So, fall semester begins, and for the first time neither I nor June have any new classes. Of course, the same has been true for every semester this year, but for some reason the fact is impressing itself on me more strongly this time. Perhaps it's only that summer has seemed very long and I was, without realizing it, looking forward to a change and there isn't any.
I am still taking the two classes all mastery candidates take, Chaplains' Seminar and Candidates' Seminar. I teach my own workshops and things, and I sometimes join one of Charlie's classes for the day (usually Messing Around Outdoors, it's fun) or substitute for him, or I sit in on Steve's American Religious History class, which he took over from Greg, just to see how he's doing. So it's not like I have no contact with academics, it's just that I'm not taking classes with novices, nor do I have a vicarious connection to the novice's view of the year through June, as I did last year. I feel...isolated, somehow, outside of the school that I have spent so long within.
So far in that I'm out.
Perhaps I shall discuss all of this in therapy. I started individual therapy some weeks ago, not because I think I need it, but because it's actually a graduation requirement for candidates--a year and a day of it, of course. I'm not sure why, I think it's something about making sure you're not crazy. I didn't do it my first year, because I knew I wouldn't finish that year anyway, and this this year I sort of let it get away from me until Allen reminded me of the requirement mid-summer. I hadn't exactly forgotten about it, and I had to admit I've been reluctant. Individual therapy, as opposed to the group therapy I did as a yearling, seems so associated with...having problems. To me, at least. I don't want to think of myself as one of those people in therapy. I know better, but it worries me all the same.
Allen laughed at me.
"Are you worried I won't be friends with crazy people?" he asked.
Allen is not my therapist. He says it's one thing to conduct group therapy with yearlings he met recently, but quite another to offer one-on-one counseling to friends he's known for a decade. He won't serve as therapist with any of us. Instead, he maintains a list of people who practice nearly, whose work he admires and trusts, and who know the school exists. They're paid from our tuition, though at a discounted rate. Some will even come to campus, if several mastery candidates are seeing them that year, though the one I picked doesn't.
It's interesting. No major insights or breakthroughs, yet, and I have to admit I still don't think I need therapy, but the opportunity to talk about myself freely for fifty minutes a week--I like it.
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