I Went to Therapy the Other Day

I saw a therapist for the first time in over a month a few days ago. I had never seen her before and she did not know anything about me when I walked through the door of her office. I am pretty used to starting over with therapists at this point in my life so I knew that I would have to tell a story that I don't know how to tell. I knew I would have to recount which significant things in my life shaped me into the person sitting in the cushioned chair across from her own with her leg shaking 100 miles per hour with anticipation of spilling words out she hasn't yet fully come to terms with.

This therapist was a stranger and even being a perpetual new client several years in a row did not make this task any easier. I knew once I started I would be okay and it would be word vomit coming out faster than I would be able to keep up with. Getting started is the hardest part because your mind knows what the task ahead encompasses and it anticipates the recoil of the shots fired within the clusters of letters that escape you while speaking on autopilot. When I was a competitive swimmer and the water was really cold, the easiest thing to do was just jump into it. So I did the only thing I knew how to do - I jumped and held my breath for as long as I could.

I explained how everything kind of started with drugs and how drugs were what led me to sitting in her office. I spoke about everything I went through with who would've been the father of my first child at 13 and how although my tiny human was not conceived consensually, I would do anything to have him or her here. I disclosed details of the history of my eating disorder, my long distance relationship with the man I thought I was going to marry that turned into six months of daily sexual abuse and a second miscarriage, but this time with him. I talked about what happened in Denver, Chicago, what happened Christmas Day of last year, the events that took place when I got in a car with someone from the place I called home and ended up alone with him even though that was not what I was promised. I recalled memories of my addiction.

She asked questions as I communicated life as I knew it to the best of my ability. I remember telling myself I was not allowed to feel. There was not time to nor would I be able to finish doing what had been asked of me without melting into a puddle of tears first. I could not feel. Quite honestly, I didn't want to. If I did, it would be game over. I am not sure I would survive feeling.

She wanted know how I was in the very moment she uttered the question. I responded with the fact that my heart kind of sucks at being a heart and how my pain was bad that specific day and how the cold I am still fighting as I type these words is taking a toll on my body. As she took my answer in, I could see something in her demeanor change. Was that the wrong answer? Did I say something I wasn't supposed to? Could I not properly convey things in the way she wanted me to?

Her eyes softened and her voice decreased in volume as she uttered words that shook me to my core. She said that it made sense. Confused, I asked what exactly made sense. She replied saying that she understood why my heart is not whole in its function; that there is no way it could be when it is so broken with shattered and missing pieces. She said that it is so damaged by pain that it physically cannot take it and she is not sure how much more it can take before it just gives out all together.

I wish I could have told her later when her words hit me that what she said affected me on a level so far beneath the surface. I did not know what to think initially. My initial instinct was to argue with her, to tell her that there is no way the emotional and mental pain could do enough damage to the organ the courses blood through my veins when the emotional and mental hurt is of my own doing. I wanted to defend the fact that everything I had professed about my life up to this point was my fault and how it all could have been avoided had I maybe different decisions at the time each event occurred. But as I later found myself crying in my room as dark as could be for that time of the day clutching a pillow to my chest while curled up as much as humanly possible in an effort to take up as little space in the world as possible, the pain hit and it hit hard.

I felt so overwhelmed with thoughts of not wanting to be on this planet. I thought to myself that maybe I am just not cut out for this life. I desperately tried to focus on just breathing normally before the waves sucked me under completely and made me feel like I was drowning.

It was then that I understood, too, how unbearable what I was feeling is and how that much intensity fully has the capacity to attack anything trying to sustain a life that is unendurable.