I originally was supposed to meet with my therapist this week, but given that my cough seems to have gotten worse and my ribs are still in a lot of pain, I decided to cancel. I let her know over text that I wasn’t able to come two days in advance and the reason was due to my whooping cough. No response. I thought that maybe the text didn’t go through for some reason, so I proceeded to write her an email with the same message. She simply responds that she received my text and my email and to feel better. No response regarding the whooping cough or my pain – just a matter of fact confirmation of receipt and a generic “get well soon” message. I’ll be honest. I was annoyed.

I’ve been seeing her for over two years. For about the first six months, I was seeing her for free as part of the program she was in at the hospital I was referred to. Each session was an hour. Then, when she started at her private practice, she gave me a 50 percent discount given our prior relationship, so I had to start paying to see her, which was understandable. Yet somehow, my sessions got shortened to 50 minutes, which I could sense based on how she’d speed up the sessions and end them a bit more abruptly than before. And it got confirmed on my pay statements.

Now, I’m recovering from whooping cough in the midst of all my phlegm build up and my bruised ribs, and I get zero sympathy from her or even a response to my text messages. This is what they say about therapists in New York. They have the guise of caring, but maybe they really don’t at all and are simply more motivated by money. If I were to die tomorrow, would she care? Well, she wouldn’t have to because if I die, she doesn’t get any more payments from me. I thought that maybe after two years that she’d develop some sort of human feeling for me and actually care about me, but it certainly doesn’t seem so. So this just goes back to my original cynicism about the world: you can’t even pay people to care about you because even then, they still won’t. And if they try to show they do care, they will put in the minimal amount of effort and leave it at that.