I had to quit therapy to finally be ready for it.

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Dr. S and I tried to resolve the conflict. To me, she knew, dependency implied obligation and control, so she would not leave her or allow me to be near her. She didn’t disagree, but how was she supposed to rescue my desire to be held from my fear of being crushed, my desire for love from my desire to please? How was she supposed to find a way that wasn’t out? I experienced my imminent departure as a fact in my body, and any effort to explain it further filled me with overwhelming ennui. Dr. S was not a boring person, and I didn’t think he was either, so boredom made us mutually suspicious. Nevertheless, I felt loyal to my malaise, like the girl who rejects every doll, game, or outing, stubborn in the unhappy dignity of her disinterest.

Dr. S knew better than to pressure me to stay, but she didn’t live up to my fantasy of a final restorative session. I thought she wanted me to bless my departure. Instead, she spoke wistfully of all the work we could do if she kept coming back, as if the work we’d already done wasn’t enough. As I walked out of her office, tears blurred my vision, and the clouds over Central Park looked like faces pushing against the canvas. I had been afraid of disappointing Dr. S, and then I did. But the disappointment I sensed in her was different from the disappointment I so chronically worked to avoid with others. Together we had created a situation that I could abandon in favor of my own desire, however primitive, without recrimination.

It must be strange, for the analyst, to exercise so little control over her patients: after years of tenderness, we could walk out the door without looking back. And yet it is precisely this conscious relinquishment of control that makes the analyst different from the other people in our lives, in potentially transformative ways. Once I left, life quickly flooded the space where our sessions had been. I fell in love, I became a writer. I expected a punishment, meanwhile, which never came, and the stillness spread the guilt and shame of failure. I could finally feel the thrills of an independence that I didn’t have to justify by winning. Leaving Dr. S made it possible to imagine returning, both humbled and emboldened by our mutual ability to endure separation. To let him breathe.

I was only away for a little over a year, and when I came back to Dr. S, we saw each other once a week. Six years have passed, and our relationship is now one of the most trusting and mysterious in my life. I told him recently that I’m not sure what the analysis is for, or how and how much it has made me better. “You’re still so ambivalent about it,” observed Dr. S. But I don’t think that’s entirely true. I’m not ambivalent about my time with her: I know I want to be there, in the suspended circle of her attention. I am simply reluctant to articulate its purpose, especially in public, because analysis has become a refuge from the widespread demand that I use my time productively, or turn my life into a progress narrative for search committees, partners potentials or the pages of a magazine. In analysis, I am allowed to be insecure and without the right words. This time, I haven’t decided how long it should last. I am able to practice living without particular ends in mind, which is not the same, I have learned, as living without desires.

Lately I have been reading the Puerto Rican feminist Luisa Capetillo, especially her 1911 manifesto on free love, repeating one line like a mantra: “wanting is powerThe translation that I have translates it as “to want is to do”. But I keep thinking of other possibilities: “willing is power” or, more modestly, “willing is power”. Desire is the minimum condition for any true transformation. But desire cannot be demanded of us by others, or by the voices of others that we have internalized to discipline our own spirits. We all have to figure out how to want the help we need. The choices we make about how to achieve it matter less than how close we can feel to the force of our choice.