I’m certainly not the first person to say you can work and be around people all day and still feel isolated and alone. That’s one of the big motivations for why I started seeing a psychologist about five miles from where I lived.

   On first impression, I was uplifted by the therapist’s positive manner. He congratulated me for seeking help. I had done the right thing, he said, by signing up for counseling rather than sitting at home getting more depressed about my state of affairs. I also admired his ability to listen to what you were saying without interruption. 

   In order not to violate the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship, especially his, let’s call the therapist Sigmund since he said he had been trained in Freudian psychology. 

   Sigmund suggested after several of our sessions together that what would help greatly help me was making new friends. Since we were both single, he said, maybe I’d like to accompany him some night to a “singles” group where you played volleyball at a high school. After playing volleyball, some of these people got to know one another better through a few rounds of beer at a local bar. It turned out a few of these “singles” were secretly married and looking for a little “extra-curricular” activity.  

   After we became more acquainted with each other, Sigmund confided in me that he too used to feel isolated, alienated, and insignificant. Now, he said, he was “getting out there” so he didn’t spend his weekends and nights all alone, which is easy to do when you don’t feel like talking to anybody. 

   Just hearing Sigmund talk about how he used to always be down and out made me feel better that somebody else was on my wavelength. I wouldn’t exactly call that schadenfreude–getting satisfaction from somebody’s misfortune. More like I knew I had come to the absolutely right person in sizing up my problems. Sigmund was an empathetic guy, but he didn’t beat around the bush when he said to feel better, I must commit myself to making a positive effort, even if I didn’t feel like it.

   It came to pass that the place where I was employed was defunded and I ended up standing on the unemployment line. Receiving those unemployment checks every two weeks paid for the basics. Except they were hardly sufficient to afford buying more than cheap furniture, such as a moldy third-hand sofa-bed from a discount store to furnish my spare efficiency apartment, where the rent had also risen.

   Being unemployed also meant I would become more isolated since I had no job where I was around people in a work setting. I knew that couldn’t be good for me. Yes, I could have signed up for temporary work. But if I did that, under the rules that were in place, I could jeopardize losing my unemployment benefits. 

   To the rescue came Sigmund, my psychologist and confidant. He suggested I discard my “ugly” sofa-bed into the local city dump, move in with him, and split the rent-controlled unbelievably cheap $105 a month rate for each of us at what he called his “elegant and charming” third-floor walk-up apartment “beautifully located” in the heart of the city. 

   Sigmund said he welcomed the idea that he longer would be living by himself. He’d have somebody to talk to whenever he felt he was getting too isolated. And vice-versa. 

   I had always looked up in admiration to professionals in the psychiatric field. Almost like Gods. Now I could see up close that Sigmund desired human companionship also. With the same flaws and needs as anybody else. 

   How could I turn down Sigmund’s wonderful invitation? I moved in without questioning what turned out to be barebones living arrangements for me. Such as the fact I had no bed to sleep on. I would need to lie on a mattress thrown on the floor until I found a job and could afford to buy a new bed. It occurred to me that by rooming with Sigmund, my therapist, his psychological analysis of me could continue non-stop 24/7. That whenever I needed on the spot counseling, he would be right on the scene at a moment’s notice.

   However, I had to put that idea to bed, even if I didn’t have one, because constantly talking about yourself might get tiring and repetitious for me, not to mention Sigmund.

   The apartment had several other problems I hadn’t noticed until after I moved in. Such as the stove’s pilot light kept flaming out at night which meant gas leaking from the oven might asphyxiate ourselves.
  The small apartment was already cramped and became even more congested when another of Sigmund’s patients, Rick, took up temporary residence by slapping down his mattress next to mine. The deal was for Rick to stay until Sigmund cured him of his clinical depression that would motivate him to find his own place to live. 

   My new housemate Rick said he was an aspiring writer, ready, like me, to work on his own new novel. He suggested that first we should both head to a nearby restaurant for breakfast that would provide stimulation and inspiration for writing.

   We executed the first part of the master plan beautifully. We could sit around and talk all morning about this and that since we had no real jobs. Talking about writing sure beat having to actually sit down and write.

   Sometimes, though, unforeseen events upset the greatest plans and stomachs. Little did Rick and I know that another of Sigmund’s depressed patients, Jessie, would turn us into a foursome by staying in the apartment temporarily until he could “get his head together” and found his own place to live.

   Jessie plopped down a mattress next to Rick’s after proclaiming that he too was a writer and would love to join us at the restaurant for early morning reflections on the meaning of life before getting down to business. Sigmund said Jesse was being allowed to stay for only a few days because he worried the small apartment was turning into a flophouse. Sigmund admitted to me in a private moment that it was getting too much for him. It was starting to affect his mental health. Yes, he liked having company. But not 24/7.

    Jessie said he loved having the companionship of guys like Rick and me who could relate to feeling so alone in the big city, a place where it was hard to make friends. Sounded exactly like something I would say.

   One day, a notice from the city’s housing authority arrived suddenly and without warning. The apartment where Sigmund, I, and my other two roommates lived was being condemned and would be torn down to make way for new condos. Our Band of Aspiring Writers, a latter-day Algonquin Round Table of New York writers, actors, and critics from the 1920s, would be disbanding. We had 30 days–to the end of the month–to vacate.  

   I had already told Sigmund I felt it was time for me to find another place to live. It had been fun palling around with several of his patients who made us all feel better about ourselves. Now I needed my own space.

   However, Sigmund warned I shouldn’t quit counseling cold turkey. It would do me well, he said, that I start attending group therapy sessions overseen by a psychologist who Sigmund said came highly recommended. To be enlightened on how other people were struggling with their problems. It didn’t matter whether they were single or married, man or woman. That next day I signed up for twice-a-week sessions. One good part about it is that I’d have someplace important to go to every Monday and Thursday.

   Rick and I celebrated our upcoming change in lifestyle by dumping our moldy mattresses we had been sleeping on for the last few months or so into the city’s waste disposal center located near a mental institution, which I hoped didn’t symbolize our actions.

   Eventually, I found a new job as a writer-editor for a national magazine dealing with anti-poverty issues. The pay wasn’t great and the joke among us staff writers dealing with poverty issues was that we would be writing about ourselves. 

   That was followed by finding an apartment house in suburbia that was renting out a one-bedroom unit for a reasonable price. I grabbed it before someone else did. Sigmund served as one of my references vouching for my reliability in paying the rent.

   Sigmund said he would continue living in his apartment until the day they tore the building down, maybe even after, he joked. Rick was temporarily moving back in with his parents while continuing his therapy with Sigmund. Our other aspiring writer, Jessie, was excited by his brilliant plan to move to a nudist colony down in Florida. He especially wanted to participate in a nudist 5k Run and play golf and tennis naked. Sounded to me like a frugal idea. In the warm weather he wouldn’t have to spend money on clothes.

   It was the following year that I received a shock to the system. Sigmund called me to say he had just gotten engaged and was moving with his fiancée far away to a midwestern city where he had gotten a new well-paying job working as a therapist at a mental health facility. I was shocked because Sigmund struck me as a restless soul who would hate to give up his independence and singles life where he drove around town in his newly-bought second-hand Mercedes-Benz and sailboat to take friends like me out for a spin. He had bought the boat even as Sigmund freely admitted he was still learning how to sail it as we reached open waters.  You could safely say we were all in the same boat together, sink or swim. Or more deeply, it was a metaphor for how to overcome one’s deepest anxieties and fears.

   Sigmund admitted to mixed feelings about getting engaged. But he said, “she’s a wonderful lovely person” that he had met at a singles function. 

   That was one of the last times I heard from Sigmund. On the phone, he had sounded like his old jaunty self even as he was entering into a new family life that didn’t exactly jibe with the person I had spent so many days and nights talking as singles guys about the challenge of forging meaningful relationships.

   Upon our parting, Sigmund offered me the sage advice, using one of his favorite quotes, that “when life gets tough, be like a shark–keep moving forward.” To return the favor, for all he had done for me, I gave Sigmund one of my favorite quotes, from baseball pitcher and amateur psychologist, Satchel Paige: “don’t look back–something might be gaining on you.”

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