It's not you, it's me.

If you want a really cool but nonprescribing shrink, I can recommend one, highly. She's very cool and yet takes no shit.

I just quit therapy today. This is a good thing, I'm convinced of that.

So much for "keeping it to myself for awhile." (That was the original plan. Until someone notices. I guess. If I tell my mom I'm finally "cured" she'll ask "Are you sure?" Then again, I'm really sick of her asking me if I'm cured. But I digress.)

In some form or another, I've been in therapy for 18 years off and on. Not Woody-Allenesque analysis, just the talky kind. Again, there were often breaks in between. There was the short-termers - the dear, sweet old lady I was convinced was the soul of evil living in the coolest apartment in the city; the burnt-out NYU doc who went medieval on a terribly fragile me for cancelling an appointment (he was reported to administration; do not fuck with even a fragile me). There was my first real doctor at Mt. Sinai, a hulking babyfaced Westerner who I'm surprised survived me; last I saw he was an ER shrink in the Bronx. There was the curmudgeouly but handsome psychiatrist on the Upper West Side; the hippie-ish psychotherapist who, for a few years, I followed to Westchester - eventually the train ride was the most thereapeutic part of the day. And there was the woman, before this one, who I reduced to tears, and then she "forgot" our next (last) appointment. I hope she's in retail now.

I didn't necessarily plan it, although I'd been planning it awhile. She was terribly nice about it, more fair than I'd ever believed a therapist would be. "Perhaps you need to leave here, to put some of this stuff into practice." I think closure is overrated; I chose "goodbye for now" and was nice to know the keys to the sofa were always available. Which is a good feeling. I think if I was a twittering basket case, she'd perhaps have advocated against me returning to the light of day solo.

Anyway. I meant to say more, display all kinds of brilliant insight as to my mental evolution. Reflect, you know.

But right now I just can't sleep. For real.