It was a pretty good session tonight until the very end.

Like a frickin' idiot, I suddenly blurted out (as she was writing up the receipt) about Alison Bechdel's book, 'Are you my mother?'.

The disconnect between her (who up until then seemed to have been doing her damnedest best throughout the session to connect to me) and me from that point on, was just so.very.ugh.awkward.ugh.painful.

First, she'd never heard of Bechdel. I guess that's kinda sorta understandable but still. I told her about the Bechdel test and she made a vague statement about having heard about it on NPR (I'm not sure if she's really heard about it or she's just figured out it's safe to say that about pretty much anything I tell her since it's highly unlikely I'm going to be talking about anything that airs on talk show radio).

Then she went on about having read the original children's book many many times, which actually I haven't read (education be lacking).

Then I told her it's a graphic / comic book type thing at which point, (as I later realized but totally missed it in the moment) she attempted to be helpful or validating or something by saying that I could bring it to session and we could look over it.

To that, I was mostly like WTF? in my head and barely concealed my irritation and told her it was fairly dense material (or at least not the sort you'd get in a typical comic) and that Bechdel goes into Winnicott (who current T quotes here and there) etc.

So, she then just stared at me and perhaps thought she should say something helpful and so, said something (while attempting to very obviously mirror my seating posture which just irritated the crap out of me even more -- I'd like the mirroring to be much more subtle) about how she could see why a book like that would appeal to me.

At that point, I was really glad to just get out of there.

And, I realized (yet again) exactly why I shy away so much from telling people around me about how much a book really means to me or why it means what it means. It's like ripping your innards out and handing them to someone who is utterly distracted and focused on, I dunno the TV or something.