Today, in Therapy: The Story
As you may very well know by now, my first book is in its final stages of production, and will be hitting the market very soon. I hope to have a preorder link available in the next couple of months. But what is this book about anyways? What is Today, in Therapy?
This has been my passion project for the past five years now. It has been put through the fires of rewriting, rearranging, and outright deleting several times since I first established its concept. Today, in Therapy is the sum of long nights, early mornings, roadblocks, and epiphanies. It has been a very large part of my life for the past several years. As we near the final product it has been my driving force and motivation.
Today, in Therapy started as a series of poems about mental health, especially mental health in men, that were broken down into sections. These sections were clearly labeled and had their own specific tone. These clearly divided sections sought to depict the various stages of collapsing mental health and its subsequent rebuilding. However, one thing became very clear to me after yet another frustrating round of editing which left me unsatisfied with the project as a whole:
Breaking and mending have no distinct waypoints. There are no boundaries and benchmarks. There is only the slow flow of progress like the shifting of tides.
If I wanted to create a depiction of the process of healing I had to do it right. Healing is a journey with twists and turns and bumps and setbacks. There are no save points, or boundary lines. The journey of healing is a constant, shifting process and that is exactly how I needed to depict it. This was the true turning point in this undertaking, my most important realization.
My next order of business was to delete the section headers, print the pages, and delete the entire document from my computer…. For the seventh time. It felt like a massive setback again but it was the best launching point to start from yet. Over the next few days and weeks I spent my free time and energy with those pages scattered across the floor of my office. I spent countless hours arranging and rearranging the order and flow of the individual poems before I had an order that flowed well from one piece to the next. During this process I removed close to a third of the draft altogether.
During the next few months I slowly added a few poems here and there into the shuffle that was developing a thick layer of dust on my desk. Life went on, my day job grew busy, and I had a few major health events happen. Progress was excruciatingly slow but I also hadn’t thought much of it, at least not until an old friend moved to my city. It was on our first night hanging out after he moved that he asked if I had been writing lately. This friend and I used to work and teach together at a summer camp for young writers. His question sparked a series of meetings to test read for me, and to give some good feedback. That was almost a year ago today.
Over the past year I have had multiple beta readers and editors give me their feedback on the project and today I am very happy to say that the project is finished. After some final design choices and clerical matters are settled I can finally share this project with you.
- ST
