I’m Done Monocropping My Life

My first armload shot of flowers as a flower farmer

When I started my life as a therapist, I felt especially like I had to put a big part of me in the closet to be a professional in this incredibly buttoned up field. Before I opened my private practice, I had a whole part of my life as burlesque performance artist Fetchin’ Gretchen in the aughts in NYC. It fed my artist self- and she gets very very hungry, especially for stage time. When I hung my shingle online, I scrubbed as much as I could any evidence of this life from the internet - I wrote to people and asked them to take down articles, I made everything private. And as I dove deeper into my advanced training, everything in my life became about being a therapist - my friends were all therapists, I went to lectures on Friday nights about therapy, I spent my time after work providing therapy all day in supervision groups trying to perfect my art of therapy. Don’t get me wrong, I dove this deep into this path because I was very interested, drawn to and invested in deeply understanding humans, how we work and how I can best work with them. But then I started feeling really suffocated. I felt trapped in this life of therapy therapy therapy. My life felt like a sea of corn with no other vegetable, animal, or mineral in sight. I especially felt like my creative self was screaming, screaming to be seen/heard and known in a profession that seemed to require that I put myself backstage in a lot of ways.

We now know how bad monocropping is for the earth, her creatures, us humans and our bodies. If you aren’t familiar with the term monocropping, it’s what was pushed for in agriculture in 1970’s - specializing on an incredibly large scale in one agricultural item and growing the same thing year after year. Think acres upon acres of corn or warehouse after warehouse of chickens. It’s not great for the earth, it is incredibly bad for animals and it invites disease which invites the use of chemicals. Diversity is the key to the health of farming and gardening and I believe it’s time we start looking at how key this is to how we grow ourselves.

It is still a big norm to monoculture a human life - pick a “career” to have that career/your work define what you do, how you see yourself and build your life - often where you live and your friends and partner. It’s the monocropping of human production. But underneath that field upon field of corn is a potentially fertile field of a life. You are limitless in what you can grow through yourself and yet I wonder if this is how we feel like we can see ourselves, especially as adults when we have made some significant and seemingly limiting life choices.

As I allow myself to become more-than-a-therapist, first in devoting myself to flower farming, and now through sharing more of my writing I feel more and more excited about the freedom I have to be me in the way I want to be me. Even if it doesn’t fit with the norms of a profession or training or how other people are doing it. So when I thought about making my first armload shot of flowers, and I imagined doing it naked, I entertained the idea of actually letting myself do it. An “armload shot” is the name for a trend in flower farming of showcasing the glory of what you have been growing by holding 50+ stems of a flower and facing the camera. So here I am, allowing multiple parts of myself to be fed and believing (hoping?) that my world doesn’t come crashing down as a result of it.

Parts of self is a theory of the mind - one of my favorites - that we have
”multiple personalities” much more than we think or experience ourselves as having. It’s a developmental achievement to imagine yourself as one singular person - so congrats if you do! But really, who we are is so context driven, so we can truly be a different “us” when we are at work, or with our kids or when singing to songs on the radio by ourselves when driving. These parts of you sometimes want radically different things - like one part wants to be taken seriously as a professional psychotherapist and another part wants to be taking naked armload shots of Zinnias. And our job as farmers of our own self-land for creating optimal growth and health is really to see if we can help grow what as much of us wants as possible (as long is it isn’t really causing harm to other people in a serious way).

So back to my armload shot - my therapist self is worried about how this may impact “being taken seriously” and my artist self is yelling at her saying “you never let me do anything FUN anymore.” I know what my therapist would have said to my therapist self if I was worried about my clients or colleagues reading this post “Well, if someone reads it and has feelings about it, you can talk about it.” Because the beauty of therapy the way I practice it is that everything can be discussed that comes up for a patient and especially everything about our impact on one another. If I go on stage more or take an armload shot of flowers and a client has a feeling about it, I can do my best to understand and validate that experience. So with this professional view in mind, I can set myself free from being only a therapist and feed my artist self who wants to write this article and show these pictures and be “taken seriously as an artist”, my little girl self who likes to play, my rebel self who takes her clothes off for shock value, AND my therapist self who can use theory to explain and validate what we’re doing. And I see my spiritual farmer self as the one that can help us all grow together.

If we can think of our selves as multiple different crops in rows near one another and our job as to coming up with planting and succession plans with harmony in mind, diversifying ourselves may become easier. One part of me can be marigolds near another part of me tomatoes helping protect her from nemotodes. I can grow one part beans here to enrich the soil for the next part of me kale who will grow there next year. And like anything in farming, if parts of ourselves suffer or seemingly die we can think about what they might need to grow better next year - more sun? In another growing field or soil? Who gets along and who needs more space from each other? These questions when applied to ourselves can give us so much more room to breathe in our concept of who we are. We can grow, regenerate or decide not to feed certain parts of us, crop planning yearly provides the opportunity to ask ourselves the question of how we are growing and feeding ourselves in our lives. And the concepts of farming, while seemingly remote to many, become a way of thinking and living that benefits us all.