Why I’m back in therapy

Sooooo, I’m back to seeing my shrink. That means I’m paying $175 for a weekly, 45-minute session. Ouch.

Unfortunately, my health insurance doesn’t cover a penny of it. Fortunately, the therapy is worth every cent. Even after only three weeks, I’m already feeling much better.

If you’ve never tried it, let me just say that getting shrunk can do wonders. It’s the only reason that I now consider myself a happy person.

But there’s always room for more work, as they say. And on this round, I’m going to chat with the lingering ghost of Little Betty. Sometimes, without meaning to, she holds me back.

Poor thing. She was the first-born child of insanely strict Chinese immigrant parents. Not only that, she was the first American-born child in the entire Liu clan. Plenty of pressure on her to do the American Dream thing.

What was I supposed to do?

But she was doomed in the womb. Her folks wanted a #1 Son, not her. The kid was also left-handed, which they said was bad luck. And how could she suck at math and science when Mom and Dad expected her to be a medical doctor??

Welcome to my youthful years. There’s more. As an accounting major in college, my GPA for at least one semester was 1.0. A straight “D” average. Yeah, really.

Somehow, I got into Columbia University’s School of Journalism. However, the family was not pleased with my next decision — marriage to a man who happened to be black.

Then, after everyone was used to our interracial togetherness, I became the first Liu woman to divorce.

Thankfully, my ex- and I found our way to an amicable break-up. Since then, I’m proud of my accomplishments as a single working mom. I’m also thrilled to have a MARVELOUS BOYFRIEND that I met three months ago (more details on him in future posts, very soon).

I am learning to make time to be with my man. I want more and more of his love in my life. But I also want to paint more, write more…and, be more. On top of that — there’s already my full schedule as a mom, teacher, home owner and cat lady.

Managing everything could get crazy. That’s where therapy could help. My goal is to find new tools to reach the next level. For me, that means turning my life inside out. As my parents’ daughter, I was quite repressed. Now, I want to take the intimate thoughts and feelings that were off-limits in my growing-up years, give them room to breathe and finally make them legit.

I want to own all of me.

In order to do that, I’ll need this blog…

My buddy Joel Friedlander recently presented an excellent challenge. I’m a huge fan of his self-publishing blog, TheBookDesigner.com. Someday, I’d love to take his advice by authoring some type of book and putting it out there myself. To create a readership base, I need a respectable number of subscribers. Joel thinks that a newbie author with any chance of success should have about 1,000 of them.

Wow. On a really good day, I pull in a couple of hundred readers. The actual subscribers? About 50. Most folks just drop by my site whenever. But subscribers…..hmm.

If you’d like to help me with this part of my journey, I’d love to have you subscribe. All it means is that you’ll get an email alerting you to my latest post. If you know of anyone who would enjoy my blog, please pass along a link to this site. To subscribe, just click on the little image of the envelope on the upper left-hand corner of the computer screen that you’re reading now.

This next stage of my life is gonna be fun.