Nineteen years ago, I was forced gently into therapy by my aunt and her friend who was my therapist’s boss. I was a ghost right then, with a chaotic shell-shocked animal living in my head, so I was easy to force.
In the beginning, when I was too poor to do anything on Friday nights, I would go instead to my therapist and flush my soul out through my tear ducts. He was free, a grand prize from the state of New York that I won for surviving a violent crime.
Easy to force.
After I spent an hour falling apart, begging this man to save me, I would walk from his office on West 57th street to my basement apartment on East 11th, a ritual of letting the hours pass so I could go to bed instead of thinking, putting myself back together, piece by piece, block by block. Tying up the knots we had loosened, in case my roommate was home and I had to act like I wasn’t having night terrors during the day.
Therapy was therapy, and the walking was therapy too. And having somewhere to go was therapy, and having someone who would notice if I didn’t show up was therapy too. The streets of New York, anonymous and swallowing, were their own kind of therapy, a place I felt more privacy than in my own home.
I remember saying to him once, from the bottom of a black well, you are the only adult who knows me. I was choking back then on huge decisions and strange relationships, ptsd and perfectionism and drugs. He was my primary adult influence— not in chronology, we were all technically adults, but in wisdom and slowness and skepticism— until everyone around me, including myself, eventually became adults too.
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