January 6
Before everything
“You will get better.”
I’m beginning to believe I was put on Earth to single-handedly destroy Audrey’s patience.
“But I should be able to work by now,” I push back. I’m taking today’s session with a pillow held tight to my stomach. I’ve been gaining weight at a remarkably fast pace, and I’m afraid she might notice.
“Nadia.” Audrey leans forward, bringing her hands together in a prayer motion. Like she’s literally begging me to stop being such a dick. “You’re doing a lot of really hard things right now. You’re in and out of doctor appointments constantly, you’re here with me—”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I cut her off. “I should be doing all of it. I’m healthy.” Except I sleep thirteen hours a night and still wake up feeling like I spent hours treading water.
She reads the room. “Okay, even if there’s nothing wrong with you, can you admit that you haven’t been feeling like yourself?” Audrey leans back in her chair and takes a protracted sip of tea, giving me a second to think before I lash out. She got her bangs trimmed over the weekend, and I have to keep myself from telling her how pretty she looks. We’re at war. There’s no time for compliments.
“Why would I want to feel like me? I fucking suck. I’m an absolute embarrassment to what I told myself I would be by now. Everything I wanted to be when I was a kid, I’m the exact opposite. We won’t even get into the fact that I had my dream life. I had it, and I fucked it.” I pause to take a breath. Then, I start counting off on my fingers: “I’m running out of money. I’m running out of energy. I sleep thirteen hours a day. I don’t talk to anyone other than you. I’m running out of ways to lie to myself and say that this is all part of some bigger, better plan. It’s just . . . I’m nothing. I am a no one.” I end my rant with a heavy gulp.
Audrey watches me carefully, without any judgment. She watches me like I’m a caterpillar on a leaf. Then, after a moment of silence, she says: “Okay. You’re no one.”
I watch her, my chest heaving with the effort of expulsing all my trauma “Right.”
“If you’re no one, then . . . what does that make your work?”
I drop my eyes to the carpet between our feet. Was not expecting that. “I don’t know. What did I ever really do? Convince people to buy junk from brands that hated them? Nothing, I did nothing. My work was nothing.”
“And if your work was nothing, then what was your job?”
“Nothing,” I say quietly.
“And Kai firing you? Saying the terrible things he said to you?”
“Nothing.”
“And all that pressure you carry around? That sense of obligation you feel to do and to be? If you’re no one and your work is nothing, what is that?”
“Nothing,” I say with something that feels an awful lot like confidence. “It’s nothing. It’s total bullshit. It’s a fucking scam. It’s . . . it’s something I made up.”
I look up to find that Audrey is smiling at me. She holds up her hands and does a little razzle-dazzle.
“Nihilism. Kind of fun.”
Audrey has cracked open a door in my mind, with rusted hinges and moss grown over the frame; a door so long neglected that we spend our entire session just clearing away the debris that keeps me from reaching the handle.
“Let’s end with a visualization,” she offers. Usually, this is the type of thing I may fight her on.
Instead, I cross my arms over my chest and lean back against the freezing-cold windowpane. Behind me, snow falls for the first time in years over Philadelphia, blanketing everything in a gray-white silence. If cars drive by, we can’t hear them all the way up here.
I’ve moved over to my favorite place in her office—my perch on top of the radiator underneath Audrey’s window.
I love the freezing-cold air that rattles the window and the way it feels like I am dangling over the edge of the building. I love looking out past the Delaware River, past Camden, and directly at the tree-lined horizon. It all goes on and on for miles: roads, houses, trees, cars. Up here, I am above the fray. From my perch, it’s easier to detach—to observe.
“Close your eyes. Imagine yourself submerged in calm. Let your shoulders melt down your back. Imagine you’re someplace that brings you joy. Nadia, where are you?”
The beach. At our Shore house. It’s August and the sun is high and hot. I’m lying face down on a towel that smells like suntan lotion and the dried pages of a paperback book. I can hear my brother and sister playing in the tide, shouting over the crash of the ocean. There’s a breeze, unobtrusive and kind, caressing my back. Someone lights charcoal in the distance, firing up a grill for lunch. I can feel my heartbeat in my neck.
“Evergreen.”
When the exercise is over, my cheeks are wet and my chest feels lighter than it has since November. Maybe sooner.
I don’t know anything,
I don’t know what any of this means, how healthy I am—if I’m even healthy at all. All I know is that if I get in my car now, in an hour I’ll be back to the last place that made me feel really happy.
And when I get there, nothing will have changed but maybe I’ll be safe enough to start again.