Dear Dr. Ian,

Thanks for not making me feel like I was crazy for coming in to see a therapist. Even when I started giggling maniacally after saying, "I know you hear this all the time, but I'm not crazy." It was just funny after I thought about it for a second. Thanks for laughing with me and not at me. Thank you also for not pushing pills on me, to which I am diabolically opposed. Thanks for having chairs in your office instead of a couch--the stereotypical nature of the whole thing would've probably sent me back out the door.

Thanks for just listening to me for the first few sessions until you got most of my background. I have a lot of it, and it takes a while. Thanks also for not looking too shocked. Thanks for pointing out that the methods I'd put in place for dealing with things were quite effective for the time, that made me look back on my difficult past with a real sense of pride. I had always been too busy surviving to realize how well I'd done so. But thanks, too, for showing me how my methodology was now obsolete in light of my changed circumstances. When you said I had "failed to adapt", even though I came back with a rather sarcastic, "So you're saying I'm going extinct because I'm choosing not to evolve," thanks for laughing. And then confirming.

I appreciate how even though I had a rough patch right around the middle of the semester, you helped me work through what, exactly, was so bad about it. And that's where I learned about toxic environments and not tilting at windmills. And I trusted you enough to make a plan to get out of said toxic environments. I also learned that as remarkable as my life has been, it has not truly been a case of Virgil versus Everything Else. That while I have done an amazing amount of work, there have been key people along the way who saw me and appreciated me and who helped propel me forward into that next thing that was always at least slightly better than where I had been before. You taught me that I need to keep looking for these kinds of people in order to build up a network of people who are interested in my welfare. That was a tough one to get, because my last "group" experience was pretty disastrous. But I'm working on it.

Thanks for showing me my own confirmation bias, and for immediately challenging my predictions of gloom and doom with "Hm. What's the evidence for that?" It showed me how often I overlooked what I did right in favor of confirming where something had gone wrong. I'm not perfect at it now by any stretch--and I still get that old wary feeling. But at least I'm asking what the evidence is for it. I'm trying. Thanks for helping me deal with how I was going to cope without therapy.

I had no idea how physically stressed I had been. I'm eating everything in the house; it seems I've dropped ten pounds from last semester. I can breath to the bottom of my lungs again. I didn't know I wasn't until it just happened the way it was supposed to a few days ago. I can sleep through the night (most of the time). I don't wake up with that awful cramp that bends me in half. My shoulder muscles hurt like hell, but after all, I was carrying quite a bit on them. You helped me realize that I need to feel proud of myself, and that I find most of that in work, as my Dad linked the two things years ago. You've showed me how to find the right kind of people to say "I'm proud of you" so that it feels more or less the same as when he said it. And maybe even better, you showed me how I was more or less copying that with my teaching, and how I could sort of feed off of that.

You've helped me realize where my power comes from and what saps it away. You've made me better, faster, stronger. Thanks for helping me realize at that very last session that the thing that scared me the most was having run out of answers when everything had previously depended on me having all the answers. That I was able to experience someone else helping me find new ways to get answers that didn't entirely depend on me was incredible. It may have been the most important thing of all. Thanks, dude.

-- Virgil