David Rakoff on terminating his relationship with his longtime therapist

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Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a
relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic
melancholia and loneliness – a  grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest
Self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib
comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet
loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and
dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty
of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting
the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair – then this
confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another
mark, except this time it was the one person you’d hoped might be immune to
your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on “adorable,”
even though you’d been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded
concentration from day one … well, it conjures us feelings that are best
described as mixed, to say the least.