“Embarrassed that you can’t recognize them?”
“Yes.” Embarrassed I couldn’t recognize them. Embarrassed I couldn’t see them. Afraid of hurting their feelings or snubbing them by accident or seeming like a bitch. Humiliated to not be myself. Disappointed to no longer be a brain surgery poster child. Mortified, ultimately, to not be so not okay that I couldn’t even hide it.
“What if you just told people?”
That question didn’t even make any sense. “Told people what?”
“About what you’re dealing with right now. About what you’re going through.”
“What? Like, wear a T-shirt that says, ‘I can’t see you’？”
“That’s one option, I guess.”
“Never,” I said.
“Never?”
“I will never tell anyone about this face thing. Not voluntarily.”
Dr. Nicole leaned forward like that was the most interesting thing I’d said all day. “Why not?”
“Because that’s need-to-know information.”
“It might help you feel more comfortable.”
“The whole world doesn’t need to know that I’m malfunctioning,” I said, like that settled it. But Dr. Nicole didn’t seem satisfied. So I added, “I just want to be my normal self.”
“But you aren’t your normal self right now.” She mercifully did not add, And might never be again.
“I’m just going to take a fake-it-til-ya-make-it approach.” That’s what I’d been doing my whole life. “If I can’t be okay, I’ll seem okay.”
“Seeming okay and being okay are not the same thing.”
“Close enough.”
“In fact,” she said, leaning in a little, “they might cancel each other out.”
“Are you saying I should just walk around wailing and weeping?”
“I’m saying,” she said, “that it’s better to be real than fake.”
I could have argued with her. But I had a feeling I’d lose.
Dr. Nicole went on. “It might help people to know what’s going on with you. It might help them help you.”
“Have you met people?” I asked. “People don’t help other people.”
Dr. Nicole let that land for a second. Then she said, “I can think of a few teachers, firefighters, nurses, loving parents, and Good Samaritans who might disagree with you.”
The Good Samaritan.
And just as I remembered him, Dr. Nicole said, “Didn’t someone save your life recently?”
Ugh. So this was gotcha therapy. “Yes.”
“Was that not ‘helping other people’？”
“That was an emergency,” I said.
“Ah,” she said. But it was sarcastic.
I took a bite of coconut bread and contemplated that.
Then a thought lit up my head like sunlight breaking through clouds. “Dr. Nicole?” I asked, trying not to sound suspicious. “When you were arguing with me just now, were you … teaching me how to argue with myself?”
And then I could see her teeth—but also feel her big smile—as she said, “You’re smarter than you look, choonks.”
Eight
WHAT WERE MY coping strategies?
A full list on that was yet to be googled, but for now, I decided on the ride home from Dr. Nicole’s bungalow, coping strategy number one would be art.
I mean, objectively, I had a giant deadline. So I needed to be doing art, anyway. And the truest thing I knew about myself was this: I was always happy when I was making things.
I grabbed my favorite, most bright and delightful box of watercolors … but then, instead of just doing something fun, I started working. On faces. Instead of just picking something, anything, colorful and pleasant to paint—a fruit basket, say, or some flowers—I bore down on myself like some kind of ruler-toting schoolmarm. Hell-bent on forcing my fusiform face gyrus into submission, I spent an entire Saturday painting face after face after face like a madwoman chasing her own puzzle-piece-shaped shadow.
How did it go?
I’m guessing not well.
But of course once they were done, I couldn’t see them.
Fine. Didn’t matter. Maybe if I did enough of them, things would start to shift.
Or not.
Either way, it was something to do.
So what if the grim determination of my attitude sucked the joy out of it all?
I had less than three weeks to fix my FFG.
By the end of the night, when my fingers were stained turquoise and plum and tangerine, and my eyes felt like sandpaper, I had a stack of scribbled, unintelligible faces a foot high and a whole table of others laid out to dry.