually think deeply enough about what he heard to say something useful in response, or keep his mouth shut and sit with them in the silence that they needed.

Many of my colleagues and peers saw my departing from established professional territory as a sign that I had gone off the rails. And to be fair, if you told me that one day I would leave all the professional structures that had contained and confined me behind - and largely live by donation for unnameable labors - I would think that was madness too.

I have no idea how life led me here. No idea how this came to pass. It is still so incomprehensible sometimes that I sometimes wonder if I am dreaming, or if I died and if this is a bardo realm delusion.

I care for therapists without being their therapist or their supervisor.

I talk with people about their night dreams and day dreams.

I read books that interest me and share my notes.

I talk with some people about their relationship to God and the Divine.

I talk with other people about death and dying, disability and sickness.

I write what I like as I feel led and freely share it for others to use or not.

There is no name for any of this, and the longer I live here in this strange space and am sustained by it - the more grateful I am for everything I cannot name.