Have you noticed that the older you get, the more you know, but the less you understand? It’s like the more complexities you recognize in life, the less energy you have to deal with them. Or something. Anyway, there are some complexities that I have recognized, which I find particularly vexing and totally exhausting, so I see a therapist in a thus far vain attempt to make the complexities somewhat less complex.

Yeah, I see a shrink. There. I said it.

The current shrink is my third shrink. The first one, whom I saw several years ago proved useless. I saw another shrink for most of last year, but after nine months or so, I became impatient with the weekly slog to her hot, stuffy office and even more impatient with hearing myself drone on for 50 minutes about complexities that were becoming no less complex, yet increasingly tedious. Furthermore, even after nine months, I played things close to the vest, and as it turns out reticence doesn’t make therapy very helpful. But I just couldn’t bring myself to talk about some pretty essential specifics with her. Instead it was broad strokes and frequent changes of subject. To her credit, she did manage to weasel some helpful insights out along the way, but I treated most of our sessions like I was telling her a long elaborate riddle—giving her some convoluted information and seeing what she would make of it. And that grew wearisome along with the stuffy office, so I decided to take a break.

After a few delightful therapy-free months, I decided it might be time to give it another go around. My new shrink seems an astute, intelligent person and I’m cautiously optimistic that while my vexing complexities may remain tangled messes that keep me from sleeping at night, there may be some level of decomplexifying that could prove useful at least in the short term.

Also? He’s fucking gorgeous.

Seriously, he looks like a movie star whose mom dresses him. It’s that rare combination of hot and dorky that melts me every time I encounter it.

I’ve heard stories about other people who have this particular first-world problem of the hot shrink. It’s the discord of wanting to make yourself as attractive as possible to this specimen of hotness while in an environment where you’re supposed to be talking about how screwed up you are. It’s like telling that handsome stranger in the bar your every sad, self-involved crazy thought instead of buying him a drink and saying something sexy and clever.

So given this particular dynamic, you’d think I’d approach the hot shrink with the same riddling and reticence I employed with my last shrink. Why would I want this incredibly attractive man to witness the neurotic inner workings of my whacko brain? Yet, interestingly, it seems I’m more inclined to do the opposite. I step into his office and I trot my shiny crazy out and give it the full Vanna White treatment, peppered with profanity and self-flagellating embellishments. At my last appointment, I was nearly gleeful in sharing with him how just that afternoon my insane imagination took a completely mundane occurrence and within an hour had spun it up to a nigh apocalyptic emotional crisis.

Is it because I don’t want to confuse my fifty minutes in his office with sitting next to a handsome stranger at a bar? Do I honestly want to sort some shit out, and pretending like I’m not a narcissistic lunatic with some troublesome depression and anxiety issues won’t actually get me anywhere? Or am I perhaps hoping that he likes that sort of thing? He’s a therapist after all. And what’s sexier than emotional instability and relentless self-involvement?

But I have to say, it’s kind of a relief to willfully decide not to care about how cracked I am perceived to be. I spend so much energy squirreling away my neuroses and insecurities into a mental subbasement, furiously pounding nails into the splintered wood planks that keep all the crazy in. Letting it out to scream around an enclosed space once a week, I think, may prove beneficial.

And in the end I can take some solace in the fact that more likely than not, I am completely unremarkable among Hot Shrink’s clients. Because if by some strange fluke if I’m the craziest he has to contend with, his job must be really dull.