"MY DEAR PSYCHIATRIST"

I promised you this letter instead of a visit, or a phone call. I write more fluently than I talk, and, emoting through writing is natural for me. You miss almost all of it when I come to see you because the pain is so very well eclipsed. What I need to tell you is all here, for the moment.

Unless you’ve made it a study, a serious life’s work, as Karl Mennninger did, of why people kill themselves, you cannot possibly understand how someone who, since early childhood, has been so intrigued with suicide. Let’s explore this odd statement that I just introduced to you by telling you that there seems to be considerably more depressive illness and higher than average incidences of suicide among writers, particularly poets.

So when you really set your psychiatrist’s mind upon it, you realize that we, the writer- poets, are very fragile, by nature, to begin with, and out of this fragility and despair, some of the most incredible creative genius emerges.

We tangle with our inner selves and struggle to untangle, cycle after cycle, and in this process, we develop the craft of expressing the deepest human emotions, creating an exquisite tapestry of the most delicate fabric.

I have just described to you, my psychiatrist, the writer’s heart, my poetic mind.

I cannot avoid the prolonged periods of sadness and melancholy. Asking for your help, to make the pain disappear, is just my way of drawing you close so that I do not become another Sylvia Plath. I fear that I am at my most vulnerable than I have ever been because I am physically declining.


So, my dear psychiatrist, when I say I can no longer care for Dora, it is because I can no longer care for myself. I barely function. It feels like I walk through a jar of molasses on good days, and on my miserable days, I am weeping as though Dora has already died. I can function but at such a low level, it’s frightening. If I had my way, I would stay in bed for days just to ride out the depressive storms. I cannot force Jim to “man up” and stand in the gap for me because he is more depressed now that he is going down on his methadone, and he is exceedingly anxious about life in general, especially my state of mind. He sees me in a panic mode most of the time, or depressed, or just angry, or staring, doing nothing. He is frightened that we are not going to find a place of our own to live, separately, but he thinks we will be homeless, and I think that as well.

The gentleman with whom I had quite a significant relationship, if you recall, after everything I have done, pushing him out of my life, still, he wants me in his life, and even without breasts. This brings a smile to my face. I look hideous. I have stayed away because my life is so chaotic, so sad. I am serving a life sentence, I told him.

What do I do! Tell me. Dora sometimes knows who I am. Other times, she blankly looks at me, and in her mind at that moment, I am a nurse or someone she knew from school, or her own mother. There are times she thinks Jim is her lover. As soon as I clear her plate from dinner, I will ask her if she enjoyed it, and she cannot tell me what she ate, less than five minutes from that last bite. This depresses me so much because I know how engaging and brilliant she was. I cry and cry. I do not know what to do.

She is my mother.

Angelina