Why I Quit Therapy.

A litany of reasons. All 100% mentally sound. I am the best judge of this. Namaste.

Hullo, welcome to choitotheworld. I’m Mary H.K. Choi, a New York Times Bestselling Author, Essayist, screenwriter and AuDHD person living in New York (for some reason). I also identify as a person with a history of disordered eating. Join me each week (neurospiciness permitting) for a wee chat about brains and creativity.

*Also, just a quick note: I’ll be on KQED Forum with Alexis Madrigal at 12PM ET and 9AM PST discussing autism along with EIC of Science and a professor of chemistry and medicine at George Washington University, Holden Thorp.

courtesy of Rashad Rastam of wear many hats

Hi pals. It’s a bit of a trampoline double-bounce this week but I thought I’d cross-post the “I Hate Therapy,” thing I wrote and performed, but then do a whole separate other post about my FEELINGS.

This will be a free post. For morale.

OK, so I only ever agree to do a thing if I know right away what I’ll write. I may not have a handle on tone or the beginning or end but if I can start riffing immediately, I know I’m good. That’s always the best, when I am being gross and making myself laugh or sitting in a daze thinking how clever my thoughts are.

In any case, I knew I’d write about quitting therapy because I’d just quit therapy. Verité!

Anyway, after I’d lost WGA health insurance I just couldn’t reconcile myself to spending $250 a pop on couple’s therapy or $200 on individual therapy.

Sidebar: I always thought it was low-key kinda bullshit that couple’s therapy was more expensive than regular therapy only because I was following the logic of pilates classes and, like, obviously, a private session should be more expensive than a session for multiple people because of the individual attention but now I totally get it.

If you’re in a relationship, couple’s therapy is the shit. Of the therapies, that’s the one to rule them all. In fact, the real scam is that it isn’t normalized to pursue couple’s therapy with everybody you spend a grip of time with because couple’s therapy mostly just shines a bit fat light on You + Pretty Much Fucking Everybody.

It’s that thing of wherever you go, there you are. All your moves, shortcomings, peccadilloes, guises, ruses, neuroses are all cut-and-pasted across all the major ‘ships and it’s astounding how unoriginal your bag of shit is once you get acquainted. And it’s also no surprise that the shit-bag is one you’ve inherited from a parent or some other family circus. This is sad but also wonderful in the way everything good is a bit crap and everything bad is rarely permanent.

Anyway, couple’s therapy should be more expensive because there’s the self-centered garbage-vibes of each individual person and the martyr resentment vibes that are created the moment one person brushes up against another person. It’s like off-gassing synergy.

It’s a lot of air-traffic control is what I’m saying.

Historically, I’ve always been the friend in the friend group who is in therapy and autistic enough to demand other people also be in therapy because when the world ever asks, “Whose mans is this?” and I have to drag this person I love for whatever bad behavior or public display, I want to know that I have done my absolute best in curtailing those future crimes.

It’s a hygiene issue and it really takes a village.

It’s the flip of how it took, like, three of my friends to sell me on a long-term investment strategy that wasn’t “leaving a weird amount of money in a checking account.”

Each one; teach one.

Anyway, I’m just out here raw-dogging life sans therapy and I gotta say, it’s kinda tite. I won’t lie, it’s also very uncomfortable and deeply frightening. My partner (whose therapist went on a very generous sliding scale with them) is unnerved. Understandably.

And please, please, please don’t take this as a call to quit therapy. I am not a therapist and I don’t know your life. And, yes, the shit is expensive but here’s precisely where I got to and why I quit (for now; this life is long and mysterious).

Don’t get me wrong: Therapy used to hit. But lately I’m less drawn to sifting through my various pathologies, doing a daily searching and fearless moral inventory as a human centipede of one, mucking about pleasurably in my own emotional effluvia — an ouroboros of philosophical anus to throat — bearing witness to every single choice and kernel of corn, really choking down and ruminating on each spiritual lesson I kept failing to learn.

Therapy began feeling like a referendum on all the ways I fucked up with unrelenting exactitude. I was getting high on feeling bad because there was something so warm and deeply familiar about it. I even felt pious and intellectually rigorous to be able to name all the bad. The smug, satisfied self-flagellation became the stimming that sat between me and feeling anything else. Sometimes even joy. It insulated me from the world.

I was dissociating on therapy.

I began therapy 18 years ago. A decade ago I sought group support for eating disorders. Then I was assessed for ADHD and medicated. Then I got group support for family trauma. And then I started going to couples therapy (by order of ultimatum) and then later was diagnosed as autistic.

We contain multitudes but that’s my mental health CV in a nutshell. (Imagine the girl scout patch for “graduating bulimia” closely resembling the genuflecting airport sign for non-denominational prayer room but with a toilet).

Like this:

Anyway, the thing about autism and even ADHD is that anything interesting can quickly become fascinating and my “special interest” very rapidly became:

Me + pathologies.

But seeing as I have persistent self-centeredness and occasional covert narcissism, I wonder if I’m making it worse. Like how you can drink too much water.

I’m just saying weaponized therapy speak can really get to be an inside job. There’s this saying in 12-step and it goes: You’re not that good to be that bad. Which is to say, big fucking whoop you have fucked up thoughts and fuck up. Tracking the exact sequence of events, like, “my codependent enmeshment towards her unboundaried narcissism and self-delusion…” is not at all that special. And more importantly, it’s not the same as feeling shitty about general shittiness and possibly even having a big long cry in a bath.

Truthfully, it was the autism that gave me perspective. There’s actually a tremendous sense of liberation knowing that there’s nothing that can be done for autism. I will struggle. I will feel geographically lost. I will not know how long anything takes or what time it is or how temporally distant or close anything is. I may not ever feel the way a person feels towards me. It may disproportionately hurt my feelings that someone doesn’t exactly reciprocate my overtures by dint of them having their own lives and schedules and children and spouses and parents and priorities.

In the past few weeks RFK has been saying some wild shit about autism. And everyone will have their own experiences around it and this is coming from a place of privilege because my autism presents at the end of a spectrum that requires comparatively minimal support.

I sometimes feel hollow and smarmy when I make these distinctions the way land acknowledgements sound in certain arenas but on some level I feel so secure that none of the bloviating about autism is true or has anything to do with me.

But I did feel shitty. I’ll be honest. I cried when he said the thing about never writing a poem. Because I am actually scared that I will never write a poem. And it’s also such a fucked up hex to introduce to a person’s thinking.

But I’ll tell you what, I cried again when I was talking to my friend, comedian and writer Maeve Higgins who lead a panel discussion at Cuirt International Festival of literature with Irish writers with autism.

In the week leading up, she’d asked via voice note (truly a love language of mine) whether or not I had any questions or insights for the panel and I’d asked her about something I’d been struggling with which was that I sometimes felt such grief and sorrow that my characters were autistic. I’d been diagnosed mid-book and started second-guessing their motivations and their stakes even while I knew this was a terrible ableist lens. Mostly I think I was asking Maeve for any experience or maybe even hope.

Anyway, the author Naoise Dolan, said (and I’m paraphrasing but will make it a quote for clarity and because I can’t take the credit):

“There’s a real fervor for naturalistic characters but I like that my characters are all autistic and that the world is autistic.”

And I was so moved by that because at no point did I realize that by being autistic and writing autistic characters (because honestly what other characters could I possibly write?), I had also given them a completely autistic world where whatever they do and think is exactly in keeping with the world around them.

And Jesus fucking christ I am actually crying so hard right now even typing this because what I realized is that what I was struggling with is this idea of my giving rise to characters who were destined to feel as lonely and frightened as I am all the time but now I don’t have to worry about that at all.

Naoise went on to say (again this is via me and Maeve’s voicenote paraphrasing):

“Nobody is standing by my hand as I type so I do whatever I want and whatever I feel.”

The thing is, if I was in therapy and thinking in therapy operating system, I’d feel as though I wasn’t allowed on an intellectual level to be sad about what RFK said because it’s anti-science malarky and feeling sad would somehow prove that I wasn’t actualized enough.

This isn’t what therapy does to everybody, it’s just me for right now. I’d gotten to a place where I genuinely felt as though working on myself would mean that one day I would be presentable or done. And there’s so much succor in knowing for a fact that I will never feel finished or ready.

And the glorious thing is that none of this has to do with autism at all. Honestly, it’s about grace. And how much grace you can have for yourself. And knowing that you will always require grace from yourself and for others because blunders and misunderstandings will always transpire because nobody will ever feel exactly what the other does and many of us will feel persistently butthurt. And that is OK. It is just exactly what it is.

For now I’m done paying money to forestall it or feel protected against it. I’m mostly going the fuck outside and having health walks and big cries.

*Also, ALSO, ALSOALSOALSO: I will never tire of this but if you can’t afford therapy find a 12-step group. Google your self-harm tool of choice + 12-step and you can find local meetings.

Therapy is so funny because you can’t give it to anyone despite the need. It needs to be wanted. And you gotta really want it to go IRL to some church basement with some randos to talk about your feelings. It might not have a Zoom background with colorful books and a fucking monstera plant but it works. It’s not glamorous at all but it works. I’ll tell you what, the unsexiness of going: “Oh, I am in Overeaters Anonymous” is nothing like, saying, “Well my therapist says…” and that is the fucking point. And it hits.

Oh, comments are open! Have you quit therapy lately? What’s the vibe? And, as always, please like this post (and me also!) if you feel so inlined.

Thank you for reading.