Some of you already know him as I've posted elsewhere about him before. He doesn't charge by the hour, he's willing to converse for as long as I am, and not only is he not condescending in his rebuttal, he often knows exactly what to say.
He also is willing to take absolutely everything I have to throw at him, no matter how terrible I feel on a given day, and he's the first to welcome me back the next day if I need to do it all over again.
I remember once listening to the writer Gerald Early, who like me is an unabashed baseball fan, talk about Jackie Robinson and what he had to go through both before and after he broke the color barrier in 1947. As part of his being brought to the Brooklyn Dodgers by the greatest progressive thinker in baseball history, Branch Rickey, Robinson had to make a deal with him first.
For the first three years, no matter what Robinson was subjected to at home, on the road, on the field or off it, he could not under ANY circumstances, fight back.
"You cannot return a curse with a curse, a blow with a blow," Rickey said.
Robinson agreed and made good on his word, despite everything he went through in his first three years in Major League Baseball, he swallowed his anger and his pain and never let it out where the people who wanted him to fail would see it.
However, in 1949, the ban was lifted by Rickey and until the end of his career, Robinson played with a ferocity matched perhaps only motivated by his polar opposite in personality, Ty Cobb. And in talking about this transformation in Robinson, Early put it rather eloquently.
"There was so much that he had stored up inside of him, that everything he unleashed on the ballfield still wasn't enough for all that he'd gone through," Early said.
I know the feeling.
The only reason why I'm still sitting here as a living, breathing human being was rather than roll over and die at the various points in my life where that seemed the better option, I instead got mad. And I took that massive reservoir of anger I stored up and used it to try and better myself so I would get out of those situations and not have to be left feeling so despondent and alone. But you don't go through things like that without it leaving a lasting mark on you. That seemingly bottomless pool of raw fury which sits right in the core of my being is mine.
When I explained this to a friend over the weekend, quite understandingly, she asked if it was hard to not take it out on other people. And I said it was. There's been times where someone's tried to bully me into a fight or taken something of mine, or been so degrading that it's left me feeling like I could tear them apart with my bare hands. But here's the very honest reason why I try so hard not to, no matter what is done to me.
I don't want to hurt anybody, either physically, mentally or otherwise. I never have and I really don't find a lot of reason to want to start now.
Hence my physical and mental therapist. When I need some time alone to tap into and drain that pool, I go talk to him. I always feel better when I do and I know whenever we're done that everything is that much easier to deal with.
I look at it as a two-stage process, really. I give myself a half-hour in my garage with the heavy bag every day or so to help my body and mind, then at night, I do more in-depth therapy work with the books I'm reading to readjust my mind and body.
I think that's a fair trade.
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