A Guy Walks Into a Psychiatrist’s Office

I have a small tradition: I always wear a colorful  shirt to medical appointments.  My psychiatrist is the only doctor who ever noticed, even commenting on how cheerful my shirt was at our first meeting.

When I walked in today, he glanced at me but was too polite to mention that my shirt was plain.

I didn’t want him to worry that something might be wrong, so I reassured him: I’d simply run out of colourful shirts. To keep things interesting, I decided to do what many women do when updating their look—add an accessory. I turned my back to him, just enough to reveal the subtle addition. It was a fluffy, unmistakable white fox tail attached to my belt loop.

In Meaning-Centered Therapy, humor is one of the ways to "connect with life." As Viktor Frankl wrote, humor is "another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation." It helps create the necessary distance from a situation to rise above it, even momentarily. The fox tail was proof that I understood the lesson. I didn't run out of clean colorful shirts; I did my homework and I was ready to graduate, even as I failed the exam on "Life as a Living Legacy."