put me in, coach

my god, man, put some clothes on


there are a lot of things one can learn from therapy, but at the end of the day the whole enterprise seems limited by two rather unpleasant axioms:

1. if you torture the details of your life for a long enough period of time, they will eventually tell you anything that you want to hear.

and

2. regret makes the world go 'round. (you'd think it was love, or maybe human connection in general, right? nope. as it turns out, it's the failed attempts to get those things that's the stuff of life.)

which is why i spent a couple of hours on saturday at my local coffee shop filling out the first homework assignment/questionaire from my new "life coach".

now, what is a life coach? well, webster's dictionary defines a life coach as "a trained professional similar to a pet psychiatrist for humans, often encouraging people to have better habits and to do things other than stew in their own head juices; see also 'american liesure class' ". so far, the main difference between a therapist and a life coach seems to be that a life coach is more forward-looking and optimistic about the future of your emotional diet, whereas a therapist tends to be more backward-looking, sifting through the stool samples of your lived experience with you, trying to identiy the things you shouldn't have been eating in the first place.

being that no one likes to touch their own poop (with the popssible exception of some german and japanese porn actors whom i've accidentally seen on the internet), my life coach homework assignment was a refreshing alternative to the therapy approach. mostly, it was about listing the things i'd like to change about myself and my current situation. i wrote a lot about being happy with what i have been doing so far with my life, and about how much potential i think i've got for more and better versions of that happiness. but i also wrote about my desire to have more follow-through with my own interests, and my own plans for cultivating them, rather than leaving them partially completed, in large part, because i so easily lose sight of how beneficial the results are going to be. i got pretty excited, actually, as i began to remind myself of how rewarding it could be to focus on seriously developing a career path in line with something other than simply money and stability, or putting my nose to the grindstone on hatching sustainable, feasible, long-term creative projects like writing short stories, or being a good enough musician to start a band.

of course, when i got home, all i did was think about this stuff some more. and then i got bored and took pictures of my middle finger dressed up in paper doll outfits that had my name on them.

the irony is lost neither on myself, nor my middle finger.