Control: Lyle
Lyle is my therapist. He is unfailingly nice to me. He offers me water and goes to get it himself. He has a nice office with lots of board games. He looks at me.
“What do you want to get out of this?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I began to drift off.
“You seem to be very tired,” he said. “Are you sure that you should be driving?”
On the following week I got into a car accident and decided that I was too tired to drive properly on the current set of medications.
“Would you like to take a walk?” he asked one session. I was used to therapy being something where I sat in a room and listened to someone drone on about life goals. This isn’t Lyle. He took me on a walk around the grounds.
He doesn’t talk all the time the way some therapists do. He waits patiently for me to speak. I speak regularly to him. I am on new meds and feeling better.
He loves Skyrim. He plays video games. He seems to like them. I don’t think that I should say how much I pay him, but it isn’t that much.
Cynics say that I am paying for a conversation. I don’t think that at all. I think that therapy is a necessary part of getting better.
Lyle isn’t a cynic. He has a youthful hope about him. He believes, I think, that he can make a difference in the world. He can, I suppose.
Joke if you will: I, Dalton Lewis, have paranoid schizophrenia. I have a debilitating mental illness which prevents me from functioning on a normal level at most tasks. He doesn’t seem to worry about that. He still thinks that the voices can be beaten. He is young and naive. I like that.
He is a new problem; he is naive. He thinks that we can win in life. I, Dalton Lewis, am not sure anymore. I think that’s the difference between me and him.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
