Miriam Toews – on studying psychology.

Winnipeg, Manitoba
October 9, 2000

Dear Marce,

You’re not the first person to wonder why I’m studying psychology. I’ve thought about it a lot and I still don’t really have an answer. I just keep coming back to this vision I have of myself somewhere in the distant future. I have this vision of me one day being a psychologist and there I am in my little room waiting for my next client and in he comes and he’s tall and handsome and conservatively dressed in a suit and tie and middle-aged and he seems a little nervous. He’s got a beautiful smile, and a very firm handshake, and we say hello and he sits down beside me and then he says it. He tells me he wants to die. And then I know that this is my opportunity to redeem myself. It’s my second chance, and this one I can’t fuck up. What do I say?

I know what you’re thinking. Marj already asked me if this whole idea of mine to study psychology was a “dad thing.” Because why else would someone who feels so dicked around by the entire psych services system want to become a very part of it, another cog in the machine? I’m not sure what to think about that. I already know what a shrink would say: Do you feel guilty for not having prevented your dad from killing himself? (Yes.) Do you feel you need to atone for his death? (Yes.) Do you feel you need to spend the rest of your life helping others like him in order to atone for his death? (Yes.) Do you feel confident that you can prevent someone from taking his or her own life? (No.) Then what makes you feel you could have prevented your dad from taking his life? (I don’t know.) In your opinion, is it rational to feel guilty, then, for not having prevented his suicide? (No, not rational.) In your opinion, then, is it rational to want to spend the rest of your life atoning for something you couldn’t have prevented from happening anyway? (No, not rational.) Do you think your father would have wanted you to be happy? (Yes, of course.) Does it make you happy to feel guilty, to feel personally responsible for not having prevented his suicide? (No, not happy.) Does it make you happy to be wasting my time like this you pathetic little fucker? (Yes, you smug, sanctimonious son of a bitch, some day I’ll have your job.)

But none of that questioning makes me feel any less guilty. So, seeing as how I’m going to feel guilty, why not let guilt be what compels me to study psychology? Why not let guilt be the thing that makes me attempt to ease someone’s pain, however slightly. Isn’t it better than me saying: I think I’m very good with people, I think I’ll study psychology. Or: I’ve had feelings of sadness in my life so I think I’ll be a very good psychologist. Or: I seem to be very good at keeping my shit together, I think I’d be good at telling other people how to live their lives, using my own tremendous success as a type of standard.

I don’t know. (Have I mentioned that already?) Maybe it’s not guilt. Maybe it’s just because I have one simple question that interior design, say, or home economics, can’t answer: Why’d he do it? Maybe I’m just the kind of person who hates mysteries. Who would rather try to figure things out than beatifically accept their impenetrability. It’s true, I despise so much of what psychology is about these days, the flakiness of it, the arrogance of it, the expense of it, the lack of it, the stigma of it, the joke of it, all that shit. But then again I know for a fact that I lack the imagination to even conceive of a different system. Maybe I can be a half-assed psychologist within the system, but creating a new one? Not likely. It’s kind of like the day I came home to the news that my dad had killed himself. I had been watching Owen’s baseball game and towards the end of it my head started to ache like never before. I thought I was going to die. I felt like someone was trying to squeeze my cerebral cortex up through the top of my head. I thought for sure my eyes were popping out of my skull. I wanted to scream. And I’d never even really had a headache before in my entire life. (I’m more of a stomach stress person.) So, anyway, I left the game before it was over and asked my mom, who was also there, to take Owen and Georgia home after the game. On my way home I stopped at the seven eleven to buy some Tylenol and a bottle of water. I was only a few blocks from home but I started ripping open the package in the car, desperate to get those damn pills inside me and working. I still hadn’t managed to get them into my mouth by the time I pulled up into my driveway and then I kind of stopped trying because I immediately sensed that something was not right. My sister and her boyfriend and Richard, an Anglican minister friend of my mom’s, were sitting on my back deck. I got out of the car, holding the two little tablets of Tylenol in my hand, and walked into the back yard. What’s going on? I said. And I looked at my sister and she just kind of stared at me and so did Sean her boyfriend and Richard got up and came over to where I was, standing on the back steps, and looked at me, and kind of paused for a second, and then said: Your dad’s dead. He walked in front of a train.

And then I said no, no, no, I kind of yelled it actually, and I remember thinking what a useless fucking word that is, no, and then, for whatever reason, I threw my two tablets of Tylenol at Richard and went into the house and slammed the door.

A couple of hours later, I was back outside sitting on the steps and I saw, even though it was getting dark, my little white Tylenol pills lying there on the ground and I thought: Well, I think I’ll take them now.

That’s my analogy right there, as lame as it may be. That’s what I compare psychology to. When Richard said those words, your dad’s dead, he walked in front of a train, the idea of taking Tylenol seemed ridiculous. Then, I guess, later on it was like well, there’s the Tylenol. What else is gonna get rid of this awful headache? I may as well take them and see and hope for the best. Taking the Tylenol won’t bring my dad back, but at the very least my head might stop hurting.

Well, anyway, that was all so long ago. I’m pretty sure I’m entirely over it by now. I should go. I have to study.

Love,

Miriam.