Pumpkin yawns and Lockwood smiles down at the big fluffball. Sprite’s soft purrs and snores help me relax, and I love the way her body heats mine. Seeing Lockwood smile at a cat, though, gives me a whole bunch of reassurance, as funny as that is.
I bite back a smile and go back to focusing while Lockwood explains slowly, so that I can grasp everything and not get drowned in information overload.
“The lie that we’re told, especially in our society, is that any discomfort equals something bad or wrong. That’s sometimes true, but if we keep cycling back to those thoughts, even unwittingly, we’re never going to be able to grow or move forward. I can tell that you know this, but it’s much harder to put it into practice.”
“I’ve actually never had anyone say all of that at once, in those terms.”
“If you’ve ever said that you miss the person you were before what happened, or that you hate this version of you now, you’re thinking in terms of how experiences change and shape you.”
“There’s definitely a before and after line. I know I’ll never be the person I was before, but I also know that I’m different today than I was yesterday. We’re all a sum of our experiences, good or bad.”
“Do you like who are you right now?”
“Of course not!”
“Do you think the agoraphobia defines you, though? Does it make you less than, somehow? Less of a person? Does it make you a bad person? Does it make you unkind?”
Ahh. I don’t feel as though I’m being trapped. Just forced to rethink what’s really going on inside my head and body. “I guess not. Not in that way. I don’t know. Maybe it does.”
“I asked too many questions. I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s okay. My parents and sister would say that it does define me.” Again, the words are bitter, but I want to be honest, even if it hurts. That’s the point of all of this. “It makes me the daughter that can’t do anything with them. It makes me frustrating and difficult to be around. It makes me inconvenient and hard to plan for. I don’t think all of that’s true, but some of it is. It doesn’t make me a bad person. It doesn’t make me unkind. I’ve tried very hard to work on myself, because of the fears I have, because of the condition, but also because I don’t want to be shriveled up.” Pumpkin raises his head at the change in myvoice. He’s always so sensitive. I blink against the sting of tears. Sprite shifts in my arms, triggered by Pumpkin’s movement. I kiss her head, let her stretch, and then she rearranges herself in my lap. “I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want to be the person that can’t get over asking herselfwhyme, orwhythat night, orwhat if it was all different.”
“I don’t think that what happened to you was really any different than a major physical injury like a broken neck or a stroke.”
I can see how he’s cycling back around to his theory about physical wounds, but I’d still like him to explain. “How do you mean?”
“You had to relearn what it felt like to be in your body again as a virtual stranger. Taking those first few steps into the outside world, and then having to protect yourself—it was like learning any other skill. How to walk, speak, or feed yourself again. After a physical injury, you usually get months and months of physical rehab, but you didn’t get any of that for your brain. You had to deal with all of this virtually on your own.”
The first thought that comes from hearing that is one that I feel way down in the pit of my stomach. I want to believe what Maverick said about there being an unlimited number of chances last night, and about life not being measured in a finite amount of anything, but it’s hard. It’s so, so damn difficult.
“Sometimes people never get better.”
“Sure, but in most cases, there isalwaysroom for improvement, even if it’s small.”
It’s not hard for me to follow Lockwood’s logic. I’ve talked to enough therapists and done more than enough workon my own reading books and being in those online groups to understand. “So I’ll have to retrain my brain to retrain my nervous system, my muscles, my flight and fear and fight responses.”
“That’s probably true but retraining your brain doesn’t always mean rationalizing your way out of something. I’m sorry that your support system all but abandoned you. That’s another set of feelings entirely that we should talk about, and we can, but I do want to tell you that you have an incredible amount of support from the club. I’ve seen men who thought they were beyond hope find the brotherhood and life they didn’t know they needed. Even one person who truly cares can make a big difference.”
“My family tried to support me, but they got tired and just couldn’t do it anymore. They couldn’t enable me to throw my life away. They tried to give me a hard dose of reality after they felt that they’d coddled me for so long. I have a good friend who would never abandon me, but I’ve never once asked her to take that burden on. I certainly don’t expect her to.” Maybe I never really had a proper support system. I’d have to define whatpropereven means and that’s like trying to define normal. It’s a constantly shifting benchmark.
“I’d like to know how you see the future.”
“What?” The question startles me, it’s such an abrupt subject change.
It doesn’t startle me nearly as much as the thing that suddenly blasts into the window. There’s a loudconkand a flash of a brown hairy body at the glass. I duck and gasp like whatever that was trying to break through the window and get me. Both cats jump to their feet. They don’t launch themselves at thewindow or go careening off the walls, or destroy the room like some of those cats that go airborne and wreck the place.
Thank freaking goodness.
The blur comes racing back, and this time, it doesn’t hit the glass. It just looks in. It’s a squirrel. A massive squirrel. It’s so big that people must be feeding it around here. Its tiny little face bobs in the window comically and then it turns, flicks its tail, and races away.
“Sorry.” I laugh as I try to coax Sprite back into curling up.
She’s not having it. She might not be swinging from the window ledge way up on the wall, but she does leave. She walks over to the bed, jumps up, and starts chasing her own tail, tumbling all over the place.
“Sorry,” I sigh again. “What did you just ask me? Wait. How did I see the future? Not playing out like this, that’s for sure.” How can I say that like it’s a terrible thing? That’s the equivalent of a parent saying they regret choices that led to their children or someone saying they wish they’d done everything in their life differently, but they’re working their dream job.
“How did that night change the plans you had for yourself?”
