The Maze, the Canvas, the Painter

People ask why I don’t do therapy. Here’s the analogy I’ve arrived at over the years.

Without any work at all, you’re wandering in a maze. You see one step ahead — the wall in front of you, the turn to the left — and that’s it. You take the turn. You hit another wall. That’s what living with an unexamined loss is: motion without a map.

Therapy is better than that. In therapy you study the maze. Week by week you map the corridors: this dead end comes from your father, that loop you’ve walked four times is your pattern with women. It’s real knowledge. But notice where you’re standing while you acquire it. You’re still inside. You can spend years perfecting the map and never once leave the corridors.

A good trip — a deep, deliberate, healing one — puts you above the maze. You see yourself in it, small and determined. You see every path at once: the ones you took, the ones you didn’t, the one you’re standing on now. You see how you got in, and why the maze exists at all.

And then, if the trip is deep enough, something further happens. You see that the maze is painted. You see the canvas it’s painted on. You see the paint, and the brush, and — with some luck and the right procedure — you meet the painter. You can talk to him. You can ask what he had in mind.

I won’t try to argue anyone into this. I’ll just say: it frees you in a way that studying corridors does not.

There’s a second thing trips do, and it may matter more than the view from above.

When the loss came, I did with the pain what I’ve always done: clenched my jaw and pushed it down. Most of us do. We’re afraid of the pain, so we put armor between it and ourselves. It feels like strength. But pain that isn’t let in doesn’t disappear — it stays outside the armor, unlived, and from out there it runs your life. It decides what you avoid, whom you can’t forgive, what you can’t hear without flinching.

The trip takes the armor off. Not gently, not on your schedule — but off. And then you can finally see the thing as it actually is, and let it in. All the way in. In my trips I have sobbed in a way I hadn’t sobbed in years. I have lived emotions at a depth ordinary life never allows, because ordinary life is precisely the arrangement we’ve built to avoid them.

Over a trip, or a series of them, the pain enters and is absorbed at a level nothing else I know of can reach. And then something quietly enormous happens:

The loss stops running your life.

It’s still there. It happened. But it’s inside now, part of you — not outside the armor, banging on it.

That’s why this is a load-bearing part of my plan, and therapy is not.