Needing to Pee

 

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 17^th 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.