Photograph by David Billet of the bedroom in which I got sick. Credit: David Billet. In the five weeks leading up to my leukemia diagnosis, my body and cognitive faculties broke down along with my relationship with my therapist and psychoanalyst of five years.
The combination of school stress, the pandemic, and a rough breakup during finals week caused my mental health to decline and led my analyst to recommend a more rigorous four-times a week treatment. This relationship was like no other in my life. Through the analytic process, my history of difficulties in interpersonal, work, and family relationships took on structure and clarity. I felt like I had access to a rare avenue for genuine self-knowledge.
I am embarrassed that I idealized the relationship, and yet, how could I not, when the returns were so concrete? Each small breakthrough fed my conviction that a life with less suffering was within my reach. Before I was a cancer patient, most of the adversity I'd experienced in life was psychic.
Identifying as an analysand gave me stability and direction in life. We're not that malleable. This much: instead of going straight down the meridian, he will go five degrees, ten degreesβmaybe fifteen degrees if you push very hardβto the left or to the right, but no more than that.
That my analyst had a background in comparative literature strengthened our alliance. She was well-versed in discourses of race and racialization, having completed graduate work on the nexus of Freudian drive theory and Asian American literature. I have South Asian ancestry and returned to graduate school to study race and postcolonialism. I felt like I was able to connect to my analyst not only because we were both people of color, but also because we shared a vocabulary of concepts.
