Nonsense Thoughts on Apathy

Dear Ex-Therapist,

by Claire Gallagher

On New Year’s, you texted me saying that you hoped I was doing well and that you would love to start sessions back up with me whenever I wanted to. I considered that you had been thinking of me and had genuinely been moved to reach out, but therapists have to make their money somehow, and certainly checking in with old patients is easier than finding new ones. The text above yours was from me, explaining that I wanted to take a break from therapy. I was doing well and the meds were working. You never responded, but you stopped calling and stopped setting up appointments. I am a firm believer that anyone can benefit from therapy, regardless of their perceived mental state or past experiences, but I think that I, narcissistically, believed that I was not somebody who could ever get anything out of therapy. I lied often in therapy sessions, withheld information, disregarded the advice that forced me to have perspectives I didn’t want to have. Could you tell, when I lied to you?

I want to tell you that the concept of your job is weird to me. Like, I’m paying you a lot of money to listen to me talk. Except most of the time, I didn’t talk, so that was weird. And maybe a waste. And the people you talk to must hate you all the time, or I did, at least. But I hated you like a parent, like you disappointed some expectation I had of you. I thought parents were mythic because really, how is a person supposed to raise another person? I thought you were mythic, too, because how do you fix someone else if you’re still patching up yourself? I cried about him during one of our sessions, and you told me that when you were young, you were engaged to a man who left and married another woman a month later. You told me that you had accepted that this was through no shortcoming or fault of your own—that sometimes things like this just happen. And I still think you were lying to me.

I don’t think you can do either, raise or fix, without fucking up. I hated you for no reason other than I disappointed my expectation of myself, too, for not being someone who could emerge from therapy slicked up with blood and placenta and amniotic goo. I don’t mean that as a good thing or a bad thing, only as a new thing.

If I had responded to your text, and if I had been willing to try, I could have told you that on New Year’s, all I could think about was how I’ve never been able to float. I was so heavy, always, in water. I blame my mother and my mother’s mother and probably my mother’s mother’s mother, but I never knew her well enough to really believe that. I blame them for choices left unmade and regrets and men who couldn’t love anybody but themselves and every way their lives didn’t end up how they thought they would. I hope you can decipher this to understand that who I really blame is myself. Who teaches you how to float? My father is in love with love— this I know. But I am not sure if certain loves are innate, like that my mom will always want me. Do you remember that night? When I thought that I had used that love up? How foreign I am to myself in those moments. I almost want to laugh because I am small again like my first time at the beach when I was picked up by a wave and no one was watching. I wasn’t supposed to be by the water alone, anyways, which I knew. And I couldn’t float. How pathetic I am to myself in those moments. How pathetic to gasp and sputter and choke and bang my fists on the floor, digging crescent moons into the space between my thumb and first finger. I stopped trying to get up after getting hit by the first few waves because it was starting to sting my face, and I liked the feeling of being lulled and rocked. Almost floating.

You’re gonna get yourself killed. Words I heard at least twice a week growing up. Get myself killed, get myself killed. Barefoot steps, too close to the tracks, men at the mall, stepping off the curb. I have a scar that forms a check mark across my right knee. It didn’t hurt when it happened. I turned and saw my window shattered and then a leg that couldn’t be mine because it was all flesh and pink and nerve and bone glinting through between a knee butterflied in two. I hadn’t known my bone would look like that. It kinda looked just like the pictures. And what a magnificent color we are on the inside. I thought that I wanted to paint my room that color. I fell into the window trying to put glow-in-the-dark stickers on my ceiling. The doctors later told me that if the glass had cut me by another inch, it would have sliced an artery, and I would have bled out and died.

Is there a real difference between fearless and careless? Am I still a child because I need someone to tell me when I stop being excused? I cross the street without looking both ways. I jog alone in the dark and leave parties without telling anyone I am leaving or where I am going. I smoke with a quiet hope. It’s a guilty hope, before you start calling me a bad person, but I think that having hope at all probably makes me a bad person, anyway. At my last check-up, my doctor felt a mass in the side of my neck— an activated lymph node, she suspected. But probably best to get it checked out, anyway. And I thought, I don’t want to die. But I also thought, selfishly, it wouldn’t be so bad. I would be excused. And I thought, I don’t really care, either way—activated lymph node or a ball of hyperactive cells in my neck.

I could chalk myself up to an impulsive and dramatic teenage girl who, after losing a man, feels she has lost her life, but the problem is that I’ve never been able to float. I know that I am light without substance inside. I knew this before a boy and before anything else at all. My father is in love with love, this I know. But I am not sure if some people are easier to love than others; I think they are because I’ve never known anyone as easy to love as him. If I had answered your text, I would have asked you how to become someone who is easy to love.

I would tell you that I still measure everyone else against him. Like before I move, I wonder if he would recoil and by how much. Most of the time when I’m talking, I’m thinking of whether or not the things I am saying would warrant a response from him. I sometimes worry I am betraying him in feeling something for another, but this is wishful thinking. I can only hope that I will feel something for another that warrants worrying. But here I go again, being impulsive and immature and young and selfish. I need you or someone else to tell me how to do everything and what to think about everything.

I want to tell you that if I were a bird, I would be flightless. I want to tell you that my hair is leaving oil stains on the sheets, so no wonder he didn’t want me washing his feet anymore. I sit and pull knots and tufts out of my hair, twisting and twirling strands that fall like dandelion puffs around me until I am left with nubs that will no longer grow. I think that I am guilty of so much, and I’ve tried kneeling again, but everything that I have ever thought, including this, has been selfish, and what is a selfish woman to God if not made-for-man?

Most of the time, I am paralyzed by fear. I am afraid of reaching a number of sexual partners that make me no longer desirable, and I am afraid of never having been desirable at all. I am afraid that I am the reason my father drinks, and I am afraid that everything that has ever been said about me is true. I am afraid that I never learned the things I am expected to know by now. I am afraid that I will wake up and find that my skin has been peeled off but underneath I’ll find only more skin, and I have to stop thinking so much about what is under my skin. I saw it, but sometimes all I can think about is seeing it again.

Is it normal to sometimes wish to be sicker?

I practice what you told me to practice. I draw and pick at my nails and find new music and sharpen my nails. I work on my breathing, so I don’t have to pull over on the side of the road while driving as much anymore. And I said the meds were working, which they are, but not in the way that I want them to, which is being greedy because I understand that moodstabilizers were aptly named. My mood is stable, as in, my mood is a straight line that stretches and sprints and does not break its path and refuses to tell me how to feel about anything. He used to tell me what he did that day, and I considered it like sun on water. And I knew how to feel about everything when I had him. But I’m doing it again, trying to dismiss this away by relating the depression to him, so that when I’m over him, I’m over the word, too. through this period of time. But I’ve never been able to float. And I think I just feel too guilty to talk to you about this anymore. And I know I’m not in any place to ask you for anything, but I really do need you to tell me what I feel and how I feel and what to like and what I should be doing more or less of and whether or not I am excused. I need you to explain everything about myself to me. Isn’t that your job? This is why I hate you sometimes because you would never just tell me. Would you please? I anxiously await your response.

Best, Claire