A note to my therapist about Mr. Robot

 

Mr. Robot

(*mild spoiler alert*)

I guess I wrote this for myself but I was writing to you.

I just finished watching two seasons of a TV show called Mr. Robot that’s about a group of weirdo anarchist hackers fighting the Evil Corp in modern day New York City. It was really well done. The main character is this brilliant young hacker who’s father died when he was a kid but the father ends up sticking around as a kind of ghost figure and it’s not clear if it’s his imagination or the dad is really there. The dad is way more bold than the character and keeps getting the two of them into trouble, but also coming up with brilliant ideas.

There are a number of a very eerie things about the show that remind me of my life, it seems like it must have been written by someone who’s actually experienced psychosis. There’s a part where the main chacter goes through this whole set of experiences and then realizes at the end he’s been in jail the whole time and it was a delusions, he was telling himself a story that made it easier. It’s not always clear if everything is actually happening or if it’s all just an internal battle in this guy’s head. I can just relate to it so much. I know that’s the power of good theater, to tap into the archetypal realms and make us feel connected to things larger than us. Anyway, that’s happening to me.

If I had made it into see you last week I might have talked about how I have this internal struggle where one part of me feels way more confident and is pushing things at work and speaking my mind, and then after I do this other part of me is embarrassed and scared. It’s not that I’m fronting, it’s really like there are different parts of me and then have really conflicting ideas about how to act. And they really are like separate parts of myself with different agendas. What I’d like to do is somehow merge them together so they don’t fight, because it’s actually a waste of time, a waste of my energy. Life is short and it can be exhausting.

But it reminds me so much of the character in Mr. Robot and his relationship with his dead father. It’s like I have a spirit in me that drives me really hard, and has been driving me really hard for a long ass time. When I’ve gotten “psychotic” it’s like I’ve let him take over and act like a crazy motherfucker and get me into a bunch of trouble. But never too much that it doesn’t all work out in the end. That month in LA County Jail psych unit where they were holding me down and shooting me up with Haldol? I made it though to tell the tale. Smashing satellite dishes on the roof of a building in midtown Manhattan and getting locked up in Bellevue? Made it through to tell the tale. Walking on the subway tracks as the world was ending as a teenager? Made it through to tell the tale. I have a crazy story inside my head and I really do dance between the worlds and I’ve learned to make maps for myself of the mad territory.

I’m way more sensitive than most people, at least in some ways, and watching TV shows that tap into the archetypes in my consciousness really does have a deep effect on me. Anyway, I think I just needed to say that stuff out loud and talk to someone about it. Or at least write it down. I’ve been writing it all down for so long. I’m like the narrator, the actor, and the audience all in one. Just trying to understand and control my story. Keep it interesting. Find other people to talk to about it. Make new interesting stories.

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