8.20.2010

Excuse Me, Miss? Your Freudian Slip is Showing

For the last few weeks, I have had the extreme displeasure of lying on the couch and sweating through an attempt to process my reaction to bumping into my analyst at a birthday party.

It really isn’t as glamorous as you’d think. Bumping into your analyst outside of his warm but safe home office, scrubbed of the more personal items you’d expect to find in someone’s residence (like their real books, not their DSM-IV or their Civilization and its Discontents).

The stray cooking smells from the night before, the dog occasionally bursting into the waiting room from a carelessly cracked door into the main part of the house – the door through which I never cross – I can handle that. But the chance meeting? My analyst looking taller than expected in jeans and a white button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, drinking a domestic beer at an unnamed location on the near South Side of Chicago? Seriously?

Here is how The Event transpired. At least, this is how I remember The Event. And we know what they say about memory. I was sitting on a bar stool in a starched white shirtdress and offensively red flats. I was sipping a glass of water and staring absentmindedly at my vintage box purse, flipping the clasp open and closed, foot bouncing under my crossed knees. The crowd of people with whom I had been reminiscing about my very recent wedding had disappeared somewhere, as had my husband. I distinctly remember thinking to myself: Isn’t that just like him? To wander off soundlessly and without any warning, as if he hasn’t even realized he’s slowly begun to walk away, fascinated by some tiny inexplicable thing?

And then.

And then suddenly I looked up from my glass of water and there was a very tall man standing directly in front of me. I can honestly say that I don’t remember seeing him walk over. There was no time to prepare myself, to take a deep breath and smooth my hair. To hijack the closest female partygoer and wrest from her purse some surface in which to examine my teeth and make sure they were lipstick and spinach free (and that’s to say nothing of the nostrils). As we did some type of very strange hug? no hug? dance - oh no, excuse me I was just leaning in because it is quite noisy in here and I can’t hear you and don’t you just stay locked up in your home when I’m not in session with you? – I quickly realized that in my complete shock, I had dribbled a fairly large amount of water from my mouth onto my chin. Fantastic.

What ensued after the initial shock of seeing him right there in person, without his ubiquitous office chair (for back support I’m assuming) or Freud bobble-head doll poised sternly behind the Batman action figure laid out in front of him is this: I stopped functioning. The blood pounded in my ears, making it impossible to monitor the volume of my voice. I stammered hopelessly, trying to land the spinning wheel of my tongue on some acceptable bit of casual conversation. “Worlds collide” is what finally came out while I silently thanked my parents for my fancy college degree and sparking social skills.

And he was predictably calm, asking me to introduce him to my husband – who had miraculously reappeared unbidden – and my mother, making small talk with my father - most likely about something very adult, like subprime mortgages or the ailing state of the American auto industry. After which, he proceeded to talk shop with my psychologist husband for the better part of what seemed like an hour (a clear exaggeration, I know). And it pissed me off. A lot.

I sat there on the barstool, feet dangling about a foot above the floor. I twirled a piece of hair between thumb and forefinger and wondered if the red lipstick I had chosen so proudly and confidently earlier in the evening looked horribly trashy. I watched the Double Dutch ropes of their conversation swing wildly in front of me. In my concentration, my tongue had found its way deep into the pocket of my cheek as I attempted to make my leap. At any moment I expected either one of them to say: “Oh sweetheart, leave the serious talk to us men.”

Where had my swagger gone? Hadn’t I spent week after week over the past seven years stretched out nervously on the couch, allowing my analyst to bask in my self-consciously hilarious glow? I mean, wasn’t I just like Woody Allen but better, on account of attractiveness and no proclivity towards young girls or my own adopted offspring? Was I? Wait . . . was I (but really mostly my parents) paying him handsomely to laugh at my jokes?

The weight of my normalcy absolutely crushed me. Here I was, being sucked into a black hole of my own blah. I was just a regular narcissist with regular misconceptions about my own power and fabulousness.

You know that fantasy you have where your analyst walks into a party you’re attending and you’re wearing a devastatingly perfect outfit and you’re even having a good hair day and you find out that he really does want to talk to you?

Well . . . let me tell you.

No comments:

Post a Comment