“I think it did,” he said. “With time I stopped clinging to my own version of events and accepted that two things can be true, that we might never agree about what exactly went wrong. Though I’m sure she’d agree we should never have had that swingers’ night with the Carlsons.”
I stayed poker-faced and waited for him to say he was kidding. He remained focused on the crossword. I peeped over his shoulder and said, “‘Prolix.’”
He filled in the relevant squares. “You’re telling me.”
I went back to the den and climbed onto the stationary bike. I finished a triathlon in the remaining weeks of April, a laughably modest goal the completion of which felt better than drugs. While running some of my twenty kilometers, I tripped over a root in the sidewalk, falling hard onto the side of my body where a sporty little fanny pack held my keys, phone, and some extra hair ties. I completed a full thirty minutes of running, went home, and got in the shower. Later that night, I went to text the group chat an image of a fish finger that looked like a dick and found the fall had cracked my phone screen. It was still functional, just less pleasant to use, and I worried I might get a glass sliver stuck in my fingertip. Charlie Brooker, I thought, you’ve done it again!
The weeks continued this way: more newspapers, more cereal, more driving to Toronto, more driving back. I felt very fortunate and a little bored. I helped Merris with groceries and minor housekeeping and stayed out of her way at work, though we sometimes had tea when I brought her home from physio. I read a few poems from Amy’s book and hated them a lot, but felt fondness for the person who gave them to me, who was comforted by the idea of a woman whose heart was a house fire. Amirah and I had our green-tea-and-grovel session, and I went with her afterward to a hospital fundraiser/musical revue featuring a bunch of a cappella anesthesiologists. It was completely terrible and so, so fun to be there with her, whispering and giggling at the back of the room. I saw Clive and Lauren and Emotional Lauren in real life, one-on-one situations where I tried to be a good listener and better friend. Sometimes I succeeded. This was quietly satisfying but did not do much to quell the shame that would rise in me every few hours like acid reflux—a reminder that I was a failure, back in the town she grew up in, eating applesauce her dad had paid for.
Still, pleasant moments found ways of sneaking in: finding a solo seat on the bus near a window, having enough coffee left for a perfect top-up, coming home from the grocery store with flowers, to put tomatoes in a different bowl from bananas. In one of our now-weekly sessions, I described these moments to Helen. As I was leaving her office, I caught a glimpse of her notes: “finding joy in the mundanity of life.”
It did feel mundane. Everything just kept happening.
Emotionally Devastating Things My Therapist Said to Me Like They Were Nothing
“I’m going to start today’s session by challenging you not to try to make me laugh during our time together. This is not because you are not an amusing person, but I wonder where we might get if we did away with the idea of trying to entertain.”
“When you say you’re ‘addicted’ to buying shirts that don’t fit and wearing them anyway, do you feel an actual compulsion at work here, or is this another case of online jargon?”
“I was struck, last time, by your statement that what you were looking for was a kind of exfoliant for the personality. I’d like to look into how it came about that your psyche has melded skincare with morality. There seems to be a real connection between aesthetic effort and emotional effort for you—would you say that’s accurate?”
“I admire your interest in authenticity, though I do not think it makes a woman—or any person—a cliché to ‘also’ feel bad about their neck.”
“You say you have no need to tell your family about your dates with women, since none of them have been serious. I wonder if they might get serious if you started taking them more seriously, or if you’re consciously avoiding doing so to save yourself the administrative hassle of coming out.”
“This urge to throw your phone off a bridge or into some major body of water is one we’ve found ourselves talking through in multiple sessions. You imagine feeling very free. Indeed, you describe this feeling of total elation at the idea of being parted from your phone by chance or force. What is stopping you from—and I’m sorry if this sounds obvious, but . . . what is stopping you from simply turning it off?”
“What do you think it would feel like . . . to delete your cat’s Instagram account?”
“I wonder whether it might benefit us to differentiate between the concepts of friendship, extended community, and imagined audience. I think there is some elision at work, and really these are very different kinds of relationships, with very different obligations and mores. And then, of course, one of them exists in the mind only.”
“If you don’t enjoy smoking and aren’t addicted to cigarettes—as you say, you don’t like them enough to buy them yourself and only smoke socially, when your friends or acquaintances are doing it—why don’t you quit? And if you don’t want to quit, can we dig in a little bit to the source of your reaction just now, when I called you a smoker, because that was quite a strong reaction.”
“The journal-based worksheets I’ve given you are merely exercises to get you thinking about your feelings and responses to those feelings. I cannot therefore provide feedback or ‘grade’ them.”
“When you say that you feel you’ll never find another person willing to be in a long-term relationship with you, that makes me feel very personally sad. I wonder if we might ask whether you are willing to be in a long-term relationship with yourself?”
Chapter 19
A one-liter bottle of branded X-Cycle water cost, I’m not kidding, nine dollars. I bought one and registered for the six p.m. Guilty Pleasure class, which promised both the ride—and the time!—of my life. The girl at the front desk had found my sign-in request slightly weird, but ultimately gave in. That was what happened when you paid full price （fifty! three! dollars!） for one of these classes: you became a kind of temporary king. I grabbed my clip-in shoes and exorbitantly priced water and headed to the changeroom.
I felt frazzled and anxious. That morning, Lauren had semi-subtly hinted that our couch-crashing arrangement was reaching its close, and Merris’s physio appointments were being reduced to once monthly. With spring term ending in two weeks, I would soon be left with no reason to come to the city, and nowhere to stay if I did. I set my bag down and took a bite of a protein bar that promised a “salted caramel explosion” but tasted, of course, like sand.
Wrestling into a sports bra, I listened to two girls, both partially naked and （respect） filling their bags with free tampons and hair ties.
“Someone needs to have a word with Kira,” said the taller and more nude of the two. “Her Stories are getting grim.”
The other one adjusted her underwear in the mirror, getting on her tiptoes to check out her butt. “I know. It’s like, we get it, you’re single,” she said. “But I do watch them every day.”
The other girl sighed. “It’s getting so bad I don’t know whether to mute her or turn on notifications.”