I Don't Have a Happy Place

by Kim Korson

  I Don’t Have a Happy Place

  • • • • • •

  Sometimes I feel bad my mother isn’t an alcoholic. Equally troubling is how my brother never killed anyone and that my father only likes me as a friend. If any of the above were my reality, my attitude and daily mood would be appropriate, standard behavior for someone in my situation. People would nod as I shuffled past, whispering how they’d be the exact same way were they forced to live under such conditions. They might even cheer me on when I ventured out to the supermarket, but still keep their distance lest they catch what I was plagued with.

  The problem is I wasn’t born into brothels, nor did I fight for survival in a concentration camp; I was raised in a regular old Canadian suburban town in the 1970s. And while my mother was nauseous a lot and my father wore makeup, I really never had any legitimate, solid excuse for being unhappy. Which, if we’re being honest, kind of stinks.

  I come from a long line of malcontents. A small tribe of depressants, neurotics, and mental patients. We run the gamut from garden-variety depression all the way up to paranoid schizophrenia, covering most of the DSM-V in between. The pessimism in my family is Olympic. Unhappiness and negativity course through our (probably diseased) veins. And, in a cruel trick of nature, we tend to live a long, long time.

  We do die eventually, though. A few years back, I lost three out of four grandparents in the span of one year. We huddled up at the shiva call, mildly joking how often we’d put on our black clothes that year, sharing deli meat and repeating how we wished we were seeing each other under different circumstances. My uncle ambled over, potato knish in hand, in an attempt to avoid participating in other conversations by joining ours. Ace told the group that we could take a collective breath, rest easy for a spell, because bad things always happened in threes.

  “Uh, don’t say that,” my uncle said.

  “Why not?” said Ace, confused.

  My uncle shook his head. “Because then it starts all over again . . .”

  Later that night in our hotel bed, Buzz repeated my uncle’s line a hundred times over. “How do you ever win with that outlook?”

  My sad sack uncle is right. Eventually, three more bad things will plague each of us. I imagine, for regular people, once the trauma quota is filled, they take a break. Maybe even enjoy some time off, go fishing, or take in a game. In theory, I’d like to be one of those fishing game–watchers, I really would, but my setting is a little bit too gloomy for recreational activities, or living. People say happiness is a choice, but I think that’s just what happy people say when they go out together to be happy. I don’t really care for going out.

  At this point in my story, I’m used to my setting. It’s a defect really, an emotional limp. On the days I leave the house, I can joke about the foundation of my personality, which I have to because I live in a small town now and run into people all the time. And although they still don’t know what to make of me, I can promise they’d way rather think I’m the love child of Larry David and Woody Allen than listen to the Sylvia Plath–itudes that often sneak out of my mouth when I’m asked, casually, how I’m doing.

  It’s taken me almost my entire life to understand my wiring. I’ve spent most of my years thinking I was just in a bad mood. I was actually in a bad mood for twenty-nine years before it occurred to me that was an awful long time to be cranky. It was then I finally called for backup.

  Let me note that this was not my first trip to a therapist. I was sent at nine years old due to a very bad case of what my parents dubbed “behavioral problems.” Buckled into my mother’s silver 1976 Corvette T-top, I had no clue where we were headed, as the Bee Gees quietly insisted that we should be dancing. My mother wore smart navy slacks, worrying her cuticles while gripping the top of the steering wheel. She wasn’t a chitchatterer, minus occasional mentions of hazardous weather or recent death, so when we pulled into the parking lot she turned off the car and stared out the windshield.

  “Okay,” she eventually said, sounding annoyed. “Let’s go.”

  The car abutted a sign suggesting we park for only one hour. I read the words backwards in my head—my latest obsession. After a few rounds, I asked my mother where we were.

  “When we’re done,” she said, “you can have a bag of chips.”

  • • •

  Dr. Ingrid Kalisky was the first grownup I’d met who had a bowl haircut. I imagined her walking into the salon armed with a photo of Dorothy Hamill, asking for the faddish wedge she’d seen all over the television, and later trudging out, swearing under her breath never to return to that place again. Dr. Kalisky had also boarded the feminist bandwagon, evidenced by her dark trousers, but one-upped my mother by adding a three-button vest and maroon necktie to her getup.

  I slouched and Dr. Kalisky talked about herself. I paid less attention to her credentials, fixating on more intriguing matters—her chair. It was squat, swivelly, exactly like the ones on The Mike Douglas Show. And since Dr. Kalisky was already sporting a tie and making introductions, I took it upon myself to pretend I was a guest on the program, like Adrienne Barbeau or Wayland Flowers & Madame.

  Having recently exchanged my desire to be a diner waitress for an imagined career in ventriloquism, I was ready. My allowance afforded me a slim volume on the craft, which I’d flipped through once but didn’t understand. However, I’d seen enough talk shows to know you could lose your audience if you didn’t have a charming story at the ready. I plotted mine, organizing an amusing chestnut about how, not having a ventriloquist dummy, I was left to my own devices, forced to hone my burgeoning artistry by draping our Yorkshire terrier’s yellow plastic raincoat and bonnet over my arm to practice. The sounds of laughter and swelling applause bounced around my head, assuring me I was killing.

  Kalisky, on the other hand, didn’t seem as enthused, and her raisin eyes sent poisonous darts deep into my soul. But really, what good was being a nine-year-old ventriloquist with behavioral problems if you didn’t gum up the works every now and again? First, I entertained the idea of answering her questions using my fist as a puppet but worried she’d send me straight to a mental institution, so I created a private challenge instead, just to bug her. The rules were thus: Scan the bookshelves, and if I recognized a single title, then, and only then, would I be able to answer any of her mental health probings.

  “So,” said Kalisky, “why are you here?”

  Swinging of the boots. Eyes fluttering. Shrug.

  “Well, why do you think?”

  The top shelf had all the fat, important-looking textbooks. Below those were volumes like The Drama of the Gifted Child and On Becoming a Person, things I’d never seen out in the real world. I stayed mum.

  “I’m fine to sit here until you are ready,” Kalisky said, gripping her Bic. “I have all day.”

  I was scanning the lower shelves when I saw it: Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. I knew that book well: the wine-­colored cover, the way the rainbow-hued bubble letters seemed to be walking up stairs. My mother owned two copies. It was now my move. I could advance on the game board, say something insightful.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Bullshit!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Ab-so-lu-te bullll-shit,” she said, stretching her words like taffy. “You, my dear, know very well why you are here. To pretend that you don’t is complete and utter bull crap.”

  My ears tingled. I didn’t offer up any facts about myself.

  “Mmmmhmmm,” Kalisky said. “Keep it up. Keep up the bullshit.”

  She seemed kind of hostile. By the third outcry of bullshit, she lost me. The first one, I’ll admit, kicked up some dirt. It was not common practice in the Marlo Thomas era for adults to swear at kids. It’s not that I’d never heard that kind of talk before. I’d used it myself, on occasion. But I didn’t expect it to be hurled my way by an adult, especiall
y a professional one. As the session progressed, no matter my answer, Kalisky called bullshit. You could tell she found this technique revolutionary and cutting edge, like it gave her a sense of badassness not usually reserved for the ­macramé belt–wearing set. It was a tedious hour.

  When time ran out, Kalisky sent me home with some nonsense on poster board, suggesting that if I cleaned my room and stopped throwing things at my mother, I would get a sticker. Once enough stickers were amassed, a prize would be mine. If we’re being honest, the only thing I ever threw at my mother was a pair of those brightly colored sun goggles we wore back then, the ones with the little cutouts that made you look like a bug. I, for one, didn’t believe a single tossing incident necessitated a Magic Markered chart and six weeks of smutty language. It was a drag to sit there. Plus it really cut into my after-school crank-calling hours. The good news was that follow-through was not a strong family trait. Eventually my mother tired of the chart and its scratch-and-sniff fruit stickers. I never threw anything at her again. I was cured.

  The next time I visited a therapist happened three months before my thirtieth birthday. Not a ventriloquist but a talent agent’s assistant in Manhattan, I was very busy being terrible at my job, feeling consistently under the weather, and weeping. Some other ways to describe me at that time:

  1. cynical

  2. negative

  3. dejected

  4. skeptical

  5. hermetic

  6. introverted

  I am not trying to be a wisenheimer when I say I truly didn’t think there was anything out of the ordinary in that depiction. It was just a list of words, a flawless one, to describe my personality.

  One of my coworkers didn’t agree with my assessment and slipped me a business card on her way out to fetch a roasted vegetable salad for lunch. She was a literary agent and she intrigued me. Not only was she a dead ringer for Wonder Woman and at least six feet tall, but she managed to pull off wearing this voguish salmon-colored suit. I wanted her to like me. I assured her I’d promptly call when I got home.

  Did I promptly call? No. I promptly took umbrage. I hailed from a long line of crabby people, none of whom got help, so why should I? What nerve, I thought, looking like Wonder Woman and pretending to use her superpowers for good, like I needed some kind of saving. Just because you got away with being a maypole and somehow still looking classy in a suit that could have doubled as a platter of lox at a bris, does not mean you are the authority on all things mental health. I spent the next three days giving her dirty looks from afar. I made sure to tsk and pffft a few times when she breezed by my desk. I made fun of her unwieldy hair. Her dumb suit. And then I made the call.

  The waiting room rendered me a day player in a Woody Allen picture. The Upper West Side address, the faded terra-cotta Oriental rug—I almost expected Diane Keaton (or Wiest) to walk out of the office with crumpled tissues and an oversized hat. Should I knock on the door or wait to be collected? I coughed, shuffling the New Yorkers around to signal my arrival. There was a small round noise machine, placed right outside the door, that was supposed to drown out the sobbing coming from inside, but that apparatus wasn’t fooling anyone with its gentle whirring. It wasn’t a barricade, it was one of those giant shells you put to your ear, convinced you hear the ocean. I made a mental note to not raise my voice above a whisper when it was my turn.

  The door opened, at long last, and out popped the Lorax’s mother. After taking in her pencil skirt, complete with purple and chartreuse felted swirly appliqués, and an updo so unnaturally red it brought to mind Atomic Fireballs, I wanted to go home. What would this character know about the likes of me—clearly I wasn’t wearing a Bar-ba-loot suit, so where would we go with this? She motioned me in, showing me to a black leather chair. She hadn’t even uttered a sound yet and already I deemed her a complete idiot and this whole exercise a colossal waste of time.

  “Why don’t you tell me why you are here?” Mama Lorax said.

  I didn’t say a thing—I hated audience participation of any kind, plus I wanted her to intuit what was wrong with me, figure it out, if she was such a hotshot. Shifting on her couch, she breathed evenly and stared, therapist code for You have rented me for the hour. I can wait.

  “Why do I sit in a chair and you on the couch?” I said. “Isn’t the patient supposed to sit on the couch? Or lie on the couch?”

  “Client.”

  “What?”

  “I prefer to call them clients. Not patients.”

  There was little sunlight filtering in. The ficus in the corner hung on for its life.

  “Would you like to sit on the couch?” she said. “Would that make you feel more comfortable?”

  “No.” I tried settling, to have good posture, but the chair was slippery and hissed when you moved. “It’s just this chair makes all kinds of weird and awkward noises.”

  “Do you feel weird and awkward being here? Is that how sitting in that chair makes you feel?”

  And there it was. The quintessential How does it make you feel question. Cardigan-wearing shrinks all over town were asking their patient-clients how everything made them feel. Bad, Lady Lorax, it makes me feel bad. That is why I am here, because I feel bad. I feel bad all the time and apparently, according to Wonder Woman, it is bad to feel bad all the time. I made a mental note to quit my job.

  “Look,” I said, throwing her some chum. “I’m about to turn thirty. And don’t ask me how that makes me feel because it makes me feel like I’m in Ordinary People.”

  “It bothers you when I ask you how you feel?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” I crossed and recrossed my legs. We stared at each other in silence, like the cowboys on those old Sunday afternoon westerns Zaida Max used to watch on TV.

  “Because it’s dumb.”

  “Dumb?”

  “Yes. It feels dumb. It’s so clichéd, that question. Can’t you do better?”

  I was agitated and surly and wanted to get out of there. I didn’t feel like sharing anything with her. Also, I seemed to not recall one thing I’d wanted to talk about before I got there. Mama Lorax could sense my urge to flee.

  “How about I promise to refrain from asking that question for the rest of our time together?”

  She was waving a white Thneed at me, so I gave her a break. Don’t get me wrong, I was still going to continue hating her, but, regardless, I would participate, because I needed her to like me. I needed everyone to like me, no matter how I felt about them. It was a problem.

  So out came the dogs and ponies and organ grinder monkeys. I wanted her to enjoy me so much, be so entertained, that when she was filling up her Ball jar with water at the cooler she’d feel compelled to tell my stories to the other crackpots in the building. Gold star, favorite, teacher’s pet—I wanted her to like me best. I pelted my best material at her and before I knew it the time was up. I stood, but to my surprise she put her hand up to signal that I remain in that rambunctious chair. I guessed it was time for the awkward exchange of money or a check, but instead she had some final remarks. Mama Lorax did more staring, which I believed to be some sort of shrink voodoo, retrieving a pencil from her updo, until she felt she had my full attention. She opened her mouth, and in a voice just north of a whisper she asked me this:

  “Can’t. Kim. Be. Happy?”

  Well, now she’d gone and done it. Her psychobabble barely settled in the air before Can’t Kim be happy became the punch line to every joke for the next ten years. It started slow. If I recounted a bad day to a friend, we’d end the story with the facetious Can’t Kim be happy? When choosing an outfit or a movie or what to order at Bagel World, I’d use the sentence as fodder. Eventually I became expert at it, able to even shuffle the words around. If a friend had a long day: Can’t said friend be tired? If they wanted a certain food: Can’t so-and-so eat p
otatoes? Can’t phones ring? Can’t syrup be sticky? Can’t winter be cold? It was the bumper sticker of my life.

  The joke wore thin as I entered my fortieth year. Okay, it didn’t really lose its punch at all, it still makes me laugh as I write it, but I was pretending to be a responsible and mature member of society because I now had children. At a less-than-mature forty-something, the tagline was still very much in my repertoire, continuing to delight me. Problem was, little else did. A bit of mockery does go a long way, but just not long enough. I was still in a bad mood.

  • • •

  My favorite thing about therapists is how they never answer the phone. This allows the unhinged to leave weird, rambling messages without having to tangle with actual people who can see through them. It also gives the shrink time to judge your level of crazy on their own time, and, in turn, you can screen your calls to do the same. When this new therapist returned my message on a day when I was feeling particularly moody, I picked up the line and struggled to find a time in my schedule that worked for both of us. I hadn’t even set foot in her office and already there was verbal judo and Wiccan trickery—and that was just setting up a time to meet. It was as if she could sense all my disorders through the phone lines, like she was already on to something. Not since my Ouija board spelled out the name of our dead family dog had I been so spooked. I still fear that if I even whisper anything resembling the therapist’s name in the privacy of my own home, she’ll know. Her wolf eyes and psychological superpowers will activate. She scares me a little bit. Let’s not use her real name.

  Dr. X was scrappy, might have beaten up a few MSWs in her day. We spent our first forty-five minutes together verbally sparring. This was no Dr. Kalisky saying the word bullshit, this was plunging an open fist into my innards and pulling out a bloody, mangled liver. I left her office (liverless) to walk from University Place down toward the very bottom of the city, dazed and unsure of what had just taken place. Part of me didn’t want to return the following week but the other part was terrified she’d telepathically kill me in my sleep if I didn’t. Dr. X had some Svengali maneuvers, and also possibly put some sort of addictive pharmaceutical in the tissue box, because I ended up returning to her chair, week after week, until I ran out of blood-drenched organs to carry home in my messenger bag.