A week later I used what would have been my rent money to book four sessions with Helen. In the lead-up to our first, I started a note on my phone identifying potential topics for discussion, which seemed like a smart move, until I opened the document in her warm beige office and it read “legs,” “is inner peace real,” and “having a skull is actually insane.” I abandoned the list and we talked about Merris （relationship to）， my body （negative feelings toward）， and doorframes.
“I learned recently,” I said, “that straight men have this compulsion where it’s important to reach up and slap the top of the doorframes they pass under. Did you know about this?”
“Vaguely,” said Helen. She adjusted the knot in her silk scarf and took a sip of herbal tea. Her mug was covered in smiling painted bees.
“Well,” I said, “I had no idea this was happening. I can’t believe all men, or even some men, have been doing this my whole life. Do they not have anything better to do?”
Helen wrote something down. “And what about this behavior bothers you in particular?” When she turned the mug to access its handle, I saw it had the words bee calm on it in block letters dripping with honey.
“It doesn’t bother me,” I said. “I just think it’s weird.”
“Seems to me that it bothers you a great deal.”
There followed one of those long and bothersome therapy silences.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I wonder: Is that what it’s like to have a brain not filled with questions about whether you’re too old or fat or dumb or smart or in immediate danger of some kind? Fucking . . . doorframes?”
I realized I did sound quite angry. I apologized to Helen; I’d been reading too many threads about street harassment.
“I shouldn’t really be mad about anything,” I said. “Statistically speaking, I’m one of the luckiest people that has ever been born.”
Helen told me that although that was true from a historical perspective, I was still allowed to have feelings, even difficult or ungrateful ones. Those feelings were, apparently, an unavoidable part of life, and it was better to notice and name them than pretend they didn’t exist.
“Alright,” I said. “I’m angry that my threshold for discomfort is so low. Like, I can function totally normally as long as there is no uncertainty in my life, but if I’m waiting to learn the outcome of something, the entire day is fucked.”
I looked at Helen. She was doing “placid” as a charades clue.
“Unfortunately,” I continued, “my threshold for what counts as ‘something’ is very low, so we’re talking, like, responses to emails, likes on a tweet, results of a routine pap smear . . . This year has been like having a rash, continuously, for months. And also? I’m angry about glamping.”
“Okay . . .”
“It’s not as nice as being indoors. No matter what. And I hate renter-friendly apartment hacks and all these other cutesy ways we’ve repackaged the conditions we live in. It’s not romantic to pay hotel room prices for a camper van in a wealthy older person’s backyard, even if there is a fire pit out there. I have thirty-seven thousand dollars in student debt. Why do we have to be the generation that accepts—on top of all the actual indignities—those sliding barn doors on bathrooms?”
“Right,” said Helen. “Interesting. What emotions are coming up for you right now?”
“I feel embarrassed,” I said. “I know these are the wrong things to be thinking about. I should be thinking about, like, inequality. And I do think about that stuff. Some days I’ll completely forget about how much I dislike my body and toggle around on those maps that show you how underwater everything will be in thirty years. Other days it’s exclusively my body, all day, which I know is awful.”
“What you think about is one thing,” said Helen. “But what do you care about?”
I told her I cared about doing the right thing in a very general, almost abstract sense, but I did not have any meaningful ideas about next steps. “I just feel like, why would I know what to care about, or even what to do? I don’t know anything. I didn’t choose the right person, and I have no idea what late capitalism actually is.”
The session carried on, me explaining my little theories and dumb preoccupations, Helen nodding and affirming and sometimes writing things down. Although I sounded like a not-impressive issue of Adbusters, it felt amazing to say these ridiculous half-thoughts out loud, even better not to have them presentation-ready. It was a thrill to express poorly and inelegantly my small and petty and unuseful ideas. I would not achieve anything by expressing them to someone else, but it was nice to think about them here, the personal as personal. Yes, all the big bad stuff was happening, but so was all the little bad stuff （and as Helen was quick to point out, a fair amount of little good stuff, though that was unlikely to be the focus of our sessions）。
I told her my theory that intimacy was a scam. I told her I wasn’t sure I liked my job. I told her how satisfying it felt to tweet MEN and have someone I didn’t know respond that they knew, yes, they knew exactly. I told her about the yogurt and the tracking app and the peanut powder. I told her I could not believe I had been brought to my knees by something as quotidian as heartbreak. I told her I was sick of feeling like the biggest woman Emilio Zara could imagine.
“Emilio . . . ?”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s what my friends and I call the head designer at Zara. I don’t think that’s his real name, but we needed somewhere to direct our rage.”
I explained that we envisioned him as a kind of sadistic mastermind, like the puppet from Saw, except his twisted endgame was to bring otherwise sane women to tears in flimsy dressing rooms. “Every time I go in there,” I said, “I feel I’m the worst-shaped person on earth. Honestly, being divorced feels the same.”
“How do you mean?”
I told her getting divorced was like getting stuck in a blouse at Zara: I was struggling, and it was clearly the wrong fit, but maybe it would be more embarrassing to try to take it off, to come out of the dressing room and have to admit, I tried, but I couldn’t make it work. Maybe it would have been easier not to attempt extraction. Maybe I should have flung open the curtain and proclaimed it my favorite, insisted on wearing it out of the store and every day thereafter, laughing as it cut off the circulation to my arms.
“Has this happened to you before?” Helen asked. “Getting stuck in a blouse?”
“Oh, tons of times,” I said. “You usually realize somewhere around the shoulders that it’s not going to fit, but it’s so tempting to mash it on and see.”
“And how does that go?”
“Badly,” I said. “Every time. And you end up sweaty and panicking and desperate, struggling but refusing to call anyone in to help you, and usually the thing gets ripped on the way off.”
Helen squinted slightly and made some more notes on her pad. I leaned forward.
“Look,” I said. “I know this may not be up to me, but if at all possible, I would love to avoid labeling any of this ‘trauma.’”