I feel very blessed about the possibility of hearing your voices coming from all over the world. This is connection, containment, intimate sharing, and deep support in a harsh and uncertain time…
My thinking has been simpler, less developed. Yesterday morning, I did three sessions: one phone, two FaceTime. At the end, I was overwhelmed with emotion, struggling to hold myself together. My last patient had her own version of “I’m not accomplishing anything.” I realized that she is working so hard in unrecognized ways: caring for her ninety-four-year-old father when she just remarried a few months ago, needing to social distance from a beloved daughter who is coming to town, having the strength to do this, her own terror and needs for care, etc. The familiar storms that batter us now. I said to her simply…
Indulging the hope that we’ll be returning to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in person and in office in the not too distant future, I wonder what, if anything, I will take away from this new and enforced remote arrangement. Although by the end of the day, my eyes are dry and achy from staring at the screen…
Kate Angus’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Indiana Review, Court Green, Gulf Coast, The Atlantic´s online Object Lessons series, The Washington Post, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day feature. She is the recipient of an A Room of Her Own Foundation Orlando award and an Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Sozopol Seminar fellowship, as well as residencies from the BAU Institute, the Betsy Hotel’s Writer’s Room and Interlochen Arts Academy (writer in residence). Angus is the author of So Late to the Party (Negative Capability Books) and the founding editor of Augury Books. Born and raised in Michigan, she currently lives in New York.
