A Therapy Holiday (How Not To Swear At Your Therapist)

​I'm body stoned with sadness.  To my therapist's left, a vase of wilting flowers deposits purple petals onto the tiny table which is never used for coffee. Usually they'd be fresh and bright, but not this week because it's only a few days before a break and I guess whoever does the flowers didn't figure it was worth it. They're wildly appropriate, drooping toward slaughtered wood with a defeated sort of attitude. “Don't mind us,” they silently sigh. “We're just dying.”

On the table next to me, a Christmas shaped lighthouse sits incongruously making no kind of sense at all. Since when do lighthouses celebrate holidays? It's a little reminder that nobody escapes the Christmas season, not even lighthouses, which are traditionally the domain of hermits and misanthropes.*
 
I hate holidays. Not the general premise of them - I'm on board with not doing work sometimes. I hate holiday 'seasons' where everyone and everything stops going to work and people start driving into one another at inordinate rates while interminable jingles ring out holiday cheer.
 
Of course, one could look on the bright side: the holidays mean a break from therapy, where you get pressured to spend time with the family that helped put you there! Hurray! 
 
Suffice to say, between the desecrated light house and the dying flowers, it's been a hard session. Actually, hard doesn't begin to describe it. I've spent most of it either in tears or on the verge of tears, feeling a sadness and anger which is nearly overwhelming.
 
In the midst of the umpteenth tense silence, an alarm goes off.
 
“We've got five minutes,” he says gently as he silences it.
 
“Fuck you, and fuck your five minutes,” I don't say. It's one of the many things I've not said this session, and I'm glad I didn't say it because he doesn't deserve that. It's not his fault.
 
I feel guilty for being so miserable. He's probably looking forward to his holiday (who wouldn't look forward to two weeks without people falling apart in fairly dramatic, if still somewhat restrained fashion. You could not pay me all the money in the world to be a therapist. More specifically, you could not pay me to be my therapist.)...

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