I Like You Just the Way I Am Read Online Free PDF Page B

Your Therapist
    There are two types of people in the world: those who think everyone needs therapy, and those who have never been. My parents divorced when I was an infant. I’ve been dyslexic, anorexic, and a theater major, so it’s fairly obvious which category I fall under.
    Throughout my childhood, my parents dropped me off at a multitude of therapists’ offices in hopes that I’d avoid growing up to be the kind of asshole who writes books about them. Also because it was sometimes easier than finding a nanny. And as a result, I’m one of those therapy junkies that believes I’d be a fraction of the person I am if I didn’t have fifty to ninety minutes a week of somebody’s undivided attention.
    I was six years old when I was shown my first Rorschach test. (I think I saw a Boston terrier driving a Camaro.) Dr. Rob, my child psychologist at the time, used to watch me play with shapes and clay while subtly trying to decipher whether or not I’d grow up to be a raging psychopath. He’d ask me questions like, “If you were leaving town on a boat and there were only three seats, whom would you take with you?” I remember his alarm when I gave my toy poodle, Bouncer, all three seats, after prefacing that my little sister would start a mutiny if granted permission to board. At that time, it was obvious to even my poodle that my sister most likely had a personality disorder and that I would make an impressively level-headed captain of an imaginary boat.
    When I was sixteen and having panic attacks, I saw Bethany Fryman, an M.F.T. who lived on my street. Bethany was a morbidly obese grandma who studied Carl Jung and smelled like a Cinnamon Roll Yankee Candle. She blamed my mom for everything, which I assume had something to do with the fact that she was being paid by my father. Bethany came to all my high school plays and even wrote me a letter of recommendation for college. I think she’s dead now.
    At twenty, I developed an eating disorder and started seeing Pamela Mann, a nutritional therapist I met at LA Fitness. Pamela was fifty but looked thirty. She loved jewelry and would always talk about redesigning her late mother-in-law’s brooches. We had dinner a few times, and I think once I even went on a date with her son (small penis).
    I terminated with Mona, the lesbian L.C.S.W. from Calabasas, after she tried to hypnotize me and steal my car at my twenty-eighth birthday party.
    Unable to find the kind of treatment I needed (that is, someone who wouldn’t steal my car), I went to graduate school to get my own degree in the field. Like a pot dealer who sells only to smoke for free, a master’s in psychology seemed like a great way to help people while helping myself in the process. I was also out of work as an actress and needed something to say when people asked the dreaded question, “Soooo, what are you working on?”
    Graduate school was composed of twenty-something degree collectors who didn’t want to face the real world, older women whose kids were out of the house and whose husbands were sick of looking at them, and lost souls whose plan A wasn’t covering their rent. I was positive my involvement was a complete anomaly.
    “You know, just something to do in between gigs,” I explained to the guy who handed me a ticket to park in the school lot.
    I walked into my first class with the kind of “I want to see how your side lives, but I’m still sort of looking down on you” swagger I picture Colin Farrell having when he does a ride-along with the NYPD to get in character for a role. I avoided sitting next to any angry cat ladies and instead plopped down next to a nonthreatening gay guy.
    Eric was in his mid-thirties with blond scruffy hair, designer jeans, and several sandalwood bracelets that let me know he had his life together. I was confiding in him that I wasn’t sure what I’d gotten myself into and that I’d probably be getting a super-important acting gig that would force me to cut my