Listen to Big Feels 6.8 here👇🏻
The first time I saw a therapist was a secret.
(I was taught that therapy, at best, was for weak people, and, at worst, would make you hate your parents.)
I booked the session through the local helpline. I was sitting in the driver’s seat of my 2007 Ford Escape, parked in the Frontier Mall parking lot in North Battleford, SK, cellphone pressed to my ear.
The man on the phone was kind. He asked thoughtful questions and talked gently and slowly. He booked me with a lady at the hospital.
It’s inherently risky to get help in a small place. Everyone knows everyone. The man on the telephone probably recognized my name. Knew my uncle. Knew my grandma. He didn’t say.
When I went to the appointment the next week, I saw my friend’s dad, a psychologist, walk through the waiting room. I pretended I didn’t recognize him. He did the same.
I had recently moved home after finishing my English degree. My friends had grad studies or grant-supported projects set up.
I got a job at the post office. Made good money. Became very depressed.
There was a straggler of a man hanging loosely onto me, my last tether to a previous chapter. I can’t remember liking a single thing about him, but I also couldn’t find anything particularly wrong with him.
The first time we went to coffee, I remember feeling uneasy looking at his face. Classically handsome, but his features shifted to something new and unrecognizable with every expression. I remember wondering if I would ever know him on the street. I’ve never met someone more chameleon.
We had met before coffee, at a mutual friend’s party. He was a friend of my sister. When he met me he kept saying, “I didn’t know she had an older sister!” but of course she had mentioned me, he just didn’t know she had a hot older sister. We sat on the deck and he talked at me and asked me abrupt questions and was interested in a way that those kinds of men always are.
I went to his house (I remember how he stared. I felt dumb for wearing such a tight dress). He came to mine (laid his head in my lap, told me something tragic, hugged me on the way out, brushed his hand against my ass). He visited me in my TA office at the university (told me that he thought holding hands was more intimate than sex; but I didn’t have sex with him, and I didn’t hold his hand).
I moved home. He drove out to my parents’ place, we had a fire.
My dad said, “I don’t like him.”
My dad likes everyone.
My mom said, “He’s going to be a doctor.”
I decided to end things. I wrote some kind of manifesto, because of course I did. I put it in my purse, thinking if he read it, that he would let me go easily, that he would understand.
On my way out of my parents’ house, my mom asked me, “Do you think it’s because of this. Do you think this is the reason you always end things before they begin?”
This: a trauma I didn’t know I had. A memory slipped somewhere deep, impossible to retrieve; now handed to me casually like a grocery list.
I drove an hour an a half down the Yellowhead, stopping at my aunt’s to pick up something for my mom. Then drove a bit more to sit under an umbrella on a patio on 8th street in Saskatoon. The sun was blaring, hot and unyielding; the walls of my brain were falling in on themselves.
I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. I gave him my manifesto. He was confused. To be fair, I would be confused too. The manifesto was intense, existential, and ultimately gay. He probably did his best.
July 19, 2014 (an excerpt from the manifesto)
When she spoke to man, this was her feeling: she was both given and taken until she was all gone. Until she did not recognize herself anymore. The only way to get her back was to be alone. What she couldn’t understand was the universal desire for her to be with man. Couldn’t they see what happened to her when she was with him? She was together with him, and apart from herself.
When I came home, everyone was gone – a rare thing in my parents’ house. I went into my room and shut the door. I remember feeling like I was falling down a deep chasm. I was afraid to wish for death, so instead I wished that I had never existed at all.
JULY 29, 2014
You told me something that I can’t tell anyone. I have no choice but to forget about it. Willing, knowing denial.
A couple days later, I called the helpline.
When I saw the therapist, she was young. She told me that I was fine, to go home, that whatever I felt was probably normal and would sort itself out.
It would be another three years before I sat in a therapist’s office again, this time listened to. This time clutching a pillow to my chest, shaking, session after session, until eventually my body could share its story without convulsing.
The straggler of a man tried to make contact a few more times. I didn’t respond. The story was never about him, anyways.
Talk soon,
Natahna
Bonus Tumblr entries from this time:
JULY 20, 2014
She was blissfully aware that he knew nothing real about her.
JULY 24, 2014
I accidentally put you on my restricted list on the popular social media site today, and it makes me smile because maybe my inaccurate finger knows best and maybe you should have been restricted from more areas in my life long before now, but it took the stumbling of my inaccurate finger to know it.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2014
I keep thinking of tiny, insignificant moments as if they were signs. Like the time you deliberately over-salted the pan scrambler we made together. I should have known. I should have known.
The Recommends: The TV show, Los Espookys, on Crave/HBO. :)
I'm OBSESSED with this line: "The manifesto was intense, existential, and ultimately gay." And I love being reminded of blessed Tumblr 🙏