{"id":161039,"date":"2022-08-11T11:47:35","date_gmt":"2022-08-11T15:47:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=161039"},"modified":"2022-08-11T14:40:45","modified_gmt":"2022-08-11T18:40:45","slug":"therapy-without-professional-help-a-week-in-los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/08\/11\/therapy-without-professional-help-a-week-in-los-angeles\/","title":{"rendered":"Therapy without Professional Help: A Week in Los Angeles"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photograph by Maya Binyam.<\/p><\/div>\n

July 24, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n

I live in LA, but I’ve just flown in from New York after a month away, so I wake up early, too early, at 4 A.M.<\/small>, and read a book called Healing Back Pain<\/em>. The author, John Sarno, is a doctor who argues that most back pain is psychological\u2014the result of tension, which arises from repressed emotion. He makes his perspective sound like the most obvious thing in the world, and makes the common explanations, like sitting too much, sound completely idiotic. Most people have been taught to think of chronic back pain as arising out of an inciting incident and to think of the spine, especially the lower spine, as very fragile\u2014even though, he explains, bodies are resilient and spines exceptionally strong. I want to believe him, because if I do believe him I\u2019ll never feel back pain again, or if I do, I\u2019ll have my delicate psychology to blame, as opposed to an innocent object like my chair. Sarno has a cult following; I google him, careful to read only the testimonials about how the book has changed people\u2019s lives. Then I fall back to sleep.<\/p>\n

I wake up again, at 7 A.M.<\/small>, make tea, and open all the mail I got while I was away\u2014health insurance bill; traffic ticket; copies of Dogs of Summer<\/em> by Andrea Abreu and A Woman\u2019s Battles and Transformations <\/em>by \u00c9douard Louis; the new Paris Review<\/em>; and a couple of issues of the London Review of Books.<\/em> I read a review of Either\/Or<\/em> by Elif Batuman, a book that made me very angry. I was nevertheless gripped by it, as I was by The Idiot<\/em>, probably because both present a problem that I\u2019m still working out and which I\u2019ve encountered in many novels that I might otherwise be inclined to say I enjoyed. I always feel betrayed by characters with whom I begin to identify\u2014not necessarily because my life or psychology is like theirs, but because I can understand the contours of their journeys and want to follow them through\u2014who then, in brief and passing moments, reveal the limits of their worldview, ushering in black people or poor people or people who speak in halting English as props to signal the boundaries of their otherwise astounding capacities for empathy. I have no interest in reading about characters who are likeable, or about characters who are inclined to like people like me, but I have a hard time not seeing it as a failure of a book\u2019s attention to detail when people are turned into metonyms for cultures and ideologies with which the novel is unwilling to engage; it feels almost like the opposite of virtue signaling: a brief and passing confession that the protagonist is (of course!) burdened by the ugliness of her social class. Almost every review I\u2019ve read of Either\/Or<\/em> mentions Selin\u2019s naive and enthusiastic embrace of great works of literature, which she reads as instruction manuals for how to construct a life; none mentions her stated difficulty in appreciating hip-hop, which she summarizes as an altogether alienating genre of music defined by a man \u201csaying \u2018Uh, uh\u2019 in the background.\u201d (\u201cKilling Me Softly\u201d by the Fugees proves, for Selin, to be the exception to the rule, because \u201cthe man, despite several false alarms, never did start rapping, and instead a girl sang an old song with beautiful harmonies.\u201d) But I don\u2019t know\u2014obviously Either\/Or<\/em> wasn\u2019t going to be entirely about Selin\u2019s problematic relationship to hip-hop. That would be a horrible book.<\/p>\n

Edits on my novel are due next week, so I\u2019ve vowed to do nothing and see no one until I finish. I spend the rest of the morning line editing, and then do a YouTube exercise video that involves flailing my limbs around as if I were lifting and then dropping a series of heavy objects. The couple in the video tries to be motivational and in the process takes a very derogatory stance on exercise, emphasizing how difficult it is and how happy we\u2019ll all be once it\u2019s finally over. Every time they demonstrate something especially excruciating, they repeat that \u201cthere are thousands, maybe millions\u201d of other people suffering alongside me, which seems like a gross overestimation of their audience.<\/p>\n

I live near USC, and more or less lead the life of a college senior. (I just quit my job.) After lunch, I go to the university coffee shop, and then walk down frat row to the USC dental school. A month ago, my cousin, who owns a dental clinic geared specifically toward Ethiopians, gave me a teeth cleaning and two fillings for free. Last week one of the fillings fell out, however, so I went to the USC dental school to get an emergency replacement. In the waiting room, I read another review in the LRB<\/em>, of Sam Selvon\u2019s The Lonely Londoners<\/em>, which I had no idea was being reissued. I read the book in college, in a class on Caribbean diasporic literature, and then again a few years later, when I traveled to London for the first time. I had forgotten all of the scenes in which Moses has sexual encounters with men and was surprised and confused to read that Selvon\u2019s \u201ccritical reputation was overshadowed by hostile feminist readings,\u201d apparently due to the chauvinism of his characters. I google around, trying to find a so-called hostile feminist reading, but wind up instead reading a blog post by an undergraduate student that fixates on Selvon\u2019s repeated use of the phrase white pussy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

After three hours, a dental student gives me novocaine, and once my mouth is totally numb, her supervisor tells me that I don\u2019t need a filling, that I never needed a filling, and that, in fact, I never had a filling in the first place\u2014all I need to do to fix my problem is use a particular kind of over-the-counter toothpaste. So they give me back my money, and I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to convince myself that I\u2019m happy for the free mouth-numbing experience. When I get home, I line edit my draft for another couple of hours, then fold laundry while listening to the new Beyonc\u00e9 song, \u201cBreak My Soul,” on repeat. When I get sick of that, I listen to \u201cSo Good,\u201d an extremely underrated breakup banger from Destiny\u2019s Child\u2019s first album, The Writing\u2019s on the Wall<\/em>, and then to \u201cTell Me When to Go\u201d by E-40. During any given two-week period I\u2019ll be listening to the same two or three songs on repeat until they attain such a strong association with whatever it is that I\u2019m living through in the present that I convince myself my life will never move on unless I find two or three new songs to replace them with.<\/p>\n

July 25, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wake up at a slightly more reasonable hour, 5:30 A.M.<\/small>, make tea, and spend a couple of hours reading my draft. I\u2019ve found editing to be like trying to perform therapy without the help of a professional. I\u2019m horrible at outlining and at envisioning a future more generally, so I wrote the first draft intuitively, hardly aware of my motivations and whether they brought the story toward a fuller, more satisfied version of itself or derailed the process of actualization altogether. Revising has been a process of trying to make the novel sound more like itself, and to make it act more in accordance with the internal rules that serve it\u2014doing away with the ones that confuse it, distract it, lead it to self-sabotage.<\/p>\n

Late in the afternoon, I decide the only thing that will help me is swimming, so I drive in rush hour traffic to a public pool in Eagle Rock. It costs four dollars to enter, there is barely ever anyone there, and I\u2019m pretty sure they let you bring in whatever you want: food, drinks. Unfortunately, I bring nothing to eat or drink, and by the time I arrive, the sun is setting. LA, like seemingly everywhere else in the world, is extremely hot right now, but when the sun begins to set the heat leaves the air almost completely, no matter the season. I jump in and out of the pool, and while I dry off I read the first few chapters of Abreu\u2019s Summer Dogs<\/em>. Then I drive, in rush hour traffic, back home. I listen yet again to the new Beyonc\u00e9, the old Destiny\u2019s Child, and all the way through Instant Vintage<\/em> by Raphael Saadiq, which includes one of my favorite love songs of all time, \u201cStill Ray\u201d: \u201cI\u2019m coming home to you \/ Wear something see-through, so I can see your heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

At home, I make dinner (fried zucchini blossoms), and, with my roommates\u2014Greta, a fashion designer, and Calvin, a painter\u2014look at the work of various photographers on Instagram. I have to take an author photo soon and am dreading it, because I hate having my photograph taken. Calvin insists that my photo should be taken in my workspace; it should show me at a desk, or on a chair, so that I can be clearly identified as a writer. But I don\u2019t want to be identified as a writer! I want to be identified as looking good.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

July 26, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wake up to a text from my friend Matt, telling me to read the Roe v. Wade<\/em>\u00a0piece in the LRB<\/em>. It opens with a reflection by Elif Batuman on The<\/em> Idiot<\/em>:\u00a0she, and others, she says, were not inclined to view it as a political text when it was published, but she now realizes the book is an account of the processes by which women and children’s lives are depoliticized. I make tea and read an article about palm oil, from an older issue. The article, by Bee Wilson, is very good\u2014it is about how the oil, once eked from palm fruits pounded by hand and relished for its particular scent and hue, has become a near ubiquitous substitute commodity for other types of oils, one whose value derives from the fact that its presence in food and bath products is nearly undetectable. I am surprised to learn that it was introduced to the English market as a cheap replacement for tallow candles and was marketed as the antislavery alternative: \u201cEvery candle of \u2019em that\u2019s burnt,\u201d read one campaign, from the mid-1800s, \u201chelps to put out a slave.\u201d<\/p>\n

I spend the rest of the morning reading over the final chapters of my novel, which aren\u2019t exactly working, but I\u2019m not sure why, or sure how to fix them. After lunch, I decide to drive to Skylight to get a book I\u2019m planning to read alongside my friend Chase, called Will and Testament<\/em>, by the Norwegian novelist named Vigdis Hjorth. I read Long Live the Post Horn!<\/em>, also by her, last week. The narrator works for a PR firm representing the country\u2019s postal union, which is facing a directive that would cut the post office\u2019s budget. At a meeting, she encounters a postal worker who describes the lengths he’s gone to in order to find the recipient of a dead letter. That part is wonderful. But then there are a lot of gratuitous offhand descriptions of Somali refugees who seem to add to the narrator\u2019s sense that the city, chaotic and overwhelming, is an affront to her own personal well-being\u2014once again provoking disappointment. Anyway, Skylight doesn\u2019t have the book, so I drive away empty-handed.<\/p>\n

I want to find another body of water, but the beach is too far away and the pool is too familiar, so I go by myself to see Jordan Peele\u2019s Nope. <\/em>It puts me in a terrible mood. There are only three other people in the theater, no one is laughing at the funny moments, and I start crying, which feels like an inappropriate reaction, but Daniel Kaluuya\u2019s minimal acting is affecting, and his character\u2019s relationship with his sister, played by Keke Palmer, seems to me to be a constant and overwhelming negotiation of how to live with grief.<\/p>\n

At home I make dinner and then futz with the final-ish edited version of an excerpt of my novel. Then I go on YouTube and watch the season-three finale of The Show about the Show<\/em>, directed by Caveh Zahedi, which premiered on BRIC<\/small> TV and then lost its funding. The premise is that each new episode of the show is about the making of the previous episode. Initially, the show is about Zahedi pitching the show to BRIC<\/small>, getting it green-lit, hiring actors, and so on, but the actors become characters in their own right, in addition to the characters they\u2019re trying to play. So do Zahedi and his family, as the episodes go on: the show acquires the qualities of reality TV\u2014there is romantic drama, family drama, network drama, and the performers begin to experience the show itself as an enclosed space. Almost all of the participants, including his wife, at some point try to escape by refusing to let Zahedi record. He winds up replacing some of them, and sometimes replacing those actors with actors, until the show\u2014which is ostensibly about collaboration (or exploitation: almost everyone, including his family, works on it for free)\u2014functions mostly as documentary evidence of the process by which he becomes almost totally alone. In the season finale, Zahedi is moved by the donations of strangers to a Kickstarter campaign attempting to fund more episodes, but when he watches their short videos about why they\u2019re so attracted to the show, he finds them completely boring. I think the show is really good.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

July 27, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wake up from a series of intense dreams that derail my entire day. In one, I go to see my friend Tavi in a play she\u2019s in, but one of the actors fails to show up, and the director asks me to fill in. I miss all my cues, I can\u2019t remember any of my lines, and when they give me a script to read, I can\u2019t pronounce any of the words.<\/p>\n

I eat a mango\u2014LA has the best fruit right now; the fig, pomegranate, and lemon trees in my yard are flourishing\u2014and text Tavi about the dream, which she points out might be an anxiety dream about my book. Then we talk about Nope<\/em>, which relates to an ongoing conversation we\u2019ve been having about the dynamics on film sets, which hyperbolize the dynamics of other workspaces. The film is extremely self-aware and, to my mind, cynical, in the sense that it is constantly questioning the process and aims of filmmaking: who or what gets used as an object of capture in the attempt to produce mass entertainment. In the opening scenes of the film, Kaluuya\u2019s character, a Hollywood horse wrangler, tries and fails to instruct a group of actors, producers, and directors in best practices for handling a horse on set. No one listens to him, and the horse inevitably becomes frightened. Everyone besides Kaluuya reads the horse\u2019s fear as aggression, and the pair are dismissed from the set.<\/p>\n

I finish working on the novel excerpt, and Greta shows me the new styles she\u2019s designing for fall. In her studio, which is next to my studio, on the second floor of our house, I try on a pair of pants to help her figure out how to size them. They\u2019re gray and twill, and although the fit is special, we agree that they feel dated\u2014like something someone might wear in a seventies period piece. Calvin is boxing up paintings for his solo show in New York. The paintings are all contrast\u2014black and white and gray\u2014and depict a series of uncanny, seemingly nonsensical totems: a heart, a boot, thought bubbles. All of my \u201cculture\u201d today is interpersonal. I\u2019m not actually reading or watching anything.<\/p>\n

I go to the grocery store to get food for a dinner I\u2019m hosting tomorrow, and then come home and do some cooking prep\u2014blanch collard greens, caramelize a ridiculously large pot full of onions\u2014and make lunch (gem lettuces, yuba, sungolds) while listening to Democracy Now!.<\/p>\n

The afternoon goes wrong. I plan to go to the beach, but then it\u2019s too late to go to the beach, so I decide to clean the house, but before I can clean the house I need more caffeine, so I walk to the USC coffee shop. On the way, I realize the Mega Millions has reached $1 billion. Unfortunately, I\u2019m obsessed with the lottery, so my walk becomes consumed by a fantasy of how my life will change if I win, which inevitably turns into a negative fantasy of how my life will be ruined if I win. I get to the coffee shop, which has closed. The barista tells me he\u2019ll give me my iced tea anyway, but then I realize that I\u2019ve forgotten my wallet, so I run out, embarrassed, unable to buy the iced tea that will save my life or the lottery ticket that will ruin it. Once I get home, I drive to McDonald\u2019s, the next best option in the neighborhood for black iced tea. Then I decide to drive half an hour away to the Ethiopian grocery store, to buy injera for the dinner tomorrow. When I get there, however, the owner tells me he\u2019s out of injera. So, I drive home, clean the kitchen, and then realize I\u2019m running extremely late to pick up my friend Dema from LAX. I run around the house trying to get ready, and in the process stub my toe on a hand weight. I don\u2019t think anything of it, but then look down and realize I\u2019ve smeared blood all over the floor. I don\u2019t have time to deal with it, so I just leave.<\/p>\n

I drive to LAX with the top down, listening to Charli XCX, grateful for the momentary respite from my week of self-imposed isolation. When Dema gets in, I turn the music off, because we haven\u2019t seen each other in two months. He\u2019s just returned from a writing residency and a tour through Alabama to screen a documentary he produced, which just debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival. In Alabama, Dema and another producer\u00a0drove around with a TV in their trunk and showed the film to the various people who participated in it. It\u2019s called\u00a0Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power<\/em>, and will be streaming on Peacock early next year. The film, which I found to be very arresting and hopeful, though never self-congratulatory or pat, as remembrances of the civil rights era can sometimes be, tells the story of organizers in Lowndes County, Alabama, who secured the right to vote for black residents; it is also about Stokely Carmichael and the evolution of SNCC, and features archival footage interspersed with the testimonials of people who continued to work in Carmichael\u2019s wake.<\/p>\n

We eat at a Filipino restaurant and catch up on everything. On the way back to Dema\u2019s house, I play him the old Destiny\u2019s Child song and the new Beyonc\u00e9 song, which he hasn\u2019t yet heard. After I drop him off, I stop at a gas station, and finally buy my lottery ticket.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

July 28, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wake up late\u2014seven thirty! I boil water for tea, eat some mango, and make pie dough for the dinner I\u2019m hosting, though I have no fruit for pie at home. Then I drive back to the Ethiopian grocery store; there is still no injera on the shelves, so I panic momentarily, but the owner tells me they have more in the back. I buy three packs of it and then drive to another grocery store to scope out the fruit situation. They have rhubarb, so I buy some of that, some strawberries, and some ice cream.<\/p>\n

On the way home I listen to the Beyonc\u00e9 album, Renaissance, <\/em>which was just released last night. I\u2019m almost completely bored by the first half, but then the second half gets very good. \u201cThique\u201d and \u201cAll Up in Your Mind\u201d are on repeat while I cook: gomen, using the blanched collards from yesterday; misir wot; kik alicha; shiro; the strawberry rhubarb pie; and a batch cocktail, the jungle bird, which has blackstrap rum, Campari, pineapple juice, and lime. I\u2019ve been tasting everything and adjusting for salt, berbere, kororima, mitmita, et cetera, so it isn\u2019t until 2 P.M.<\/small> that I realize I haven\u2019t had a proper meal. I make a quick salad\u2014gems, yuba, sauerkraut\u2014and then deal with some logistical work stuff (contracts, looking over the TOC for a book I may edit) before calling my dad. He gets my stepmom on the line, and we compare what we\u2019re cooking. She\u2019s making misir wot and kik alicha, too.<\/p>\n

I clean my room and bathroom while\u2014once again\u2014listening to \u201cThique\u201d and \u201cAll Up in Your Mind\u201d on repeat. When I like Beyonc\u00e9 I love her; her sound is so big.<\/p>\n

Dema, Chase, and Adrian come over for dinner. Greta and Calvin are there too. While we eat, we listen all the way through the Raphael Saadiq album and Erika de Casier\u2019s Sensational<\/em>, and then get into a huge argument over Beyonc\u00e9. One person, whom I won\u2019t name, claims that she isn\u2019t an artist\u2014that she has no vision. Other people, whom I agree with, tell the first person that just because they don\u2019t like her vision doesn’t mean she doesn’t have one. Over dessert, we play a game that some of us have played before. One person chooses an affect or feeling, and then everyone goes around and plays a song that, for them, epitomizes that feeling. We start with \u201cangry,\u201d and I play \u201cYour Life\u2019s On the Line,” the Ja Rule diss track by 50 Cent, which leads to the discovery that no one but me experiences anger on a regular basis\u2014everyone else relates more to being \u201csad,” so we do that next. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever listened to a sad song in my life. Eventually, I ask people to do \u201cboundary maintenance,\u201d which confuses everyone. I start with \u201cNext to You\u201d by Mike Jones, Adrian plays \u201cNo Games\u201d by Serani, Dema plays \u201cI Will Survive,\u201d Chase plays \u201cShadow\u201d by Ashlee Simpson, Greta plays \u201cDFMU\u201d by Ella Mai, Calvin plays \u201cKeep the Family Close\u201d by Drake. All good but, I think \u201cI Will Survive\u201d is the best: \u201cGo on now, go, walk out the door \/ Just turn around now \/ ‘Cause you\u2019re not welcome anymore.\u201d Boundary maintained! The final category is \u201chorny.\u201d After that, everyone goes home.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

July 29, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t win the lottery! Life goes on.<\/p>\n

Chase is hosting a pool party in the Simi Valley. The drive is exactly as long as Renaissance\u00a0<\/em>plus an extra ten minutes, which gives me enough time to listen to \u201cThique\u201d and \u201cAll Up in Your Mind\u201d twice. We swim and then Chase cooks a beautiful, gigantic meal on the grill. Someone says something that reminds me of Healing Back Pain<\/em>, so I start describing it, and it turns out two people there have had their back pain almost completely relieved by John Sarno.<\/p>\n

Someone else starts talking about the ghost of their grandmother; she sometimes rearranges the things in their house, or takes them away. Another person\u2019s grandmother was a medium and haunts them, too. Someone else expresses skepticism: How could there be enough room on earth to accommodate the ghosts of all the people who have died? The air would be thick with them. Another person argues that the air is<\/em> thick with them, and yet another person says that we can\u2019t assume that the ghost form corresponds with the corporeal form\u2014the ghosts may not take up space. I don\u2019t have an opinion but can feel myself tearing up.<\/p>\n

We walk through some dirt roads as the sun sets. Eventually, I leave, and drive into the worst kind of LA traffic: night traffic. The road is crowded, it\u2019s almost too dark to see anything, and I keep having to ride the clutch. Near my house, some girls, who look like they\u2019re on the way to the club, have gotten into an accident\u00ad\u00ad\u2014their car looks totaled, and they\u2019re all dressed in heels, yelling into their phones.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

July 30, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wake up in tears from a dream about my mother dying by a physician-assisted suicide. I call her on the way to the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, and when I try to describe the dream, I start crying. She tells me, laughing, that if her husband ever tells me she\u2019s decided to do an assisted suicide, I should call the police. Then she tells me she\u2019s kidding\u2014she actually can<\/em> imagine electing to do a physician-assisted suicide. When I arrive at the market, where I go every week, it\u2019s completely deserted, except for a ring of cop cars around the periphery. I google \u201chollywood farmers market cops.\u201d One article says it was shut down because of \u201cshots fired\u201d; another says it was because a man was throwing rocks off his balcony.<\/p>\n

I leave, buy some groceries elsewhere, and then cancel the rest of my plans because I have a hard time making my dream not feel real. It\u2019s hard to know what to do when presented with made-up events that nevertheless produce real emotions. I\u2019m very superstitious and have a hard time not reading dreams as omens, even though I\u2019ve spent many years in therapy with a psychoanalyst and am well versed in the practice of treating them as the strange expressions of repressed emotion.<\/p>\n

I try and fail to read a series of random things: a scan of \u201cThe Agonized Face\u201d by Mary Gaitskill, which Tavi sent me; the beginning chapters of Days of Abandonment<\/em>, whose sentences always feel like they\u2019re washing over me\u2014they are long and swollen, as if uttered like dictums in the mounting stages of an argument that will have no end. Eventually I turn back to my novel, which is, I think, probably to blame for all my bad dreams.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maya Binyam is a contributing editor of<\/em> The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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