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Don't think, just write. That's what my thrapist said. Now here I sit a pad of paper before me, a tooth-marked pencil clutched in my nerve-wracked hands. I stare across the desk at Dr. Somby, and she smiles and gestures towards the pad.
"I can't help you unless you write," she says.
I look down at the paper again. I shouldn't be in therapy, I really don't need it. I'm a happily married man, I have three-children, I have a fuel-injected V8 with dual quads, and I have a problem.
Last week I had a nervous breakdown. In the middle of a heated argument with a defense attorney in court I snapped. I ran from the courtroom to my office on the second floor, and the next thing I remember is my wife asking me to come out from under my desk, that I was scaring her. Well I was scaring myself to.
I always thought that I was stable, I've never had any problems with pressure. I work a high stress job, I am an assistant district attorney. I help raise our children as best I can. My wife and I have had arguments, but we love each other just as much as we did when we got married seven years ago.
The morning had started as any other, I woke up to my alarm clock at 4:30 and rolled out of bed. I took my shower and got ready, just like always. My wife woke up at 5:30, and started getting ready for her job. The kids woke up at 6:00 to get ready for school. All in all, it was a normal morning.
At 6:07 it all went to hell. First the kids started fighting and when I tried to separate them, they still wouldn't calm down. Kate hit Zack and he started crying, when my wife and I finally got them separated, I was already running late, it was now 6:32.
As I reached the freeway, I hit the gridlock. I heard on the radio that there had been a wreck involving a transfer truck, and that the road was closed off until the area could be cleared. I shrunk down in my seat and turned up the radio, to find that my station--the station that I had been listening to faithfully for three years, the station whose sticker adorned my car--had gone country. Seeing as how it was one of only two rock stations in town, I sighed and switched to the other to find that it too had gone country.
At this point I was late, my music was gone, and when I reached for the air-conditioner I found that I was going to be sweating to, because my air-conditioner was broken. 7:27, the traffic began to move, haltingly at first, and then at the unparalled pace of 7 miles per hour. At that rate I would arrive at my office at the courthouse in approximately in approximatly 4 hours.
And then, get this, some idiot honks his horn at me. At this point I am ready to kill people, but I control myself enough to get to work at 8:24 (the traffic finally sarted moving).
When I got to work, I found that Judge Randall was looking for me, and was not happy about me missing our appointment. The rest of my day didn't go much better, my secretary quit, a judge threw out my case against one suspect, and then I got into an argument with that defense attorney about whether or not our wire-tap tapes were admissable, and that's where I go blank.
I finish scribbling and lean back chewing on my pencil. Dr. Somby reads what I have written in silence.
"Well, am I crazy?" I ask her expactantly.
"What do you think?" She asks.
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