mental health

Anxious Seeks Canine is a memoir blog series about a gay man living with Asperger’s, mental illness, and the relationships that may very well be fueling it. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Except for the dog. Here’s part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18. Subscribe for more posts.

I

Was it strange that I staked so much on a Halloween dog pageant? Yes. Ridiculous, even? Certainly. Still, knowing this, I couldn’t shake the feeling that victory had been snatched from my grasp. 

Upon returning home, I slumped into a chair, dropping a bag of sample goodies I’d collected from a pageant vendor beside me.

Cash sniffed at the bag. Muttering, I pulled out the treat packet.

“Fine,” I said, scattering pieces onto the floor. “You win.”

Something glinted at the bottom of the bag. Yanking out the Oscar-style participation trophy I’d been handed upon pageant signup, I glowered at its faux-gold finish and the seams where the front and back segments connected.

Cash got a trophy, and what did I get? Nothing. Where was the recognition of the strides I’d made in orchestrating Cash’s makeover? It was just plain unfair.

Having polished off the treats, Cash now looked up at me, expectant.

“Haz more?”

“You know,” I began, “maybe other people are taken in by your puppy charm. But let’s be clear: I know you just for what you are. Now take that dress off.”

Not understanding, Cash planted his paws on my knee.

“More please.”

Flinging the trophy away, I lifted Cash’s paws over his head and yanked off the garment. Then I strapped on his anxiety vest and left him to stare placidly at the wall.

My disappointment aside, Cash’s behavior at the dog pageant was yet another example of the steep difficulty gradient I faced as his owner. 

Further trips to the dog park were now ruled out. But long after we had stopped going, Cash would continue to yip during car rides. 

The noise was so shrill, so earsplitting, I half-wondered if my dog might be standing on an electrified grid. Fear, excitement, or a mixture of both – I was never quite sure what emotions prompted Cash’s meltdowns, and with my diploma in dog interpretation still pending, I was at a loss.

Anxiety pervaded almost every other activity. Cash refused orders to stay out of the kitchen while I was cooking. A greedy little opportunist, he would pounce the instant a potato peel hit the floor, only to be plagued by intestinal strife the following day.

Putting him behind a baby gate only sparked whining, as Cash grappled with the horrifying reality of me not being within immediate view.

Looking at our common afflictions, you might be inclined to believe that cosmic gears were grinding away, ensuring that the stars aligned to bring us together. 

For who better was there then I to understand my poor dog’s stress, his IBS, his ever-growing needs? 

And yet somehow, I knew the cosmos had made a critical error in its calculations. 

II

If you’ve had a troubled childhood, there’s a chance that becoming yourself a parent can bring a lot of those experiences bubbling back up.

Latent feelings of unworthiness are evoked, and old defences deployed. I was like a swimmer, battered by waves of self-criticism, buoyed only by water wings of self-justification.

When faced by Cash’s neediness and my seeming inability to address it, I simply told myself that I was “doing the best I could”. 

“I always made sure you had clothes on your back,” went my own mother’s exonerations. “There was always food on the table. You never went hungry.”

And what more could any growing child possibly require? What’s that you say? Patience? Compassion?

My parents after all lived not in a world of wishy-washy feelings, but hard necessity. When I was 16, I complained to them of symptoms stemming from my then-undiagnosed IBS.

My mother made multiple appointments to see doctors and specialists. But when the food allergy tests came up negative, she and my father threw up their hands in defeat.

“You’re just being a hypochondriac,” went their refrain. It may as well have become my middle name, for the number of times it was used.

Only a decade later would I recognize my folk’s evasion for what it was. My asking for help, the revealing of my vulnerability, had been a request for them to in turn be vulnerable. 

Saddled with worries of their own, mom and dad had sidestepped the implicit request for recognition, falling back instead on invalidation.

Not feeling heard, or at worst, feeling actively ignored, taught me to bury my problems, a classic stratagem for the aspiring neurotic.

Now I was in possession of a child of my own, a creature who depended utterly upon me for my help. A dog who would not – could not – leave the parental home in search of healing, as I had done.

I had tried in my own way to remedy the situation, but now I felt like I had reached capacity; that the empathy well was running dry. 

How had I let it get to this point? Why, like the proverbial frog in boiling water, had I not sought escape sooner?

Trying to avert a descent down the convenient corkscrew of self-blame, followed by excuses, and still more blame, I took Cash for a walk.

Cash paused to pee on a clump of grass and was walking away when he yelped. 

Noticing he was limping, I bent down to study Cash’s trembling paw. He yelped again, struggling to escape my hold.

These were the cries, surely, of a dog being beaten with a plank of wood. The sound drew looks from pedestrians and drivers alike.

A pickup queuing at the traffic lights drew to one side.

“Everything okay?” came a vice. I looked up to see a man leaning over the driver’s side window. “Did he step in glass?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied.

“Need any help?” 

There were homeless people collapsed on the sidewalk, possibly unconscious, possibly dead, and yet no one stopped to check on them. Yet here was a perfect stranger, rushing to the aid of a dog with a sore paw.

“It’s all good,” I told the pickup driver. “Thank you, though.”

Probing the area between Cash’s toes, I discovered a single blade of dry grass. Within moments of its extraction, my dog was walking as if nothing at all had just happened.

A grunt of dismissal escaped me.

“Hypochondriac.”

III

The drama, however, was far from over. On the way back to the apartment, we stopped at a small park fronting directly on a busy road. 

Wanting to give Cash the freedom to explore, I unclipped his leash and stood ready to catch his collar, should he decide to suddenly bolt.

The fact I had anticipated such behavior from him should have been warning enough. While sniffing a bush, Cash’s ears went up and he turned, facing the road. In an instant was off, dashing past me and into traffic.

“Cash!” I screamed, staggering to the edge of the curb. But it was too late. He was already halfway across the road. “Go on, get hit then! See if I pay your vet bills.”

Part of me was already rationalizing it. If Cash died, wasn’t that technically natural selection in action?

“Bad!” I thought, slapping a mental wrist. These were thoughts entirely unworthy of a good dog owner. 

My resignation softened into relief when Cash arrived unscathed on the far side of the road. Relief that he wasn’t injured, but also relief that I felt relief in the first place. Apparently, I still had a conscience.

Of course, I would have felt bad if he died. And yet…even with Cash alive, I somehow always felt bad. Guilty; like my best efforts were never good enough. 

At last, I caught sight of Cash’s target: a short-set woman walking her two terriers. Cash immediately set himself to mounting one of them.

As I stepped out onto the road to follow, I knew then that maybe I was right; that what my dog required was something I was entirely incapable of providing.

IV

Dr. Kukosian’s decision to close her Koreatown practice had essentially been the nail in the coffin of our relationship.

But feeling in need of a therapist’s guidance more than ever, I decided to spend the following morning shrink-shopping. 

After a raft of calls spent trying to nail down a candidate who was both available and willing to take my insurance, I managed to book a single appointment with a therapist in Westwood.

Dr. Ihekweme’s practice was nestled in the corner of a third-floor high-rise, decorated in the Art Deco style, with brass fixtures and columns clad in imitation green marble.

He greeted me at the door to his single-room office with a luminous smile and a bouncy baritone.

Above Dr. Ihekweme’s desk hung an oil print of a duck pond hedged with bulrushes. A bland, if not welcome, change from Dr. Kukosian’s Christian iconography.

“So, how are you?” Dr. Ihekweme said, as I settled onto a couch. My reply was almost automatic.

“Well, thank you.”

“Really?” Dr. Ihekweme replied. “So why then did you ask to see me?”

Recognizing the puckish glimmer behind his spectacles, I broke into a smile. 

“Well, I’m struggling with a few issues right now,” I said, and stopped. Dr. Ihekweme nodded encouragingly.

As this was our first meeting, I contented myself with a background sketch of my situation with Cash. Soon, however, words were gushing from me in a torrent, as I ping-ponged from present-day anxiety to ancient grievance.

It wasn’t enough that I was telling my therapist that my anxiety was monopolizing my life. Rather, I felt that the best way to convey what I was feeling would be to figuratively vomit it all over his lap.

“You’re giving me good information here,” Dr. Ihekweme said, when I had finally stopped to take a breath.

Was that a trace of surprise I heard in his voice? Surprise that I was able to pinpoint my problems so quickly and astutely? Or surprise that I was treating my own struggles in such an offhand manner? 

I was relating my life to Dr. Ihekweme in bullet points; treating the relationship as if it were mere relay between telegraph operators, clipped sentences and all.

“So,” Dr. Ihekweme said, visibly struggling to digest everything my words. “You said you decided to go part-time at work a year ago?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “The idea was to take a break, so I could transition careers.”

“From what you’re telling me,” Dr. Ihekweme began, “it doesn’t sound like you’ve been having much of a break. In fact, it sounds like you are juggling quite a lot.”

“I guess so,” I replied. “I just… I just don’t know how to exist outside a state of preoccupation.”

Dr. Ihekweme adjusted his collar.

“And how long has it been like this?” he asked. The answer rose almost automatically to my lips.

“Fifteen years.” Dr. Ihekweme’s eyes widened. “It started when I was a teen. My family kinda went to pieces. I was being bullied at school. My way of coping was by working.”

“So all these extra commitments you have taken on,” Dr. Ihekweme continued, “they have become a burden for you.” I nodded. “Plus, you have your dog to think about, also.” 

“Right,” I agreed. “I mean, I knew when I got Cash that he would require time and energy. Like any pet. But these days I feel like all I do is put out his fires. I’m feeling…” I searched, “…smothered. And guilty for feeling smothered.”

“Could we go back for a moment to what you said about your family?” Dr. Ihekweme said. I sighed. 

It was a request I should have seen coming. While speeding through my carousel of thumbnail sketches about my life, my therapist had been noting critical facts.

The details I provided, I imagined, were the stuff of which clinical breakthroughs are made. And yet in my previous sessions, during which I’d discussed such experiences at length, no such breakthrough had come knocking.

Still, Dr. Ihekweme had extended an invitation, and an RSVP was due. I would have to venture into the place from which I long shied; the abode of ancient demons; my wellspring of grief, and loss.

The very same wellspring that had ultimately given rise to my neurosis.

Anxious Seeks Canine continues with Part 15: ‘If only’.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

Anxious Seeks Canine is a memoir blog series about a gay man living with Asperger’s, mental illness, and the relationships that may very well be fueling it. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Except for the dog. Here’s part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18. Subscribe for more posts.

I

During my teen years, our home was transformed into a warzone rocked by sibling violence, theft, and drug use.

The one-two punch of my brother’s unruly behavior and growing financial pressures drove my dad into a state of sullen depression. 

Left to wrangle three unruly children, my mother had no choice but to assume the role of disciplinarian.

Did child-me wallow in victimhood? Or rather, did he meet her change of tack head-on?

You betcha.

When my mom withheld my allowance over some petty offense – failing to clean the house on her schedule, I believe it was – I waited ‘til her back was turned, then opened her purse, counted out the exact sum I was owed, and went on my merry way.

When I answered back, she struck me with a wooden spoon. Emboldened by the injustice of it all, I snatched this improvised weapon from her grasp, snapped it cleanly over one knee, and fled into the garden.

“Just you wait,” my mother called from the verandah. “When your father gets home…”

But when my dad’s car finally pulled into the drive, no punishment was forthcoming. The incident appeared to have been forgotten. Either that or my mother’s anger had dissipated, like the thunder that rattled our windows during Far North Queensland’s rainy season.

Later, during our weekly trip to the video rental store, I found a film about a girl so discontent with her upbringing that she resolves to return her mom to the “parent store”.

The film follows Little Miss Discontent’s adventures seeking a suitable replacement. Each candidate however turns out to be an extreme embodiment of some negative trait. 

While our hero might initially warm to one would-be replacement, sooner or later she would discover the woman was either a strict taskmaster, too emotionally needy or a neglectful deadbeat. 

Then all bets would be off, and the girl would go marching back to the store, dragging the latest unsuccessful candidate behind her. 

After more than a few of these sobering experiences, Little Miss Discontent accepted she was wrong for disposing of her biological mother and welcomed her home.

The filmmakers probably thought their viewers would reach the same conclusions as the protagonist had: that our parents, however imperfect, ultimately have our best interests at heart.

Perhaps they hoped we would understand that our folks are saddled with the difficult duty of striking a compromise between keeping us happy, and keeping our worst impulses in check.

What the producers did not count on, however, were people like me actually taking a liking to one of the film’s replacement moms: a young, New Age-type who could be persuaded into doing just about anything.

When summoned to the table for dinner, Little Miss Discontent complained about having to eat her broccoli.

Rather than rebuking her daughter, New Age Mom merely beamed.

“Well that’s perfectly fine with me,” went the reply.

The following morning, the girl advised New Age Mom that she would not be going to school.

New Age Mom was well within her rights to correct her daughter, yet all Little Miss Discontent received instead was a jolly stamp of approval.

As I saw it, New Age Mom represented the high-water mark of parenting. The perfect embodiment of unconditional love…and not the shirker of parental responsibility she actually was. 

Comparing my mother’s behavior to New Age Mom’s, I was frankly appalled. Being the perfect child I was, her treatment of me up to this point was a complete affront to reason.

When our next battle inevitably erupted, I brought out the heavy artillery.

“I don’t want you for a mother anymore!” I howled. “You’re mean and always angry. I wish there was a real parent store so I could trade you in.”

My mother’s only reaction was to sigh. 

“If only,” she said. As if being forced to stand in a storefront display would have been a blessed reprieve.

II

Reading this story now, I couldn’t blame you for thinking my childhood problems were just a hair shy of trite. 

Any audience member hearing this account on This Is Your Life I imagine would felt shortchanged. My story of struggle is entirely lacking in twists, significant transformations, and a redemptive finish.

Yet my mother’s put-uponness, when taken to the extreme, felt like a form of emotional neglect.

Pleas for protection from my brother for example went largely ignored. My being gay was treated as a “choice”, if not an expression of mental illness.

These subjects would become the later focus of my therapy, but right now, sitting in Dr. Ihekweme’s office on our first session together, I could only give him the CliffNotes version.

Leaning back in his chair, my therapist took stock. Whatever others might have made of my catalog of woes, Dr. Ihekweme seemed to find it all rather interesting.

“So,” I began, after a moment’s silence. “What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Dr. Ihekweme replied.

“As in, do you think…is there any hope for me?” Dr. Ihekweme laughed, in the gentle, disarming fashion that I would learn was his habit.

“This definitely sounds like something we can address,” he replied. “But maybe I should first tell you a little bit about how I work.”

“Okay…”

“I don’t believe in keeping people in therapy indefinitely,” Dr. Ihekweme continued. “Only as long as it takes for them to feel better. I want people to leave my office feeling able to overcome their challenges.”

Well, this was interesting. Most therapists I’d dealt with so far hadn’t seemed as solution-minded as Dr. Ihekweme. Rather than actively structuring our sessions, they had insisted merely on listening, nodding, and responding.

All the while, the panicked part of my brain – wanting to ensure my time spent on the therapist’s couch was time well-spent – had been seeking something more solid, direct, and proactive. Maybe I had at last found it.

“But I want you to know it may take time,” Dr. Ihekweme said.

“How long?” I prompted.

“Six months, maybe.” 

Six months? I wasn’t exactly expecting an overnight transformation, but surely there was some more efficient way to address my problems?

“Do you think you’ll be able to stick with therapy for that long?” Dr. Ihekweme said, after a moment.

“I guess?” I offered.

III

If I was a trauma victim, then my time on the couch was an E.R. intervention, and Dr. Ihekweme the nurse, triaging me with talk therapy.

Once he felt my trust had been earned, Dr. Ihekweme seeded our exchanges with insights and observations, delivered sometimes with a cheeky wink.

From out of our many conversations emerged a growing awareness about how Cash’s presence was triggering my latent shame issues.

During one trip to a dog cafe, he chewed his leash and raced out into the street. As I ran, panic-stricken after him, I was forced to concede – with great relief and no small amount of embarrassment – that my pooch was indeed averse to other canines. 

But in a dog-friendly city like Los Angeles, avoiding other pooches would be a difficult task.

Still, he needed exercise. Not being much of a runner, I decided to bring Cash along on my weekly hikes. Even assuming I was willing to ignore his barking fits en route to hiking spots, Cash still fell to mounting or fighting any dog he came across. 

Worse still, he refused to walk at the group’s pace. Once, while navigating a particularly narrow stretch of trail, Cash tried to overtake me, and in the process almost sent me plunging into the void. 

Corgis are bred for herding, and while that isn’t to say they can’t adjust to domestic life, I became convinced that maybe part of Cash’s problem was that he was being deprived of the opportunity to fulfill his cattle-chasing urges.

I might not have access to a farm, but even a house with a yard would have been better than my tiny studio. Given enough room to run, Cash might have been able to safely expend all his anxious energy.

Another fact I fell to considering was that Cash may simply have become his highly strung self by way of neglect or misfortune. There was also the possibility that maybe his condition was simply the result of a bad genetic dice roll.

According to one of Cash’s previous owners, he hadn’t played well with their other dogs. Neighbors had complained over Cash’s incessant barking whenever he was left on his own. 

The fact Cash had apparently been the last of his littermates to be adopted may have indicated his uneasy temperament from the start. Doubtless, Cash’s other owners – four in total, over eight months – had grappled with the same issues as me.

The experience I knew must have been traumatic for him, and so giving Cash up hadn’t ever seemed an option. One way or another, I was just going to have to stop my handwringing and make this work.

And yet for all my best, but imperfect, efforts to help Cash – for all the difficulties ignored and compensations made – I didn’t see his condition changing in the near future.

During one session,  Dr. Ihekweme replied to my concerns with a suggestion that caught me completely off guard. 

“What?” was all I could say. The words were so radical, they barely registered.

“Maybe,” he repeated carefully, “this is a relationship you need to let go of.”

Was my therapist really saying what I think he was saying? That I should surrender my dog?

Admittedly, it was an idea I had secretly toyed with since my first days as Cash’s owner. But for someone as driven and defined by achievement as me, to give Cash up represented not only the ultimate cruelty – but a crippling defeat. 

“I can’t,” I replied, finally.

Dr. Ihekweme looked thoughtful. 

“Are you sure?”

Anxious Seeks Canine continues with Part 16: ‘Such good care’.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

Anxious Seeks Canine is a memoir blog series about a gay man living with Asperger’s, mental illness, and the relationships that may very well be fueling it. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Except for the dog. Here’s part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18. Subscribe for more posts.

I

While my therapist Dr. Ihekweme didn’t immediately broach the subject of putting Cash up for adoption again, the idea lingered, and with it the promise of release.

Where once before I had fantasized about giving up my mother, I now caught myself contemplating letting go of my fur baby.

Maybe there was another dog out there, I told myself, a dog better suited to my temperament and lifestyle. Older, possibly more settled. 

But truth be told, these thoughts were just an escape hatch from the canine ownership equivalent of postpartum depression.

The neurochemical alchemy that normally made for a happy relationship had somehow gone awry.

All that remained now was my grudging sense of responsibility to soothe Cash’s separation anxiety – a responsibility I seemed to fail the minute I left my dog’s cone of vision.

Seeking temporary distraction in new extracurricular pursuits, I undertook Spanish classes. Having picked up the invaluable phrase, “Mi perro es muy dramatico”, and little else, I dropped out, enrolling instead in improv classes.

Following a lifetime of avoiding sports, I shed my athletic performance anxiety and joined an LGBTQI-friendly dodgeball league. 

Emboldened by these attempts at extroversion, I even began hosting regular weekend hikes and game parties.

Between work, Cash, and my ongoing commitments, it wasn’t long before I began to feel rather strung out. True to form, I was leaning into workaholism and achievement.

“Your stress levels have definitely spiked in the last few weeks,” Dr. Ihekweme noted during one session.

“I’m overcommitted,” I told him, “but I can’t stop myself. If I stop these activities, my self-worth…it’d just collapse.”

Knowing you’re behind the wheel is one thing. But recognizing you have the power to avert an oncoming vehicle was proving quite another.

“I encouraged you to start forming new habits,” Dr. Ihekweme said, “but maybe it’s time to – how do you say…” Dr. Ihekweme fumbled for the right idiom. “Maybe it’s time you ‘pumped the brakes’?”

Part of me desperately wanted to follow my therapist’s suggestion, while the other insisted on plowing blindly forward. 

There were after all things I wanted to do, a certain kind of person I wanted to be, and time was a-wastin’. Justifications, of course, for a pattern of behavior that had helped keep my covert depression at bay. 

Yet the pain I had never truly owned as my own – had kept on indefinite layaway – remained, waiting to come home.

Sooner or later, something would have to give. And it was not, as it turned out, my packed schedule, but my knee.

II

If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I am not a particularly athletic person. Sure, I’ll go for a run around the block or take half a day off to hike, but that’s about as strenuous as my exercise regimen ever gets.

Nor am I a particularly outstanding team player. If given a choice between, say, board games with strangers, or locking away in my room with a good book, the book almost always wins out.

Loathe as I am to admit it, my autistic need for control and routines has earned me the unofficial qualification of “Captain Killjoy”.

After a lifetime of being singled out in Red Rover, I came to view dodgeball as a long-awaited chance to defy my “easy pickings” status.

A natural deficit in what the experts call proprioception – a sense of one’s body in space – has meant I can be rather uncoordinated. Yet on the courts, I ducked, pivoted, and leaped with the best of them.

Try though I might though, my body didn’t maneuver itself in the ways it was supposed to. My core muscles failed to engage, leading me to twist and bend at odd angles.

More often than not, throwing a ball strained my shoulder and threatening to dislocate it. But emboldened by small successes, I kept at it.

During one particularly heated game, I raced over to recover a ball and saw a player in the opposing team preparing to snipe me from afar. 

Halfway into a squat, I tried to throw myself away from the projected trajectory of the ball. That was when I felt something disconnect in my right knee. 

The leg gave out, leaving me sprawled on the court, frantically signaling for a time out.

After friends helped me off the court, I limped in the wings of the adjacent stage, working the joint. The whole area had become big twinge of pain.

Just a temporary dislocation, I told myself. In a few weeks, I’d be more than good.

Another player in this situation might have headed home to rest and elevate the injury. Instead, I stuffed a knee sock with instant ice packs and hobbled straight back out to court.

But over the coming weeks, my knee joint wobbled with increasing frequency. This was no mere dislocation, but something far worse.

MRI scans revealed I had torn the ACL, a ligament, as well as the surrounding meniscus cartilage.

A knee specialist recommended I undergo surgery. The downsides were a huge medical bill and somewhat limited mobility for the next 12 months. The alternative was no more dodgeball, and a risk of early-onset arthritis. 

Walking out of the specialist’s office, I felt my eyes well with hot, angry tears. I was going to be left temporarily handicapped.

A state my catastrophic thoughts treated as surely worse than death.

III

The terror of becoming disabled stemmed from a rather practical consideration: there was no one I could rely upon to help me.

This at least was what I told myself – a convenient cover for the fact I simply didn’t know how to ask for help.

Asking someone to take Cash out for his daily walks would, under normal conditions, have been inconvenient. But given his infamous anxiety and aggression issues, no one in their right mind would want to assume temporary custody of my dog.

My pet aside, being bedridden for days and homebound for weeks meant I’d have to finally slow down. Without the refuge of overachiever mania, I would be faced once more with the demons that had surfaced during my earlier illness.

When I explained my concerns to Dr. Ihekweme, he took a moment to respond.

“So you can’t ask anyone else to take care of Cash,” he began. “What are your other options?”

I stared. Was my therapist baiting me? He knew just as I did that my options were, at this point, singular. 

But having myself suffered abandonment by others because of my disability and my struggles with anxiety, could I really inflict the same upon another? 

“Putting Cash up for adoption…that would crush him,” I said. The sirens of shame were blaring in my ears.

“So what is the alternative?” Dr. Ihekweme reiterated.

Even supposing I found some temporary workaround post-surgery, lately I had had to give up on taking Cash outdoors. What he needed most right now was rehabilitation, something I had proven sorely incapable of providing.

“It seems this situation is a huge source of fear and concern for you,” Dr. Ihekweme added. I stopped short of replying.

“You don’t need to do anything right away,” he counseled. “But just think about it.”

And on the drive home, I did. To fob my pet off to someone else would, in my imagination, be taking “the easy way” out. But keeping Cash right now hardly seemed fair, either.

For months I’d felt like I was trapped in a deadlock: resentful of my responsibilities, but guilt-ridden about the idea of letting Cash go. 

With my knee in its current condition, the time had finally come for decisive action. 

IV

In the initial days after Cash’s adoption, he would yank incessantly on the lead when we walked to the point of choking himself. 

If I had expected my dog to walk placidly at my side, he would instead bolt in fits and spurts, jarring my arm. 

Compromise had taken the form of an extendable lead. In principle, it should have given Cash free reign to wander where he chose. In practice, it had meant my dog regularly tangled himself on lamp posts and fire hydrants.

One time, he wound himself around a tree, and when I tried to untwine the lead, Cash continued to walk around it, undermining my efforts.

My dog’s attempt to keep me in sight only had the effect of leaving him even more tangled. 

The situation might have been comedic, had I not been so exasperated. It was only later that I saw how perfectly it encapsulated our troubled dynamic.

Almost a year to the day of Cash’s adoption, I reached out to his most recent owner, Anja. We’d connected on Facebook, Anja occasionally commenting on photos of Cash, thanking me for taking “such good care” of him. 

“Right,” the inner critic had sneered. “How little she knows.”

Like any responsible owner, I imagine she’d felt some measure of guilt about the decision. Guilt, but also relief.

When I mentioned to Anja that I was looking to rehome Cash, she revealed that her other dog had recently died. His absence, she said, had left a hole in her life.

A Cash-sized hole, I asked?

Anja indicated that as circumstances had changed, she would indeed be willing to take Cash back.

My heart stuttered. For the past two hours, I had been drafting and redrafting an adoption advertisement for Cash…and failing to make a convincing pitch.

“Insanely cute but high-maintenance,” my descriptions had more or less run. “Does not play well with other dogs. Refuses to be left alone for any period of time. Will not walk on a lead. Hazard ahead.”

Here, at last, as an out. Cash had previously lived with Anja, so there was an element of familiarity. A re-adoption seemed a far kinder fate than dumping my dog upon some unsuspecting stranger.

Anja’s offer hovered on my computer screen, unacknowledged, for an hour a two. Finally, I screwed up my courage and did the unthinkable. I said “yes”.

Anxious Seeks Canine continues with Part 17: ‘How do you stop?’.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

Anxious Seeks Canine is a memoir blog series about a gay man living with Asperger’s, mental illness, and the relationships that may very well be fueling it. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Except for the dog. Here’s part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18. Subscribe for more posts.

I

A date had been set: in one week’s time, I would be handing Cash back to his previous owner.

Perhaps the responsible thing would have been to return him to the adoption agency which had entrusted him into my care. But to do so would have required multiple rounds of meet-and-greets with potential owners in Los Angeles’ eastside.

It would mean, in essence, physically fronting up to the fact that I had more or less failed my dog.

But with freedom now in my sights, I found myself abandoning all attempts at “managing” Cash and his many aversions.

Of course, this is not to say I didn’t make more than a few last-ditch attempts at salvaging our relationship.

The first involved doubling our discipline training time; the second saw me holding back Cash’s food until set times each day. The idea here being both would bring him into line.

Perhaps sensing my withdrawal – the release of almost a year’s worth of tension – Cash grew somewhat uncertain, and perhaps a smidge more obedient.

At the suggestion of a friend, I purchased a no-pull lead. The moment I fitted it around Cash’s muzzle, the transfer of power was more or less complete.

Suddenly, I was no longer a slave to my dog’s impulses. Cash walked where I wanted, and moreover, at my pace. 

But this change, however welcome, was not enough to tip the balance. My mind had already been made up. 

Where before I had held off on employing anti-anxiety medication, come the morning of Cash’s readoption, I didn’t waver.

Squishing a fragment of the pill into a spoon of peanut butter, I offered to Cash. He devoured the snack with relish, smacking his chops.

Half an hour later, he was in a daze, climbing calmly into the backseat of my car. Rather than strangling himself with the belt, as was his habit, my dog instead sat silent and unmoving through the entire car drive.

The site of my and Anja’s meeting was to be a park in Pasadena. After parking and feeding the meter, I walked to the agreed spot, dragging Cash –barking and lunging at squirrels all the while – behind me.

Onwards I marched, staunch in the understanding this was the last time I’d witness such melodramatics.

II

Anja’s silvery head of hair signaled her presence at a nearby park bench.

Seeing me, she gave a smile and wave, and we exchanged a hug.

“So just so you know, Cash is super anxious,” I said as I sat, pulling my still struggling dog up onto my lap.

“I can see that,” Anja laughed.

“He doesn’t really like other animals,” I explained. “And he can get pretty aggressive around other dogs.”

“That won’t be much of a problem,” Anja assured me. “He’s going to be spending most of his time at home, or in the yard.”

“Great,” I said. “He’s got a lot of energy, so the more you can play with him, the better.”

“I’m retired, so I’ll have plenty of time.”

“Also, it’ll help if you read this.” I handed Anja a three-page guide I had prepared a day earlier.

It covered everything from Cash’s training regimen to his feeding habits, containing an exhaustive list of “don’ts”, from the cautionary (“dog parks will send him ballistic”), to the seemingly contradictory (“letting Cash sit on your lap only makes his anxiety worse”), to the gruesome (“expect diarrhea”).

“This is quite a lot,” Anja said, looking over the printout.

“I know,” I apologized. “Cash himself is quite a lot.”

Anja absorbed this with a magnanimous nod. Then came the subject that I knew I must broach, one I sensed might draw a negative response.

“Once he’s settled in,” I began, “would you be okay with me coming to visit him? Just to see how he’s doing.”

“Of course!” Anja beamed. Perhaps seeing the pain in my expression, she added: “As far as I’m concerned, you’ll always be his daddy.”

My guilt thus appeased, I proposed transforming Cash’s bed and various other belongings to her trunk.

Afterward, I got Cash secured in the backseat, bending down to offer a farewell.

“Okay, Cash,” I said. “I’m leaving now. Like, forever.”

Cash didn’t seem altogether that interested in this bombshell revelation; didn’t so much as look me in the eye. When the sense of impending loss did not hit me, I kissed him on the forehead and shut the door.

Only then did Cash sit up, peering at me through the glass in what I guessed was his first inkling of abandonment.

Clutching Anja’s reassurances to me, I drove home in silence. I’d been dreading this whole event for weeks, and now, at last, it was over. 

III

The moment I got through the door to my apartment, I began to bawl, great gusty sobs drawn up from the pit of my being.

Suddenly no longer able to repress my emotions I had been keeping at bay for weeks, months, and years, I let them run unchecked. 

The loss of childhood pets, schoolyard bullying, the breakdown of my family – all of the suffering and grief I’d never felt safe feeling, let alone expressing, was now given vent.

Engulfed, I crawled into bed, pulled up the covers, and wailed into my pillow. Then came questions to an apparently merciless god, questions that would surely have done my angsty teen self proud. 

“Why?” I cried. “Why do I always lose everything I love? Why must I suffer like this? I’m begging you, just tell me. Please.”

From out of my sobs came the realization that I had indeed loved Cash; had loved him in the only broken way I’d known how to. Long after these animal noises had dissipated, that realization remained, an abiding truth.

For all the hardships, it was hard to dismiss the little brilliant moments in between, bonding over tricks, sharing hikes, a road trip to Three Rivers. 

In these moments, Cash and I had both been at our happiest. Where he had felt safety and a sense of purpose, I had felt relief and pride in the progress we’d made together.

Part of me wanted to silver-lining the ultimate outcome. Cash had now been granted the benefit of a new beginning, and I the chance to focus on the career change to which I’d been pinning all my hopes.

But without a dog to tend to, I found myself relinquishing busyness as a state of existence. Depression hit like an eighteen-wheeler, and I went down, reduced to a quivering, helpless mess.

When I was finally able to pull myself together, days later, I was walking in a slow, crooked way, my body right-angled as if it were trying to shrink from invisible blows.

Seeing the signal fires of my distress, my therapist summoned me to an emergency session.

IV

“How do you stop?” I asked from where I sat on Dr. Ihekweme’s couch, a blanket draped over my knees.

How, indeed, when for years your idea of survival was little more than blind forward momentum? 

Dr. Ihekweme’s eyes seemed to turn inward as he considered my question. After a moment, they resumed focus. 

“Tea?” came the gentle offer. I nodded.

Dr. Ihekweme fixed me a mug of vanilla rooibos, chewing all the while over my inquiry.

“It seems,” he said, handing me the mug, “that there is another question behind the question.”

Eerie, this intuiting of my thoughts. Dr. Ihekweme perched on the arm of his chair.

“Your way of surviving, your workaholism, has failed you,” he noted. “You are at a crossroads now. You want to know what the alternatives are.”

He was right. Over the course of our therapy, I had pushed Dr. Ihekweme for diagnoses and treatments, and he’d held off. 

His duty, as he saw it, was to be a soft landing for painful feelings.

What my therapist wanted was to wean me off dysfunction; to gently coax me into surrendering black-and-white thinking and self-fulfilling prophecies; to teach me to accept life’s many ambiguities.

For all my recognition of the suffering I had experienced, I hadn’t quite been ready to process it all. Clear answers and tangible solutions were demanded, when what the situation really called for was mental breathing room.

But with Cash gone, and me beholden to another sort of black-eyed dog entirely, I could at least see the futility of quick-fix solutions. And yet…

“I just need this depression to be over,” I said.

“The depression is just a symptom,” Dr. Ihekweme reminded me. “It is the same with your anxiety.”

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life running,” I clarified.

“You want peace of mind,” my therapist added, and I knew what he was going to say next.

“… You’re going to tell me I need to meditate, aren’t you?”

A smile touched the doctor’s lips. My complaints about mindfulness weren’t exactly unknown to him.

“Well,” he began, “as you said yourself, that didn’t work for you before.”

But now?

Anxious Seeks Canine continues with Part 18: ‘It’s not his fault’.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

Anxious Seeks Canine is a memoir blog series about a gay man living with Asperger’s, mental illness, and the relationships that may very well be fueling it. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Except for the dog. Here’s part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18. Subscribe for more posts.

I

“I guess I am wondering,” Dr. Ihekweme began, “if you were biting off more than you could chew?”

My head dipped in a grudging nod.

The first time I had tried meditation, I’d sat for a whole 45 minutes, ramrod straight…but wriggling all the same.

“It seemed pretty reasonable at the time,” I bleated.

“Maybe,” Dr. Ihekweme began, “you could try 15 or 20 instead? Just to start with.”

“Don’t you understand?” I wanted to cry. “That would be conceding defeat!”

My perfectionism after all refused to settle for anything short of, well, perfect.

My phone buzzed on the sofa cushion beside me. Glancing down, I saw a photo appear of Cash on some leafy path, mid-walk. He looked, dare I say, happy.

“Sorry,” I said, brandishing the phone for my therapist’s benefit. “It’s Cash’s new owner.”

“Everything okay?” Dr. Ihekweme asked.

“I think so,” I offered.

One week on from his re-adoption, Cash’s old/new owner Anja had reassured me that he was settling in just fine. To believe otherwise, of course, meant prodding a hornet’s nest of dormant guilt.

“I guess you’re right,” I eventually signed. “Forty-five minutes is kind of extreme.”

“Have you thought about doing a guided session?”

“Audio tracks almost always put me to sleep.” Dr. Ihekweme mulled over this, then got up to fish around in his desk drawer.

“Normally I would not do this,” he said, “but in your case, I would like to make a recommendation.”

My therapist brought out a bundle of papers.

“I want you to try this meditation course,” he said, peeling off a pamphlet and offering it to me. “It’s subscription-based, you pay once and they’ll send you a new lesson in the mail every week for a year.”

For the first time since starting treatment, I found myself questioning Dr. Ihekweme’s judgment. The most guided meditations required were an attentional sliver…and yet still I struggled.

And now my therapist was suggesting I take an entire course?

Fending off incredulity, I studied the pamphlet, bracing myself for the spoiled-milk whiff of a pyramid scheme.

“This course will help you build a meditation practice step by step,” Dr. Ihekweme explained. “You choose the pace.”

“You’ve done it already? The course, I mean.”

“I’ve been following these classes for years,” Dr. Ihekweme confessed.

“And do they work?” He grinned at bluntness of my question.

“Do they work? Well, let’s just days that some days I wake up in a state of joy and gratitude.”

A state of joy and gratitude? It was almost enough to make me dry-retch.

But given I was handing cash over to my therapist week in and week out, the very least I could do was take a recommendation.

II

The pamphlet remained tucked in my jacket pocket, temporarily forgotten, for some days afterward. 

When I dug it out again, it was less out of a sense of obligation than out of growing desperation.

Even with Cash gone, my stress levels remained as high as ever. Whatever I had been doing so far to manage it, it clearly was not working.

Suspending my skepticism, I paid a nominal fee and signed up for a year’s worth of lessons. 

A few weeks later I clawed back my commitments and peeled open a newly arrived booklet. What I found inside were refreshingly simple instructions, couched in beautiful anecdotes and symbolism.

When the second packet arrived in the mail a short while later, I devoured its contents in under an hour.

By the third lesson, I’d gone from eye-rolling cynic to Kool-Aid zealot, from 15-minute daily meditation sessions to 30-minute sessions three times a day.

The depression receded, replaced first by a vague sense of wellbeing, then instances of boundless optimism. 

With Dr. Ihekweme’s guidance, I found myself more and more able to achieve a birds-eye view of my own suffering.

The inner critic who had presided, despot-like, over my life, was now being shown the door. And as his hold on me loosened, so too did mine on the metastasizing perfectionism and workaholism that had long propped up my self-worth.

This is not to imply, of course, that either completely went away. Rather, they lingered like Cash’s carpet stains: unsightly – but valuable – reminders.

Left unchecked, mental illness had twined its creepers around my thoughts, thrusting its roots into the bedrock of my personhood. 

But where I had once lived in terror that I might not ever be able to extricate myself, I was slowly accepting that, one way or another, I was going to be okay. 

The deciding factor of okayness, being – of all things – my willingness to accept its possibility; to let the vessel of my being calmly ride the peaks and troughs of life’s uncertain seas.

For years I had shambled through life, dragging shame and despair in my wake like a ball and chain.

Yet in learning to offer myself the acknowledgment, the affirmation, the acceptance I had been denied, I was suddenly able to shuck the toxic, constricting narratives of my past like an outgrown skin.

III

But smooth sailing was no more a guarantee for me than it was for Cash. About a month after his rehoming, Anja called in a state of exasperation.

“He’s just too needy,” she said. “He’s constantly underfoot. He refuses to be separated from me. And he barks at every visitor!”

“You’re telling me,” I wanted to say, but I held my tongue.

“I know it’s not his fault,” Anja continued, “but I can’t help but feel angry at him.”

Anja’s litany of complaints mirrored my own, and yet I was still surprised. Surely her prior experience with Cash surely should have told her what she was in for.

Even with all her years’ experience as a dog owner, Anja had not felt prepared for the stifling possessiveness that had followed Cash’s re-adoption.

“… Do you know anyone who might want him?” she asked.

And there it was. My decision to rehome Cash had ended in disaster.

Where before I had suggested visiting Anja to see Cash, I found myself now putting these plans on hold. Seeing me again could create false expectations.

Offering to temporarily house Cash until a suitable replacement owner had been located thus was out of the question.

The best option available now was to do what I had previously refused to: return Cash to the adoption agency.

Days after Anja dropped him off, I got a call from an employee.

“We just want to know why you didn’t return Cash to us directly,” she said, her voice a few degrees south of zero.

The woman clearly didn’t understand what I did: that the return window had long since closed.

Crude as this analogy might seem, having refused to return Cash while he was still within some imaginary warranty period, what right had I do so now?

Still, I humored the inquiry, even offering to send the woman my three-page guide. Radio silence followed, all my emails to the agency about Cash’s wellbeing going unanswered. 

The hammer of judgment, it seemed, had fallen, and I charged in absentia with dereliction of duty. 

And so what. Only I knew the lengths to which I had gone. No explanation was demanded, nor needed.

The best I could hope for now was that my erstwhile pet was this much closer to finding his forever home.

IV

The day I’d adopted Cash, the agency had given me a framed photograph of the two of us posing in front of their office.

The photographer had captured me holding a somewhat confused-looking Cash in a half-hug, less an act of spontaneous affection than an attempt to stop him running away.

At the time, I saw this photo as a promise of future happiness. Only later would I recognize it as an ultimate representation of the anxiety that tainted our relationship.

Up until the day I’d surrendered Cash, that photo had rested on my mantelpiece. Unable to deal with the feelings it evoked, I had packed it and every other reminder of our time together away.

Half a year later, post-knee-surgery, I found myself digging under my bed and rediscovering the box of forbidden mementos: a dirty leash, a gnawed chew toy, a polka dot dress.

And I found myself wondering, did Cash still remember me? Did he think of me with sadness, as I often did him? Or with joy?

As with my ex Derrick before, I had found myself grieving the relationship well before the official end date. My rocky passage through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance might have been avoided completely, had I found a surefire treatment for Cash’s anxiety.

Shoulda coulda woulda. The grief resurged then, but it was not bottomless, nor as complicated by doubt as I had expected.

Sometimes when entering a room, I had found my dog sprawled on his back, feet in the air, the very picture of a poisoning victim. 

My first thought would be a tongue-in-cheek: “Finally, the little nuisance is dead”. But of course, he would just be sleeping, as he often did, contorted like some figure in a Picasso painting.

Later I would look back at photos of him in these various positions and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Then I would miss him; miss how he would jut his snout out from beneath the desk, peering up at me in a silent request to “sit on daddy, please”.

What I did not miss, however, was the incessant barking, the separation anxiety, and the clashes with other dogs. Remembering these traits was like having someone hold smelling salts to my nose. 

In a hot second, I’d go from the dreamy recollection to bolt upright and sober. Off came the rose-tinted spectacles, and down the heel of practicality, sending little pieces of nostalgia-glass flying.

As time went by, I found myself swinging less and less between these poles, settling instead on a comfortable in-between.

It was quite possible, I realized, to both miss something and be relieved by its absence. Entertaining both feelings did not necessarily mean I had to be engulfed – or condemned – by them.

Parting ways with Cash at the time had not been a bad decision. In fact, it had seemed the only decision. 

Too caught up in my own dysfunction, I had been in no position to address Cash’s own. As time went by, it had become apparent that the question was not how I was failing him, but rather how I was failing myself.

When I removed the box from under my bed, I discovered two other things that I had, until now, forgotten about entirely.

The first was a whiteboard, caked with dust, carpet fluff, and dog hair.

On it was scrawled a list of dreams and goals, most of which had been either scraped or wiped off during its passage out of Derrick’s storage shed.

Of the few items that remained, one stood out: “Relax and give yourself time to just ‘be’.”

For a year-and-a-half, I had aspired to a happier, more wholesome life. Instead, I’d found distraction, endured loss, and sought release. 

Now, I had returned to that same aspiration, the whiteboard sitting before me posing an open challenge.

But there was the second item besides the whiteboard still to consider: Cash’s anxiety vest.

What had motivated me to first buy it was evidence that the deep pressure such vests provided could soothe anxious canines. The same principle had also applied to humans.

But buying Cash his vest, it had never occurred to me that all along I might have been equally served by wearing one.

Opening a browser tab, I hootfooted it over to Amazon, and minutes later had a human-sized compression vest on order.

The similarities that first drew Cash and I together may have ultimately forced us apart. But they also brought into focus the irony of my intentions: namely, that the help I’d tried to give my dog was ultimately the help I myself had most needed.

This post concludes Anxious Seeks Canine.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com