It is the
terrible year of COVID and in my 25 years of being in the field, I have never
experienced a greater demand for mental health services. My father had asked
for some legal documents to be notarized, and then to get something called an
apostille. I had never heard of an apostille before, but it turns out
that it is a form of authentication that is issued by the Secretary of the
Commonwealth that verifies the authenticity of a document, including the
verification that the notary who notarized the original document was
legitimate. It was with a lot of maneuvering that I was able to free up the two
hours from work that I would need to go to the State Department offices to get
the apostille.
I chugged my
iced coffee and headed down, documents in hand, and arrived at the John W.
McCormack State Office Building located at 1 Ashburton Place in Boston. Earlier
in the day, I had been on zoom for my morning calls, and when I stepped out,
noticing that it was colder than I expected, took off my shirt and put on a
zippered sweatshirt. On arrival at the security desk at the John W. McCormack
State Office Building, I handed in my phone and took off my belt before I
headed for the scanner.
“You’ve got to
take off ya sweatah,” said the officer in that distinct Boston accent.
“Ok,” I said,
“but I’m not wearing anything underneath.” I imagined the experience of what
that might be for the people waiting in line behind me. He shook his head and
waved me through the scanner.
Arriving at the
17th floor, I was first in line. This looked promising. The person
at the desk looked at the documents and told me that they had not been
correctly notarized and that I could either take them back or go to a local
bank to get them redone. I had waited for so long that I decided to go to the
bank. I had time before I had to return to work to run a group.
On getting to
the bank, I noticed that the coffee had started to take its toll and that I
needed to pee. The bank officer kindly offered to notarize the documents but
informed me that, due to covid restrictions, the bathrooms were not open to the
public. After notarizing the new documents, I realized that the ones that my
father’s lawyer had sent were different from the original ones and that it was
unlikely that the new ones would be valid because they were missing my middle
name. No problem, I would call my father.
It was at that
precise moment that the speaker on my iPhone 7 died. I could neither make
outgoing calls nor receive incoming ones. I could text, but that was all. My
dad, who lives in Cape Town, rarely texts and would only have answered his
phone had I called, but there was no way for me to make the call. I had to get
back to work but could not call to say that my phone was down. I decided to
reboot the phone to its original factory settings. It restarted, but the phone
still did not work. It was OK though. I had two hours to get my group.
I thanked the
bank officer and now the need to pee was significant. It got worse. It had
started to rain. I had no raincoat and the drip, drip, drip of the rain made
the urge even worse. Glory! A Starbucks in sight! No luck. Bathroom closed. A
Dunkin’ Donuts! Same problem. Covid restrictions. I was in the middle of a
highly secure government building area with lots of cameras, otherwise, I would
have found some obscure wall, but there was no obscurity. When the urge to pee
is so strong, everything is miserable, and the stronger the urge, the greater
the misery. Drip, drip, drip, and the iPhone isn’t working and it’s running out
of battery and the documents are all wrong and I need to pee!
I got to the
parking lot and thought, ‘I am just going to go next to the car’. Security
cameras everywhere. Images of me peeing on the front page of the Boston Globe
flashed before me. Harvard psychiatrist arrested for disorderly conduct.
Maybe I should just go back into the rain, get soaked, and just pee in my
pants?
I was
squirming. It looked like I was doing some bizarre cross-legged version of the
macarena and a tango combined. I went to the ticket office where the attendant,
clearly recognizing a fellow human in deep distress, allowed me into the staff
bathroom. Words cannot capture the joy, so I won’t even try to describe the
sensation of relief! I texted the group co-leader to say that I was on my
way. “I’m in group now,” she texted back. I looked down at my phone. It was an
hour early, reset to daylight savings time. My schedule was off by an hour.
Emotional and
physical distress narrows our focus, and when severe enough, become the singular
point of our attention. It is easy to judge people for being rude, for not
having foresight, or for behaving badly… but you never know. Maybe they just
need to pee.
