Done

I'm done. My Therapist will say no more. (Mostly because I have no plans to return to therapy at this time.) I will make the call on Monday to remove myself from the patient roster, at least for the summer.

I plan to continue writing for my own titillation, enjoyment and edification, but it will no longer hew closely to the blog's title. That's unfortunate. But c'est la guerre, as the French say. There are a few reasons for my impending holiday from psychology. They are not mysterious, but they're all true. I'll leave the weighting of them to each one's mind as a Rorschach Test of my own design.

As recently noted, I am not comfortable with the suggestion that My Therapist and I develop an "intellectual, emotional, romantic, erotic relationship" at the rate of $110 per 50 minutes once a week. That conversation actually began with my questioning the efficacy of the process - which was thinly veiled code for "I think this stopped being helpful and just became entertaining." And there's nothing wrong with that. I just have lots of people I can talk to for free when it comes to knocking the rough edges off of life from time to time.

Therapy was a lark, in a way. And I didn't have anyone else around me objective enough to talk me through the whole Rooster thing. I thought I might be crazy, or worse. Therapy got me over that hump, and for that I'm eternally grateful. I don't expect that it will ever take me over the next hump - finding a Forever Somebody. Mostly, I'm not sure Somebody exists. Partly, I'm not sure I'm well-suited to the Forever thing.

Summer is fast-approaching. I'm enjoying my time with The Boys in the cool of the evening on Friday nights. Going to town 3 hours early for the doctor's appointment meant leaving town 3 hours early to get home before I crashed and burned 80-some miles from home. I passed up a lot of quality time with people I need in order to do the doctor thing. That's not a trade-off I'm happy making any longer.

I would like to buy myself a new car and pay cash for it come Christmas. That's a possibility if I pare back a little here and there and buy one of those micro-mini roller skates with a hood that get 45 mpg. Therapy alone will save me a few hundred dollars a month. Between now and Christmas, that's $2,000 - about 20% of what I expect to pay. So there's a financial incentive to telling my troubles to a tipsy friend instead of a bona fide doctor.

Would I have made this leap without having reacted so negatively to My Therapist's suggestion? Probably not as soon, although the thought had begun to percolate. So everyone can think what they will. If you're given to name-calling, now is the time to do it because I intend to pay little mind to this topic beyond the next few days.

I wish him well, My Therapist. He did me no small amount of good when I needed some good done. I had hoped that over the course of a couple weeks, a romantic, erotic relationship that I pay for - literally - might have become an attractive option. It didn't. And it's not going to become one. So on we go. As the wise man said,

"Regrets? I have a few. But then again, too few to mention."

We're just done.