A Critical Level Of Existential Disturbance

on being a writer, a comedian, a therapist, a bad-at-money-person, on why I'm not currently in therapy and why I feel way better about death now.

hi, it’s me! pic: Michael Gebhardt

Last night after a comedy show, I was standing around with some friends and fellow comics, laughing and fucking around and generally loitering in the rain outside the bar. A couple people were chatting about having therapy scheduled for today, Friday, and off-handedly I mentioned, ugh I miss being in therapy. My closest friend in the bunch looked up at me sharply, not from judgement but from a place I immediately recognized as shock and incredulity for an extremely reasonable reason: bitch how are you not in therapy?? You are a THERAPIST!

I KNOW, I replied. It’s unhinged! I confessed to her and everyone that while I loved my therapist and I want to be in therapy, I had to stop for a while because I literally can’t afford it.

A collective groan erupted, ugh America! Both completely absurd and completely unsurprising that our country values mental health so little that it is not uncommon for a working therapist to struggle to afford their own therapy.

But to be honest, it’s not simple enough as to say that my therapy job is the reason I’m unable to currently afford my (expensive and amazing) former therapist (who honestly I’m obsessed with, have a small but very real crush on, but more importantly is an incredible therapist and I hope to be able to resume seeing them soon.)

having fought the chaotic urge to post a picture of my old therapist’s psychology today profile right here, so you can see how cool and excellent they are, i’m sharing a cute photo and me and my husband Basil and our daughter Goldie watching the eclipse.

Okay, but so the thing is if I was seeing 30 + clients a week, as I have done in the past, I could probably afford a therapist. Probably. Maybe not the therapist I want, but a therapist for sure. Generally speaking, therapy is a shockingly low-paying gig if you work for a mental health agency. For example: I have 14 years of experience, and have recently seen gigs listed for someone at my level (in Brooklyn, one of the most expensive places to live in the country!!!!) for 45K a year. LIKE WHAT.

Even when you open a private practice, which I did about ten years ago and is most often the best way to make a good income as a therapist, it can be challenging to make things work. Especially if you live somewhere expensive, and you don’t want to only see super rich people, and when you take into consideration things like lack of benefits, losing money every time you have to cancel or your clients have to cancel or you want any kind of time off or somebody leaves or loses their job etc etc ETC!

When I got Covid a few months ago, I’m being totally real with you when I say that my first thought was not oh, no I hope my partner and kids don’t get it, or oh, no I hope I don’t get Long Covid, it was hmm, I wonder if I can pull myself together enough to still see my clients remotely, otherwise we’re gonna be fucked this month. ( FYI: I realize that that’s awful and terrible modeling from a therapist of self-care blah blah blah I KNOW OKAY! But like… honestly what is self- care under capitalism?!)

So right, it can be hard to make a good living as a therapist regardless. But people do definitely do it. Some therapists see a bajillion clients a week, managing their burn out with edibles or massages or drinking or binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy and snapping at their loving partner who just wants to process their day like I’m sorry babe, I just cannot listen to you right now, I love you but literally all I do all day is listen to and care about people leave me ALONE!!!!! (This is absolutely how I felt and/or sometimes actually behaved when I used to see 30+ people a week.)

Some therapists make it work by exclusively seeing clients who can pay $300+ dollars or more a session, even if that choice does then evoke a distressing cognitive dissonance around it being absolutely opposed to their personal ethics and ethos or why they became a therapist in the first place.

A bunch of therapists I know have a more balanced and satisfying work life, seeing a mix of people they enjoy seeing who can afford different amounts, and not so many people that it completely drains them and burns their personal life and their own mental health to the ground. Not always, but often these therapists seem to also happen to have a partner with the kind of job that makes that kind of practice possible. You know, someone with paychecks that don’t change week to week, someone with health insurance or working within an industry that makes a lot of money for people with money, and therein gets a lot of financial love.

But that situation has not been my situation. Neither me, nor my partner Basil, has one of those reliable, high-paying, high-valued- by-capitalism- kinds of jobs that allow people to know exactly what their bank account is gonna look like at any point in the month( which honestly sounds crazy and made up to me.)

Basil, like me, is a writer and artist (which I love for him and I love that about him.) He’s incredibly talented and amazing, and in various moments has had huge professional and financial wins (way bigger than mine btw,) as well as various fellowships that are super super helpful in keeping us afloat. But then as is the nature of the beast of the entertainment industry: there is feast and there is famine, and the lean times come. And they really come when you are historically Bad With Money and haven’t planned well (something I feel is VERY TRUE about me, and also something that I have a ton of shame about and A LOT to say about, and I promise I will in another post.)

But right- ADHD brain in full effect today- I want to further clarify how we arrived at this current moment wherein I, a practicing therapist, cannot currently afford therapy. About 5 years ago, I stopped working as a therapist full-time (which was maybe not a good financial decision, but was definitely a good decision in all the other ways, and one in which I was super supported and encouraged by Basil, which is something I will truly be infinitely grateful to him for.)

Long story short, but after many years of ANGST AND REPRESSION, I reached what you might consider to be a CRITICAL LEVEL OF EXISTENTIAL DISTURBANCE, focused on my lifelong struggle to try and force myself to be okay with being a writer and artist as “a hobby.” Basically, various things helped me to finally accept that I was NOT okay with that, including: being with a partner who had NOT forced and twisted himself into making that sacrifice, many years of my own therapy and many years of providing therapy in which I supported OTHER people in connecting with their repressed desires and ultimately was like ok fuck why can I never take my own advice.

And not to be dramatic, but the most powerful driving force behind this reckoning was having my first baby, Goldie. Everyone also talks about having kids as something that ruining artists’ careers, but becoming a Mom pushed me to finally claim mine.

Look, I’m an angsty, anxious person, the sort of person who thinks about dying on the regular, as well as many other morbid, unpleasant things. It’s not a big deal to me, it’s just a part of my day. And I swear to you, once I had my daughter, I just suddenly in a whole new way literally COULD NOT BEAR the thought of dying replete with regret, and specifically could not bear the thought of having my children be raised by a miserable Mother consumed by everything she had denied herself, which would OBVIOUSLY leak out in terrible ways onto her children, as much as I would’ve wanted it not to.

I would have these vivid, haunting fantasies of my daughter talking about me in therapy as teen or young adult, being like My Mom’s so sad all the time. I feel like she’s jealous that I’m actually going after my dreams. I feel so bad for her but I also kind of hate her….it’s not my fault she gave up her dreams, like what the fuck.

So I made a big change, with the energy and obsessive drive to succeed of the eldest daughter with a praise kink that I am. I started working toward splitting my time between therapy and writing/comedy, actively attempting to nurture both careers. This change has made me both VERY happy and VERY stressed out financially, especially over the last couple years. Stand up comedy and writing for film and television are both even MORE unpredictable and financially bleak for most than being a therapist, unless you’re one of the lucky ones who eventually starts getting regular paid work in the industry.

I’ve been making progress, which I really try to take in and feel good about, although my impulse to minimize and trash talk my successes always pops up. If I have a win, my go-to is to be like, well, I guess I tricked them, or they must have really low standards. When I’m rejected or a project or joke doesn’t go well I’m kinda like yeah…I mean, I suck, so that tracks.

But I’m trying to make that voice quieter, or at least accompany it with a newer voice that’s like SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET ELY ENJOY SOMETHING FOR ONCE GODDAMN! I did get paid for the first time this year to write a feature screenplay, and that felt amazing and validating and I’m proud of it- the biggest reward was that emotional and psychological one. The financial reward was nice and helpful, but it wasn’t a lot. I know if I added up the hours I worked on the screenplay and divided them by the lump sum I was paid for it…. it would be a tragically low hourly rate that would really bum me out, so I will not be doing that.

I also write funny jokes and creative copy for places as a freelancer, and I get paid between $10-50 bucks for most stand up spots, and there are other little things here and there. I’ve written television pilots on spec as samples, as my main goal is being staffed in a television writer’s room. Right now actually, me and Basil are working together on developing a television series with a small production company, our first big project together which has been SO fun and exciting and amazing (and caused a lot less relationship drama between us than you might think imagining up a tv show with your spouse might evoke.)

We recently casually mentioned this project to a friend of ours, a friend who happens to have a Regular Job in Tech. They imagined that us getting “hired” to develop this tv show was a big financial win for us, and we laughed wryly like noo nooo noooo. We broke down the nature of film/tv development for them: that the development process is often completely unpaid, you’re just pouring literally everything you’ve got into creating this entire world and loving it and obsessing over it and spending hundreds of hours toiling away on the hope and prayer that someone buys it and all your work pays off in this huge, life and career-altering way, but you’re also simultaneously preparing yourself for the reality that it very possibly will not only NOT GET MADE but it also very possibly will NOT EVEN SELL, not because it’s bad but because so many things just don’t. And then that’s like…it. That’s a wrap. Our friend looked at us truly floored and honestly? HORRIFIED. You do all that work for free????? And then it can just end up being nothing, how can do they do that?!

We agreed, it’s fucked up, but as I found myself yammering on about how I also just feel really lucky to have the chance to be in the development process and engaged in this work that I love, even if it DOES end up being nothing, I noticed our friend look at me like you look at someone whose been brainwashed by a cult… and my voice trailed off.

The thing is though, I do really feel that way most of the time. Like deeply grateful to even be given the opportunity of a chance at success, with big sort of it’s an honor to even be nominated vibes. Even knowing that the whole world you’re painstakingly, lovingly building might end up being just another abandoned folder in your google drive, one you glance at in passing and feel sad and wistful sometimes.

Some people don’t even get the chance to be in the ring at all, I tell myself, and I say it like I mean it. Some people don’t have a million worlds they’ve created in their heads, a google drive of abandoned folders that all at one point were something and could have Become Something beyond that, some people aren’t pressing create new folder right now, one that’s about to be filled with pages imbued with energy and heart and a youthful, stubborn hopefulness. So even without personally experiencing a Big, Life-Changing Win yet as a writer or comedian, I feel like one of the lucky ones. Not constantly, sometimes I feel EXTREMELY unlucky, but often enough. Because I’m doing it.

Now I know that in a way… that mindset is bullshit. We deserve more than a chance, we deserve more than scraps and should be paid fairly and often for our work, and we deserve to live in a country that values artists and art and mental health and everything that exists for other, better reasons than making rich people richer. But in a way, I appreciate my brainwashed gratitude, even like it. Because I know that it’s born from having lived many years not allowing myself to do what I’m doing right now. Regardless of whether anything I’m doing creatively leads to a kind of capital S success, I’m still doing it. And for me there is serious and powerful inherent value in that.

Like I’m no longer haunted by those terrible fantasies, of having fucked up my children by way of having fucked over myself. (I’m sure I’ll fuck them up in some other way I’m not aware of, but at least it won’t be that one.) And now when I think about dying, I feel really sad- but in a way that is fundamentally and profoundly different than how I felt sad before.

When I picture myself on my deathbed now, I primarily feel sad that I would miss out on more life. Miss out on creating new worlds and jokes and stories that excite and inspire me, on trying and fucking up and failing and triumphing and accomplishing something that once felt so out of my reach, of getting so lost in something that for a moment none of the bullshit of life exists. I feel sad about missing out on more time with my husband and my kids and my sister and my parents and friends, more time trying to take this fucked up, impossible human situation we’re in and find the joy, find ways to laugh at the shittiest parts, find ways to tolerate it and make it fun. To make it mean something.

I used to feel so deeply, unbelievably sad, picturing myself about to die. I would imagine myself on the brink of death, usually in a hospital bed. My life would flash before my eyes- and what I would mostly see and feel in that flash was not presence, but absence. Regret, grief and sadness over the absence of what I wished I’d see.

So yeah. Obviously, I am so, so glad that I do not see that anymore. That I’ve made some choices I’m proud of and my end-of-life fantasies have shifted to include a sadness that carries a very different tone, quality and set of feelings. Like I told you before, I’m generally terrible at acknowledging my own accomplishments. But I feel very, very good about this one.

But also though? Being broke fucking suuuuuuucks. And I kinda wish I had a therapist I could talk to about it.

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NOW SOME HOUSEKEEPING:

Ps- if you live in NYC or close by, I would so love to see you at my monthly queer stand up show this coming Tuesday 4/16, 7:30pm at Union Hall! Tix here: Gay Shame Comedy Show!

Pps- thank you so much for reading this whole thing! If you’re a free subscriber, I would be so grateful if you’d consider upgrading to a paid subscription. And if not, I GET IT and thank you so much for being here, never leave <3

xooxooxox until next time

Ely