Chapter 25
Henry
“So,” Gay, my therapist said, sitting back in her chair, “how have you been doing this week?”
I considered that for a second. It was a mixed bag, honestly. Jamison and I had been texting more, and I felt like our relationship was getting back on track. And during those moments, I felt almost normal.
But then, I’d cried myself to sleep last night, and that hadn’t been the first time. So…yeah, mixed bag. But what, exactly, to say to my therapist about that?
“You’re thinking hard,” she pointed out when I hadn’t answered after a few seconds. “It’s not a trick question, I promise.”
“No, I know.” I shrugged. “I was trying to put it into a nutshell, but it’s like two - or maybe more - separate nutshells that don’t want to integrate.” I paused, thinking about that. “Integrated nutshells? Maybe I am crazy, doc.”
She smiled indulgently. “You’re not crazy. I know crazy, and you’re not it. You’re a complicated human being, as we all are, and you’re allowed to feel different things at different times. So what are the different things you’ve been feeling? Give them to me one at a time.”
It was stupid how damn affirming it was to have someone tell me I wasn’t nuts.
Like, I knew I wasn’t nuts; I knew I was a perfectly normal guy in a perfectly shitty situation who was coping as best I knew how.
And yet, hearing her officially tell me in her doctor voice that I wasn’t crazy was a moment of ahhhh.
I felt a little bit of my tension melt out of me.
“Well, things are going good with Jamison,” I began, thinking as I spoke. “We, uh, we kissed. On Friday.”
“And you hadn’t done that in a while?” she guessed.
I shook my head. “Not since the diagnosis. Partially just because we hadn’t seen each other much, but also partially because I’m…
” I fumbled for the right word. “‘Scared’ isn’t exactly right, because I know rationally there’s nothing to be scared of.
I mean, it’s just a kiss!” I forced a laugh, slightly high-pitched though it was.
“But something felt big about doing it, despite that.”
“Hmm.” She pushed her glasses back up her nose and studied me.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with labeling it ‘scared’ if that’s the word that feels immediately right to you.
You’re in a scary situation in general, and that can bleed into even things that feel, quote-unquote, silly or irrational. ”
I considered that. “Then I guess yeah, I was scared. But Jamison came over, and we were talking about, you know, our relationship and stuff, and he asked if he could kiss me. And he just looked so…worried, and I didn’t want him to be.
So I kissed him. And it was…it was good.
We didn’t take it further - there wasn’t even any tongue - but it still felt like a big deal. ”
“The biggest,” she agreed with a smile. “You overcame a hurdle. That’s a big deal even if it’s an objectively ‘small’ hurdle. What’s the other side of things, your second nutshell?”
Ugh, that. I sighed. “I’m crying a lot. I’m scared a lot.
” There was that word again. “I don’t like leaving the house.
I feel like people will stare at me, and what if I somehow cut myself and bleed on someone and…
ugh. I mean, I’d have to be like, ‘Oh hi, I have HIV so now you’re in danger’ and holy fuck do I not want to have to do that. ”
She pondered that for a second. “Ok, let’s try to separate reality from your fear. If you leave the house, is there any reason to think people will stare at you? Do you somehow look different?”
“Well, no…”
“And how often, when leaving the house before, did you randomly get hurt and bleed?”
“Well, I mean…” Damn her for being all logical! “It could happen, even if it’s not common. And suddenly if it does happen, it’s a big deal and not just a matter of slapping on a band-aid and wiping up the blood.”
“Ok.” She nodded. “That’s true. But let me counter that with this: people these days are very aware of bloodborne pathogens - not just HIV - and how to safely handle blood. So the likelihood is that even if you were to bleed in public, nobody’s going to be wallowing in it.”
She wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know, but still, it felt risky. “But one mistake and boom,” I countered. “Someone’s life changes forever.”
“Do you have herpes?”
I blinked at the apparent nonsequitur. “Uh…not that I know of?”
“I do,” she went on, ignoring my perplexed expression. “It’s actually localized on my hands, which is really uncommon compared to mouth or genital herpes, but it does happen.”
“Uh…ok?”
“When I have an outbreak, I get blisters on my fingers, and herpes is highly transmissible from the fluid in those blisters. So I have to be really aware of keeping my hands clean and moisturized, and then keeping them safely away from potential points of infecting someone.”
Oh, I saw where she was going with this. “Ok but like, nobody dies from herpes.”
“True.” She nodded. “But - and I don’t know about anyone else - when I got the diagnosis, it kinda felt like my life was over, in the sense that the freedom I’d had to just…
touch anyone and anything was gone. Suddenly I needed to live my life super-conscious in a way I’d never done before.
” She smiled slightly. “Was that over-dramatic of me? Yeah, probably. But that doesn’t change that that’s how I felt.
I’m not saying it’s the same,” she went on when I started to speak, “but I am trying to reflect back to you how that experience isn’t limited to you, and perhaps make you think about how rational or irrational your fear is. ”
I shrugged. “Still feels pretty rational to me. If you’re infectious, you really do need to be conscious of it.”
“And that’s fair,” she agreed with a nod. “But do remember that you’re not the only person in the world with a transmissible medical condition. You’re not somehow a unique scourge.”
Unique scourge, I mouthed to myself, unable to stop a smirk at a pair of words I didn’t think I’d ever heard put together before.
Then I sobered. “I mean, I guess I know that. But…” I shook my head, unable to put my finger on the argument I wanted to make.
“Just because I’m not unique doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. ”
She cocked her head to the side, considering. “Let’s try to tease out the difference between worry and fear for a minute. You can be worried about something without fearing it. Are you worried or fearful?”
I thought about that. “Both?” I ventured. “Fear is just a bigger version of worry.”
“I’m going to disagree with that. To me, ‘fear’ implies a level of paralysis and powerlessness that ‘worry’ doesn’t. You fear monsters, you worry about whether you turned off the stove before you left the house.”
“Well -”
“And I think,” she went on without waiting for me to finish, “that at this moment, you’re fearing a monster when you really should just be worrying about the stove.”
Huh? “I think you lost me a little.”
“Ok, let me try to clarify,” she said, holding up her hands placatingly.
“You carry a transmissible illness. It is one hundred percent logical to worry about transmitting it, in the sense that you need to be aware of your status and, say, whether you’re leaving blood smears wherever you go.
But at the same time, being conscious of it doesn’t mean you need to be paralyzed by it.
It’s not this evil monster that is destined to take over your life.
Part of your job here in therapy is to figure out how to keep it from taking over your life when it doesn’t need to.
Keeping things in proportion is important.
And I think that currently you’re letting it paralyze you; part of my job is to shake you out of the paralysis.
So…” She grinned. “Shake, shake, shake.”
I knew I was supposed to return the grin, but…it was easy for her to say. “But how?” I asked, a plaintive note breaking into my voice. “It goes back to the rational versus the emotions, and how I can’t stop the emotions even with logic.”
“Honestly?” She shrugged. “A lot of repetition, mostly. When you feel the emotions swelling, you can do things to break that paralysis.”
“Like what?”
She shrugged again. “Lots of things. Anything from literally pinching yourself -” I winced.
“- to repeating affirmations to yourself, to keeping a post-it note in your wallet that you look at when you need it. It looks different for everyone. But the overarching theme is something that can remind you that you aren’t necessarily ruled by your emotions.
That’s part of what separates human from animal, our ability to rise above visceral emotion. ”
“So…which do I do?”
“You tell me,” she shot back. “Do any of those ideas resonate right off the bat? If so, try that one. If not…hell, try them all. I have a worksheet somewhere…” She grabbed her laptop off her desk and focused on the screen.
“Just gotta find it, give me a minute.” Obediently, I waited while she navigated the computer.
“Ah, here we go.” The printer whirred to life and she reached over to pull a piece of paper from it, then handed it to me.
I looked down at a surprisingly low-res print-out of a bulleted list.
“‘Call a friend’?” I read off the top of the list. “Am I on a game show?”
She cracked a bare smile that clearly said I wasn’t as funny as I thought I was. “Keep reading.”
“‘Shake it off by moving your body’,” I obediently kept reading. “‘Journal your feelings, snap your rubber band, engage in self-care’.” I looked up at her skeptically. “These feel really basic.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Emotions are very basic, hindbrain things. Sometimes you have to fight them with hindbrain-stimulating strategies. So think about it: do any of those seem like something you could remember to do when you’re spiraling?”