Out with a bang
The emails you send your therapist on Saturday night
My elementary school hired a guidance counselor because the high school needed a wrestling coach. I don’t know exactly how something like that works, and knew even less in the single-digit ages, but that’s what I was told at the time and had no real reason not to believe it.
But that’s how we ended up with a muscular man in short sleeves and a tie making the rounds through my 200-student K-through-five, teaching us about warm fuzzies and cold pricklies. This seemed to be about all he’d been trained to do; I ended up in his office one day when I was seven after sobbing at my desk, worrying about how long my 100-year-old great-grandmother had left to live and whether or not I’d get to see her again before she died.
He tried to console me by telling me I probably didn’t really want to see her anyway, that she’d be hooked up to “a bunch of tubes” and that she wouldn’t be able to hear anything I had to say1. It served only to add a medical-distress overlay to the mental image I had of my great-grandmother, who to that point I’d only imagined as aging and far away.
By the next year he’d grown the repertoire to include a lecture on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is interesting but has very little practicable application for an 8-year-old. In short: full “self actualization” (aka “good at being human”) sits atop several strata of other needs that need to be met to succeed.
The base level started with food security and shelter; above that health, and, of less consequence to the 8-year-olds, secure employment; the next labeled on most charts as “love and belonging” … above that, self-esteem and then self-actualization. The more time I spend thinking about it, the more ridiculous it seems that an 8-year-old could scan the chart and with a decisive nod of the head think I am self-actualized.
I’m being facetious. It’s absolutely worthwhile to start discussions into deeper concepts like this early and to be revisited later.
Like now.
It’s a Saturday night, and I just emailed my therapist an annotated version of the pyramid, completed with bulleted lists and all-caps notes highlighting SLEEP and INTIMACY & CONNECTION as areas to work on. These lower tiers, if I’m honest, are all a bit wobbly, have relied on scaffolding to keep them in place for quite a while now.
If I’m being honest—and if I am, it’s uncomfortably so at this juncture—the leap from the self-esteem rung directly to self-actualization seems pretty insurmountable, though some of what’s at that upper tier—morality, creativity, purpose, fluctuate but are present.
All to say that I have bits and pieces of what I need at all different levels, but this here, this isn’t a pyramid, it’s a Jenga tower where I’m trying to slide bricks back in, an attempt at stabilization that could still send the whole damn thing tumbling.
In an hour, I’ll get an email from my therapist, a single sentence letting me know she’s gotten it and we can discuss it on Friday. By Friday, I will have forgotten all of the urgency I feel now. By Friday, the New Year will already be here.
This Maslow’s thing? It started as an exercise to revamp my New Year’s Resolutions. I get a bang out of New Year’s Day that no other holiday gives me. It’s independent reflection and reassessment, and each January 1st somehow I wake up with a mind that feels clean and well-scrubbed.
In a post that has been nothing more than pop-psychobabble, I don’t know why I’m chafing at using the phrase “intention setting.” That’s what resolutions are, anyway, right?
But it’s in this period of reflection that I write down a list for next year that looks so much like the year before — move. write 10 pages a week. read a book a month. drink green tea daily — and (though I know this is a universal experience) I begin to doubt that I will achieve any of these for more than a few weeks anyway, and that I will not revisit this list throughout the year to recalibrate, that the best I will do is drink a little extra water…
And now, four days off from the new year, I am considering relying on Wikipedia and the instruction of a high school wrestling coach to retool my peaceful reset into a results-driven to-do list: I WILL ALLOW MYSELF TO BE EMOTIONALLY VULNERABLE. Do it, check the box, move on.
That’s the problem though, right? We’re all told the best way to make resolutions stick is to make them quantifiable. But whether it’s checklist or trying to mash those missing pieces into the hierarchy of needs, the reality is that all of it is comprised of daily practice. There is no yes/no box to check that won’t come unchecked tomorrow.
But none of it is a reason to stop. And while there’s likely something to be gained from trying to use the hierarchy as a tool, as I am here now, settling down and letting my breath steady again, I am realizing that ACHIEVE SELF-ACTUALIZATION is in fact a grandiose resolution, if not just a tall order for a single year.
These things I do want: I want my friends to know they’re loved. I want to break myself out of the functional freeze that sees me scrolling through social media for hours every night after work. I want to sleep unassisted and without a fight. I don’t want to do it, but I want my house to be in a better state of repair and I want my backyard to be tamed enough that I don’t lose my new, smallish dog in the tall grass. I want to write more, write better, and I want to limit the Saturday night emails to my therapist.
I think I’m ready for my reset.
I didn’t get to see my great-grandmother again before she died at 104, but on a single point, he was correct: my great-grandmother had been deaf since childhood, so no, she wouldn’t have heard anything I would have said to her.