I’ve long found the act of going back and reviewing what’s happened over the past year to be incredibly helpful in orienting myself -- intellectually, politically, emotionally. In previous years, I’ve attuned this end-of-the-year practice to the goings-on in my fields of study -- ed-tech, most famously. But this year, I’ve been mostly focused inward, a year of much personal struggle and personal growth. Only in the last few months do I feel like I have any energy for looking up and out, any solid direction professionally -- and even that feels quite tentative and tenuous. I’m fairly reluctant to write openly online these days -- more about that in tomorrow’s essay -- here I am with some 2024 reflections, a series of posts from now until the end of 2024.

One of my goals back in January was “find a therapist,” a goal that I abandoned about a week into the new year -- as one does with New Year’s resolutions. (In my defense, it is just ridiculously hard to find adequate mental health care, whether or not one has health insurance that covers it. And currently, I do not.)

"I'm fine," I told myself. But just a week later, as I was sitting at my desk (ostensibly writing), a person jumped to his death from the roof of the building across the street. I saw something flutter, something fall. I looked down and saw his lifeless body. He was wearing a black hoodie, just as Isaiah often did. He appeared young, again, like my son.

I immediately resumed my search for mental health help, and I found an office with therapists who specialized in grief and addiction (and sports performance -- these things all seemed weirdly intertwined in my life). I made a call and was put in contact with a therapist the very next day.

I spent the next few months, making the once-a-week trek down to Chelsea to begin to work through my grief with Lynda, an Irish woman who understood much, I think, of my cultural background not just of my experiences of loss and sadness. It’s been over four years since Isaiah’s overdose, and while I did briefly try some Zoom therapy after he died (it was -- no surprise -- not good), I have still been stuck in a very very bad place for a while now. “Complicated grief,” it’s called, apparently. Complicated grief. Depression. And PTSD. The latter diagnosis prompted Lynda to refer me to a specialist, Elisabeth, someone who specializes in grief and addiction as well, but also PTSD treatment, particularly EMDR. So since July, I’ve been doing that -- "eye movement desensitization and reprocessing," dealing with the trauma from not only Isaiah’s addiction and death, but from his dad’s cancer, dying, and death.

And it’s worked. (I think?) I mean, I feel different. Better. Like maybe I have my life back -- or at least, I feel like I have a life. I feel like living my life, a life that isn’t just a carefully constructed set of tasks that keep me putting one foot in front of the other (literally, not just metaphorically), a life utterly black and broken from pain and loss and unbearable, inescapable, relentless grief. I actually want to re-engage with the world; I am angry again for the world (not just at the world and at myself). I want to write.

I say the treatment "worked,” but I’m not sure how I feel, intellectually at least, about the process -- I mean, clearly, emotionally, I’m relieved, even happy. A huge burden has been lifted. Even so, I’m not sure how I feel about psychology, about psychotherapy -- it all kind of seems like pseudoscience to me -- and especially about EMDR as it seems so strange to trust a field, a process when many of its practitioners admit to not knowing precisely why it works.

I feel ridiculous explaining EMDR to others too, because as soon as the words come out of my mouth, I recognize how preposterous it all sounds, how much metaphor we rely on when we talk about “the mind”: in one explanation, traumatic memories get “stuck” in the brain and the bilateral stimulation helps disengage them so they can move forward, so the traumatic memory and its triggers can be processed, analyzed, and the brain healed.

I am unable to escape the connections I’ve made in my professional work to B. F. Skinner, it seems -- always wondering if, as he argued at least, we can ever really know “the mind.” Many of my reservations about psychology are bound up in my uneasiness with Skinner -- his refusal to believe in free will, no doubt, and in agency. And as I start to write more about artificial intelligence, I’m back to dealing with all sorts of theories of “the mind” yet again -- all these arguments that I hear technologists and their hype-men make about intelligence, all while knowing we still know absolutely jack-shit about how our own brains and bodies actually work. (Being in therapy also makes me dangerously prone to psychoanalyze others -- as in, "why would you rather engage with ChatGPT than work through your ideas with other people?")

I’ll be wrapping up my PTSD treatment in the next week or so, and I’m going to take a break from therapy for a while. It’s not that I’ve resolved everything -- hahaha, hardly. It’s not that I even have “closure” when it comes to the loss of Isaiah or Anthony. But as I close out this particular treatment, I am thinking quite a lot about the ways in which death has yanked my life in directions that were far out of my control and what agency -- fuck you, Skinner -- I have to yank back.

And of all the mad things to do now, I’ve been debating returning to graduate school to finish my PhD. Well, to be honest, it’s been so long since I dropped out, it would be to restart a PhD entirely. I have two chapters written of a Comparative Literature dissertation, two chapters from a project that I don’t even remember -- something about the Situationists, something about street theatre and political protest. I’ve been looking at PhD programs at Columbia Teacher’s College and at NYU -- I wouldn’t move to go to school. Why?! Why?! I mean, I think I would like to teach again. (Even though higher education remains an absolutely terrible institution in many, many ways, I do see it as one of the few places where we can stage a resistance to techno-fascism.) But mostly, I think I want to remind myself that all these deaths haven't ended my life.

All this desire for closure and completion is indication that I probably still need therapy. Or maybe it’s an indication that I’m coming back to myself -- a self that was taken away not just by Isaiah’s death but long, long before that. Maybe I still have to figure out who I can become, not just figure out how to get back to who I was before he died.