The therapist my psychiatrist recommends me to is also a man, but older and white, leaving little space for our identities to intersect. I settle for our connection being this: that he wishes for me to get better, and so do I. Our first meeting takes place not long after my grandma passes, an event that lingered too closely and heavily for me to actually discuss.
We speak to each other only through the laptop screen. With my doors and windows shut, he comments on the darkness of my room, not yet knowing what a comical observation he is making of my situation as a whole. Yes, I want to say, it is dark and small and a draught blows from beneath my door, but haven’t I made it beautiful? With my green walls and full bookshelf, haven’t I made it something like home?
He prompts me to tell him about myself, and at once, I am no one. I think of all the things I know about me to be true, and how it is all clothed in a sticky shame. Somehow it is easier to be anything else – even if it is worse, even if it is a lie.
When he asks of my symptoms, I make sure to rattle them off in an order that sandwiches the worst in the middle. I pick my words carefully, tiptoeing around my diagnosis of agoraphobia with I’m having a bit of a hard time leaving the house. I don’t mention the hunger, how it is constant. Not for food, necessarily, but for a satiation that never truly comes except to be replaced by disgust. I am hungry to spend money and to hoard it, to laugh loudly and to similarly cry, to take care of myself and to punish, to be in company and to be alone; constantly seesawing between the lack and the excess.
I’m eager to please, to prove to him, myself, that I am not that bad, not that sick. I want to be blameless, innocent, capable if not for the circumstance. I want to be the patient that can say yes, I exercise, I eat healthy, I meditate and journal and when I feel a lump in my throat I cry, but never for too long, and when my clothes pile up I don’t contemplate just throwing them out.
I don’t tell him about how harshly I see myself, how in an effort to not come across in a way I don’t intend to, I elect to show nothing at all. That while this trait in others can seem endearing, in me it is always standoffish, hinting at a stupidity of having nothing interesting to say, or lacking the confidence to say it. And I’m unsure which is worse, being perceived as stupid or self-hateful - but I do know there is something quite pathetic about a person who cannot back themselves, even when the stakes are so low. It is ugly to witness, like the discomfort of watching a child fight drowning in the shallow end of a pool. Look, you want to say, there is solid ground beneath you, there is really no need for all this personal commotion. And besides, people are watching.
He tells me of things to which I can’t relate. Again, that familiar distance grows, and I’m watching from afar, wondering how his words could have anything do with me at all. I sit and listen to him speaking of running marathons, and classical music, breathing in boxes and grounding in the physical. I nod, I smile, I perform well at filling the time in my learned silence.
He reads me a newspaper article about a diver learning to control his breath to be calm during a shark attack. As he reads, he smiles with joy, a child-like amazement. I want to tell him that I’m not the diver, but the shark, and in looking for something to bite, my teeth keep sinking into myself. I want to confess that all his questions are misdirected, that he should instead have been asking me if I keep a glass of water beside me when I sleep. If go to bed only with a light on, maybe the one in the kitchen, or down the hall, with someone’s voice playing on my phone. If I care for myself like this, in small ways only the desperate can muster. If I would sooner fall asleep in a busy room than an empty one, needing the presence of the world around me to not go anywhere, not even to sleep, alone.
But I cannot imagine any useful response to divulging such feelings, and I realise I can’t find what I truly need in this call: kind laughter, a soft smile, the muttering of something to the effect of: yes, you are normal, you are fine.
After the session, in the quiet of my dark room, I decide the meds aren’t working. Surely, it should be different than this. Though hesitant, my psychiatrist agrees; we will try something new.
In the next four months I’ll stop seeing this psychologist, unable to bridge the gap between the multitudes of divides. I’ll stumble down from 30mg of Lexapro to five, inviting into my already weary headspace the symptoms of SSRI withdrawal. Everything will be horrible, everything will hurt. I will sleep with all the lights on, I will not leave water beside my bed, I will wake and check, out of paranoia, if my senior dog is still breathing through the night. I will eat slow not to throw up, I will laugh with tears in my eyes, I will have earphones in, always. From this period, I will retain near to no memories except the knowledge of a constant muffled ache, and at my worst, my paranoia will come to fruition as my dog falls ill, and in less than a month, at my lowest, he will die.
Here, I meet my new therapist.
This is beautiful.