clinical training started today. there was no grace period, no how-tos for dummies, just the high-wire and no net beneath. learn by failing. learn by saying the wrong thing. look a total stranger in the eye, and control your terror, and try and find out what's wrong with him.

i think i'm afraid i'll be bad at it. not afraid to try, but afraid that this is finally something so massively beyond me that i'll wade into the ocean and never touch bottom. that the thing i reassure myself with -- that i and everyone i know are damaged, fucked-up, struggling for the surface, and that when it comes to clients it's just a matter of degree, a tendency not a diagnosis -- may not be true, is not true, that there really are more things on heaven and earth that are dreamt of in my philosophy. that i'll be too empathic, or not empathic enough. that people who try to help others should not themselves be desperately trying to keep it together, beating it into themselves that it's ok as long as you let go of it all and not take anything so damn seriously.

how seriously to take it, that's the thing. that's the trick. i can't take it absolutely seriously. i can't take anything absolutely seriously any more, because that's how you truly go mad, like soldiers in wartime who can't find a way to make light of the situation when their brothers-in-arms are blown to bits by a claymore. perhaps that's the thing to hang on to, that yes, many things are horrible -- people slashing their wrists, starving themselves to death, following the voices in their head onto the railway tracks -- but ultimately, there's either God, in which case all is well, or oblivion, in which case all is meaningless. and either way, it's possible to imagine a large-enough space that the sum total of all uncured mental illness, no matter how awful, is still nothing, insignificant, lost among the vastness of whatever infinity is real.

i wish i could go back to college. in college you know who you are.