Chapter 35
Helen stands to hug me when I walk into her office. “I don’t normally do this, but I’m so glad you’re all right.” She smells like lavender, and on any other day I’d probably find it strange to be hugged by my therapist, but everyone is hugging me lately, so what’s one more?
We spoke briefly after the match. I ducked into an empty room when Robbie finally got her on the phone. She was just arriving home from a reception for her kids’ school. Her first concern was my safety. Was I hurt? Was I feeling better?
“I’m not hurt, and the worst is over now,” I told her.
“Good,” she said. “I don’t want you to do anything but go home now, Austin. Rest. Just rest.”
“How are you feeling this morning?” she asks now, returning to her desk and wheeling her chair to its normal spot.
“I’m okay. Really. I’m fine.” Reassuring her.
Reassuring myself. Ignoring the vacuum of darkness I felt when I woke up in Charlotte’s roommate’s bed, unable to move, and stared at the collection of medals from half-marathons hanging on the door.
If it weren’t for the jackhammer tearing up the street outside the window, I wouldn’t have made it here at all.
“The one match I don’t go to or watch on TV…” she says. “Was I your good-luck charm all along?”
“Yeah, you really let me down,” I say, feigning a smile. She smiles back, and I take a seat on the couch.
“Well, you haven’t lost your biting wit.”
“It’s the only thing I have left. What good am I now?”
“I know you’re kidding, but I have to do my job and ask you what you mean there.”
Walked right into that one.
“Well, Robbie went back to LA yesterday, and he doesn’t want me to continue with the rest of the year. So I’m just stuck here for a week, talking to you—no offense—and then I’ll go back home and…I don’t know. Figure out how to get a new coach? Or maybe I won’t use a coach at all.”
“Do you want to keep working with Robbie?”
The thought of doing this alone scares the shit out of me. It seems equally terrifying to start from scratch with someone new, but it might be necessary.
“No,” I tell her.
“Why?”
“He’s afraid of pushing me, like he’s going to break me or something.
He was afraid before, and it’ll be even worse now.
That’s a shitty attitude to have as a coach.
I’m better off with someone else. I just have to find the right person,” I say.
But there’s more to it than that, and it’s been eating at me since yesterday.
“And…he left me. He left me when I needed him.” I pause, and look up from the floor.
“But I’m sure you knew all about that. I’m sure he told you. ”
She doesn’t respond, which is confirmation enough.
“It’s kind of fucked-up, this whole thing, right? Like, he can just tell you things about me, my life.”
She lifts her hand to her mouth, considering. “Sure, yeah, it might be a little unusual. But, Austin, it’s never the other way around. I never tell him anything you share with me. He just gives me necessary context in an emergency. And this was something I needed to know.”
“It’s weird.” I shake my head. “I don’t know if this is working.”
“It seems like you’re trying to burn everything down right now. You’re done with Robbie. With me too, maybe? Diego?”
“Diego is done with me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I get to deliver news you don’t already know? Awesome. Yeah, he stopped talking to me the day before the match, and then we had a blowout in the locker room.”
“Is that what caused your anxiety attack?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. You said it’s everything compounding. Maybe that tipped me over the edge. Maybe everything caught up to me. I don’t know,” I say quietly, sinking back into the couch. I’m tired of talking, of thinking about all of this.
“Austin, there’s something I’ve been wondering.”
“Go for it,” I say, barely looking up.
“We’ve never talked about your dad.”
“We have.”
“Not really. You’ve mentioned him, but we’ve never really talked about him, and I think we should.”
“Just to kick me when I’m down?”
“No,” she says, with an edge I haven’t heard from her before. “Not to kick you when you’re down. To find a way to lift you back up.”
I sigh.
“Do you feel abandoned by your dad?”
“No, he died. Remember?”
“You can still feel abandoned.”
“I don’t feel that way,” I say. “Do I feel like I wouldn’t be sitting in this room right now if he was here? Do I feel like it isn’t fucking fair?” I shrug to myself.
“And that makes you mad?”
“Sure.”
“And the fact that Robbie left. That Diego left. That your friend from high school…”
I look up at her mention of Jake. A few days ago, she got the short version of the story I told Diego. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, though, just mentioned it in passing. Apparently it made it into her notes.
“Do those things make you mad?” she asks.
“They don’t surprise me. I expect it. Everyone leaves.”
“How long have you felt that way?”
“Forever. It’s not a feeling. It’s a fact.”
“I don’t think it’s been forever. I think…it’s been since your dad got sick.”
And there it is. I’m pretty sure I’m too smart for therapy. She thinks she’s arrived at this huge revelation, that all of this shit is linked back to Dad, as if I haven’t already put that all together. I don’t need a degree to do that. It’s common fucking sense.
“Austin, not everyone is going to leave.”
“I know that. You think I don’t know that? I could have run this session.”
She pauses, dips her head slightly. “You need to hear it more often,” she says, ignoring my dig.
I glance at the clock. We’re only ten minutes into our session. Jesus Christ.
“Do you want to go?” she asks. And I somehow work up the confidence to tell her how I actually feel.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why?” I whisper, searching my shitty self for the answer, as the pressure in my face builds.
“Because I’ve been coming here day after day, talking and talking, and nothing has changed.
I lost. I didn’t get through anything. I lost, and it wasn’t because I wasn’t good enough, because I didn’t play hard enough, because I didn’t want to win as much as Diego did.
Nope, it was because I’m fucked-up. Everything is so fucked-up in my head.
Everything is so tangled up there that it travels down and wraps itself around my body and tries to drown me whenever it wants.
And it stops me from doing the one thing—the one thing—I’m good at.
And now I’m just sitting here, staring at this box of tissues, wondering when I’m going to need them.
Where? Where is the breakthrough? That’s why they’re there, right?
I cry all the time everywhere else”—I pause to laugh at the absurdity—“but in here, nothing. Yeah, it’s not working.
This is not working. I’m wasting my time and I’m wasting yours. That’s why I want to leave.”
Helen’s pen hasn’t touched her paper since I opened my mouth. She just sits, waits.
“Do you know what Diego asked me? He asked me if I ever wonder how good I would be if I didn’t have to deal with my anxiety.
It’s like he looked into my eyeballs and could see the back of my brain, like my thoughts were subtitled in front of him.
When do I stop dealing with this? When do I get better? ”
It must be at least thirty seconds before anything more is said, before Helen hits me with her next sentence and the temperature of the room drops ten degrees.
“I think you use your father’s death as a crutch.”
Her delivery is sharp, clinical.
My eyelid twitches. “I’m telling you, trying to get at this through my parents—that is not the way in here. It’s not the solution.”
“You feel sorry for yourself because he’s gone.”
“That isn’t it.”
“You’re stuck, and you don’t believe that good things can happen to you.”
I shake my head.
“Well, if you don’t believe that good things can happen to you, why should they?”
“That’s not it.”
“How can you win a tennis match if you don’t believe you will?”
The twitch is back.
“Where is the breakthrough?” I ask again, raising my voice.
“There isn’t one,” she fires back.
Silence.
“There isn’t one if you aren’t willing to do the work,” she continues.
“I did the work. I gave up my phone for a week. I’m twenty years old and I had no phone. That was work!”
“And it helped you. I don’t see you giving yourself credit for that.”
“It’s not sustainable. How does this become sustainable?”
“There’s more to be done. There are hard things that you have to be willing to talk about, and sometimes that doesn’t happen in a week.”
“I’ve talked about things. I’ve talked and talked about them,” I say, pressing my fingers against my eyes.
Helen places her pen on her notebook and reaches over to set it on her desk. She turns back to me, and the corners of her mouth lift.
“What?” I ask her. What is that fucking look for?
She clears her throat.
“You’re trying to win therapy,” she says.
I groan. I don’t even try to hide it.
“You go to practice every day. You get stronger, you get smarter, and you keep building. You keep trying new things to make yourself a better athlete. That’s what we’re doing here. It’s the same thing. Maybe you can’t see it after one session, but you’ll see it over time.”
She grips the arms of her chair and rolls it closer to me.
“Austin, you cannot simply win therapy with a breakthrough. Do you want to know what winning looks like? It’s finding tiny ways to release the pressure—the pressure that I see in your eyes, in your body, in your shoulders.
Winning is showing up. Winning is being honest. Winning is taking care of yourself.
Winning is talking and meditating and going to bed on time.
Sometimes there isn’t a breakthrough. Sometimes you just wake up one day and feel a little bit better—not because you’re lucky, but because you put in the work. ”