I’ve been wondering lately whether I should end therapy. I probably won’t do it, but I do think about it.

I’ve been with my therapist for almost seven years now. I had my first appointment with her in November 2000. She’s not even my first therapist – I’ve been in therapy on and off since I was in college. But she’s by far been the most beneficial. I have the best rapport with her and I’ve learned a lot with her help.

I’ve thought about ending therapy from time to time. This most recent musing came about because I was thinking of ways to save money if Matt and I have to move, and getting rid of that weekly expense would be a big way to save.

But also – sometimes I feel like I get diminishing returns from therapy. By this point, I know what my issues are. I know why I am the way I am, why I do what I do, why I think the way I think.

My biggest issue is one that therapy so far hasn’t been able to help me with: an existential malaise. The big picture. I’m not living my purpose. This has dogged me for years. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in college, didn’t know what I wanted to do after college, in law school, after law school, now. Throughout my years of therapy it’s the one thing I’ve never been able to solve. I’ve taken a couple of writing courses (screenwriting and fiction writing), I’ve written a couple of newspaper letters, I’ve written a piece for the Blade, I’ve joined a chorus – but none of this lets me avoid going to a job every day.

The thing I ask myself is: what would I do if I didn’t have to go to a job every day? What would I do if I were set for life? And that’s a question therapy can’t seem to help me with. It’s a question that requires *action.* And therapy has never been good at helping me translate understanding into action.

Therapy has been very good for certain things. My therapist is someone who I always know is going to be on my side, unconditionally. I can talk to her about the most embarrassing, stupidest things and know I won’t be judged. I can vent to her to my heart’s content. I can be totally selfish around her, because it’s the one place where it’s all about me me me and I don’t have to feel guilty about being the center of attention.

Also, I’d be afraid of not having her to talk to anymore. She’s a safety valve that helps me keep my sanity in case I need it. I don’t know if I can trust anyone else to listen to my problems without rolling their eyes at me, visibly or otherwise.

So for now I’ll keep going to therapy. But I do wonder sometimes.

David Foster Wallace is the guest editor of the 2007 edition of the Best American Essays. The book won’t be published until October, but here’s Wallace’s introduction to the volume. It’s vintage Wallace. (Here’s the table of contents.)

I was going to quote an excerpt from his intro, but I couldn’t find one that would make any sense out of context. You’ll just have to read the whole thing.

Oh, hell. Here’s an excerpt. But it still doesn’t capture the full tone of his piece, because the essay isn’t really about politics. Although it does encompass it.

Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place — not to mention extraordinary renditions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the passage of the Military Commissions Act — if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grown-up way. ‘We’ meaning as a polity and culture. The premise does not entail specific blame — or rather the problems here are too entangled and systemic for good old-fashioned finger-pointing. It is, for one example, simplistic and wrong to blame the for-profit media for somehow failing to make clear to us the moral and practical hazards of trashing the Geneva Conventions. The for-profit media is highly attuned to what we want and the amount of detail we’ll sit still for. And a ninety-second news piece on the question of whether and how the Geneva Conventions ought to apply in an era of asymmetrical warfare is not going to explain anything; the relevant questions are too numerous and complicated, too fraught with contexts in everything from civil law and military history to ethics and game theory. One could spend a hard month just learning the history of the Conventions’ translation into actual codes of conduct for the U.S. military . . . and that’s not counting the dramatic changes in those codes since 2002, or the question of just what new practices violate (or don’t) just which Geneva provisions, and according to whom. Or let’s not even mention the amount of research, background, cross-checking, corroboration, and rhetorical parsing required to understand the cataclysm of Iraq, the collapse of congressional oversight, the ideology of neoconservatism, the legal status of presidential signing statements, the political marriage of evangelical Protestantism and corporatist laissez-faire . . . There’s no way. You’d simply drown. We all would. It’s amazing to me that no one much talks about this — about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by ‘informed.’

Followed, in pure Wallaceian fashion, by a footnote.

This is going to be disorganized and not very well written.

I hate it when I use this place as my personal therapy session. I’ve already got a therapist. And this place isn’t private. This is a place where I put myself forward to the public.

(Shades of Josh Lyman. “This is a place where solemn work is done. This is a place… this is a place… let me say this… this is not a place where one’s personal things… where things among people… this is not a place… let’s… This is a place where work is done and nothing else.”)

I remember something Mike wrote when I first quit blogging a few years ago. “I’m sad that you never really considered devoting most of your blogging energy to the less emotional aspects of your life, choosing instead to live a very big chunk of your life out in the open. It made for some very compelling reading… and it wore you down in little more than a year.”

I’ve tried hard to avoid doing that since I resumed blogging. But sometimes it slips through. Sometimes I tend to feel things… intensely. I can be oversensitive. Not all the time, but it still happens.

I realized something about myself a while back. I used to think I hated competition. I told myself I wasn’t competitive. But what I realized is, I am competitive. I’m very competitive. I just don’t like having to compete. It’s much easier to feel jealousy or envy instead of actually doing what it takes to compete. In theory I’m against competition, because I think you should focus on yourself instead of on other people, and competition brings up conflict, and I hate conflict. And yet, I focus a lot on other people’s accomplishments in comparison to my own and wind up seething with resentment inside – sometimes subconsciously, so I don’t even realize I’m doing it. So basically, I hate being competitive, yet I can’t help but be competitive.

There are certain blogs I don’t read anymore because they stir up lots of negative feelings in me when I read them, mostly envy. Part of this comes from the fact that I’ve been blogging for such a long time that I resent people who’ve been blogging for much shorter periods of time and are much more popular. Which I know is totally stupid. But they don’t have to be newish upstarts – they can be older bloggers, too. Regardless — I think to myself, what have they got that I haven’t got? And the answer is, drive, or more writing talent, or more focus, or something inherently appealing or attractive about their personality.

I am such a competitive person. I get envious *so* easily.

Sometimes I wish I could get back to that place where I wrote about things in a compelling manner. But too many people know about this site now, which inhibits me.

I’ve been bummed lately in general. Part of it is this dark and gloomy weather that’s hung over New York City and Newark the last few days. Part of it is that Matt’s been really busy and frazzled with getting things set for the new students to move into our building and hasn’t been around that much. Part of it is that I’m worried about us maybe having to move, and about the dent that’s going to put in my finances.

Sunday was one of the worst weekend days I’d had in a long time – complete and utter boredom and loneliness and gloomy weather, resentment over lost or deteriorated friendships, self-flagellation for not being as social as I should be, self-doubt.

I don’t know why I am the way I am. Years of therapy have not gotten rid of it.