For the past few weeks, I’ve been working with cognitive therapy. Here’s a simple way to put it:
I’m learning to change my thought process, to work myself out of the well-worn grooves
of negative thought. I’m goingto be honest and tell you that I’m not very good at it. Not yet.
It’s kind of like learning to play an instrument. Youcan’t just pick it up and be magical and have
a verse-chorus-verse complete with dreamy interlude and devastatingstrum. You
have to practice. You start with the scales and you do them over and over until you can’t see
straight.Then you force yourself to do them some more. You work your way into it. A process
that commands patience. Oneof the most difficult forms of patience is the kind you have to
have with yourself. Hence my jerky, sputtering start.

My therapist insisted that when I walk through a doorway, I tell myself two things. Two basic
things which one,maybe, shouldn’t have to tell themselves. I say maybe because it isn’t
always a given. I walk through a doorway and tell myself: I am a lovable person; I am a
valuable person. It’s a belief that I have to hear from me—when my therapist suggested
this I was quite irritated and angry. I didn’t understand it because I didn’t think I could
do it. That is, until, the first time I did it. And even right now I lean back and forth slightly between
making this entry something private, or making sure anyone can read this. My growth might
strike you as ridiculous, but I’ve got to quit caring about that. See, you can put weight
to things—on purpose and on accident. And some things carry a weight we aren’t aware of
until we try to lift them, until we put them into our hands and try to step forward. That’s
the best way I can say it. No pivotal beam of sunlight found me instantly. No trumpets sounded.
But with my next step I believed it. You wouldn’t believe how many doorways one walks
through in a day, until you start counting.

I’m going to say it until I can’t see straight. Then I’m going to walk through some doorways
and say it some more. This isn’t for you, or for this, or for that. This is for me. In some ways,
this is for everything because sometimes one change can trigger a long line of necessary.