For anyone who has met Scuti, it won’t come as a big surprise that Scuti sees a therapist. Scuti clearly needs therapy and I am that therapist. In an informal poll of people who know Scuti, the most frequent comment was “Scuti needs help.” Scuti, as you will shortly understand, took this as very positive feedback.
My purpose here, though, is not to see how many Hippa violations I can commit by revealing Scuti’s shortcomings. Rather it is to help you understand Scuti a little better and provide a ‘psychological Rosetta Stone’ for you to try to make more sense out of what Scuti has written.
First, the upside. Scuti is smart, as in really, really smart. Rocket smart. The kind of smart that starts to get scary. If I had to guess, Scuti’s IQ is somewhere around 230. However, after you account for the impact of all of Scuti’s phobias, Scuti’s effective or functional IQ is closer to 60.
The number and extent of Scuti’s phobias is a matter of ongoing investigation. I relate just a sampling of the more prominent ones here.
There is estaliteraverbaphobia or the fear of letters of the alphabet that are also words, namely, “I” and “a.” I have been working with Scuti for a number of years on this and have succeeded in getting Scuti to use “a” more frequently. This requires adherence to a regimen of breathing exercises, making writing in public a bit of a spectacle. Prior to this, “a” in Scuti’s writing appeared as “*” or sometimes “#” and occasionally “%.” The letter “I” on the other hand is probably a lost cause because of the unfortunate coalescence of the aforementioned estaliteraverbaphobia with another of Scuti’s fears, pronomenphobia, or the fear of pronouns, personal pronouns in particular.
You begin to understand how Scuti’s collection of phobias might become debilitating. There are far too many to discuss here so, for now, I’ll briefly mention just a few others. First is occultidestaphobia or the fear of hidden meanings, closely related to another of Scuti’s fears, perdeparvaresaphobia, or the fear of missing an important detail.
Finally, and most perplexing is Scuti’s descernaphobiaphobia, which is an abject fear of being diagnosed with a phobia. This fear is so pronounced that Scuti has developed no fewer than 60 personalities, each one well aware of the other 59 (“those others” as Scuti would say), each of whom has some phobia of their own while “this Scuti” is free of any such affliction. Technically, Scuti does not suffer from schizophrenia but is more like a group chat gone horribly wrong. I am still trying to sort this all out.
Functionally, what this all means is that Scuti is a very keen observer of surface meaning and superficiality. Scuti takes everything and everyone at face value and goes to great depths to try to make sense of the world on this level. Scuti always assumes the best of anyone, often referring to others, lacking any prior knowledge of them, as “nice.” Scuti understands the concept of hidden meaning and that things can, at times, be other than they appear. However, unlike you and me, Scuti categorizes “hidden meaning” in roughly the same way that others would categorize extraterrestrial life — it might be possible but is so far removed from day to day life as to be functionally non-existant. In an odd but characteristic way, Scuti accepts the suggestion that there are hidden meanings … at face value.
I once suggested Scuti attend a seminar on hidden agendas but shortly into the first presentation he started hyperventilating, passed out, and had to be taken to a clinic. His only recollection of the event, weeks later, was that “… the nice man tried to explain ‘hidden agendas’ but all I could do was wonder if he had something else in mind …”
What this all means for you, the reader, is that you can take Scuti at face value. Scuti is keenly observant, authentic, empathetic, compassionate, and virtually incapable of dishonesty or deceit. He is incapable of being a threat to anyone, other than the possible threat of having a keen observer take you at face value. At the same time, you need to understand that Scuti is functionally illiterate in the nuances of social discourse so you must avoid attaching any kind of ‘agenda’ to his comments. They are, simply, just his words.
Even with his seemingly countless phobias, one effect of descernaphobiaphobia is that Scuti behaves like someone who has no phobias whatsoever. You just need to be patient as you try to track the “group chat” stream of consciousness per my comments above.
It is very easy to like Scuti. He is very much like a faithful, happy, infinitely loyal puppy with an IQ of 220 … who can talk. As a result, Scuti has attracted a “following” of sorts. There are a wide variety of people who look out for him and try to help “manage” the gap between the actual and effective IQ’s of 220 and 60, even though Scuti himself sees no need for it. I guess I am one of that following.
After the seminar/hyperventilation disaster above, I tried a different tack, suggesting that Scuti start to write down some of what he thinks about all day, which is to say, a real-time transcript of the “group chat.” And he does think about things, unrelated things, strange things, off the wall things, all day, every day. This growing collection is the result of that ongoing experiment.
Let’s see how it goes.
Cordially,
Psychi
aka Scuti’s Therapist