Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking: Poems

By Sadie McCarney

Sadie McCarney’s Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking is a buoyant second collection that playfully navigates the turbulent waters of life with mental illness and neurodivergence. In much of the book, history and science are treated the way they are often viewed by a brain in mental turmoil: places and events get switched around, facts get rewritten, and the fantastical reigns supreme. Through poems ranging from didactic (the horrible “self-care” advice received by the poet when she was struggling most) to historical fiction (patients in an asylum in 1800s England), to the quirky and unexpectedly fantastical (a rainbow carpool unicorn, a young child’s timeline reversing each morning, and an everything bagel that includes competing theories of time), McCarney digs deep into the muck of her own lived experience. She resurfaces with, if not gold, at least an old time capsule and a few treasured hunks of bone. Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking highlights the sometimes dubious (but always jubilant) inner workings of a mentally unwell brain at play — especially within the context of a larger society that frequently seeks to tamp down this weird and rare form of magic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781778521294

Book preview

Cover: Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking: Poems by Sadie McCarney.

Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking

Poems

Sadie McCarney

Logo: E C W Press.

Contents

Dedication

i. Coping Strategies

Let It Out

Take Supplements

Turn Your OCD Rituals into Spells

Do Your Fucking Breathing Exercises

Do The Sex

Take Your Meds

Act

Be the Change

Actually Talk During Your Scheduled Talk Therapy

Sleep It Off

Don’t Think about Death

Think about Death

Turn Your Pain into Art

Drink

Choose to Be Different than You Are

Take Comfort in Material Things

Revisit Your Childhood Trauma

ii. Surrey Girls

Lucinda

Mary Ann

Caroline

Bea

iii. Alternate Timelines

The Best Version

Conveniences

Republic 2

Tale of the Phoenix

The Cave

A Less Good Version

Negatives

Alt-Everything

Tale of the Grocer

A Labourer at Stonehenge

The Cleanse

Fast Food Breakfast

Victimology, Redux

The Great Reign

Gridlock

Happy

Tale of the Flood

Back, Back

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

Dedication

For Lindsay, with thanks for all the free therapy

i. Coping Strategies

Let It Out

Soft yet it reverberates, like static.

A hike through brambles until

even the brambles can’t spy you

undone in the brush. Then, louder:

a hoarse crow’s caw (which, among

the haggard Jack pines, finds a rare

acceptance). Go deeper. The canopy

of pine needles will seem to gloat

of its evergreen stability. Unpack

the sticky-zippered pup tent you bought

from Army Surplus. Sleep. Twilights:

spray for bears, jerk the unwilling

zipper around you like a straitjacket,

and Scream Like You’ve Found

a Severed Arm in the Woods.

Scream until it’s your severed arm.

Scream until you are those woods.

Take Supplements

A supplement helps what

you’re already doing, like

a glossy tear-out poster

stapled inside a magazine.

Take 5-hydroxytryptophan

(see, tryptophan, it’s just

like Thanksgiving!), proven

to boost your serotonin, or

GABA, which may be linked

to mood and sleep. St. John’s

Wort is a big deal — a natural

antidepressant (serotonin!) —

while Bach Flower Remedies

contain impressions of flowers

trapped in alcohol, which aids

anxiety. A supplement helps

what you’re already doing, but

these are natural, they can’t

really hurt you. No matter what.

Why not throw in passionflower,

wild lettuce, lemon balm? It’ll keep

you calm and, therefore, alive.

You’ve done well for yourself,

today. All together, that’s $239.65.

Turn Your OCD Rituals into Spells

Your therapist says it’s magical

thinking, so you drive for miles

under sun-splintered sky and flick

the windshield wipers on, off, on,

thirty times. This is your