“More people wanted to sign, but I wasn’t able to get to everyone on time,” she said. “Anyway, welcome back to South Dakota. We’re happy to have you here again. There’s no place like home, right?”
TWENTY-FIVE
I started therapy the followingweek. I still couldn’t believe I had agreed to it, but anything was better than my mom sending me to an inpatient center. The idea of counseling repulsed me a bit. Therapy as a concept was fine, but it felt so cliché now. It had been commoditized to the point where everyone now went to therapy. Leo, Alex’s insufferable friend who I had hooked up with, had made therapy his entire personality, but he didn’t seem to be getting any less toxic.
It took my mom and me a while to find someone who was both covered by insurance and based in New York. Covered by insurance because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to afford it. Based in New York because I needed someone used to working with high-achieving neurotics. So that’s how we found Nora.
Nora was a postdoctoral fellow at NYU. If I had unlimited money, I would’ve chosen someone who went to a better school and had more patient reviews, but given the circumstances, Nora was the best I could get. During our sessions, I tried answeringher questions as honestly as possible, not because I believed she could help me, but because I didn’t like the idea of wasting time or my co-pay.
My first impression of Nora was that she was a 60th percentile in looks who could easily become a 70th percentile with just a little effort. My second impression was that she liked to use terms like “anxious attachment style” and “generalized anxiety” and “panic disorder” and “mild substance abuse tendencies” to describe me. If I had been her manager, I would’ve recommended she use fewer words from the DSM-5, as it seemed like a real amateur move that would hurt her credibility with patients like myself who’d taken an introductory psychology class and knew she was basically quoting a textbook.
As a postdoctoral fellow, Nora didn’t have much counseling experience, which meant she still hadn’t mastered the art of hiding the judgment and surprise from her face when her patient said something along the lines of “Until a few weeks ago, I planned to have a baby so I could get into my dream law school.” (I did not tell her about how I became obsessed with Laura, as I read online that she could break patient-doctor confidentiality in the case of a court order or a belief that I posed an imminent threat.) I could tell that my confession caught her off guard. However, she still did a decent job compared to how I imagined the rest of the population would react. I would say she was in the 90th percentile of hiding her reaction to such a statement. She only widened her eyes a little, she only blinked a little faster, and she even managed to mostly hide these two physical cues by scribbling a sentence on her notepad.
For the first few sessions, Nora and I dug into why I wanted to go to Harvard Law School so much. According to Nora, itwas normal for my insecurities to trace back to high school, but it was not normal for these insecurities to have a sizable impact on major life decisions I made as a twenty-one-year-old. Actually, she didn’t use words like “normal.” She said that one person can’t be objectively better than another and that I needed to stop seeing people through the lens of categorically “better” and “worse” based on my unhealthy and superficial ranking system of smart and hot. I told her I also based my rankings off niceness, but we both knew that I was lying.
At first, I didn’t take what she said too seriously. I liked ranking people in percentiles, despite Nora telling me that this was an extremely fucked-up habit (or, in her words, “unhealthy thought pattern”). But after our first few sessions, I decided to take her advice, mostly because I had nothing to lose and could go back to thinking about percentiles at any time. To try out this new way of thinking, every time I started to put a percentile on someone, I stopped myself and thought of one characteristic that I liked about them. After a week of banning percentile-type thinking, I found that I did feel better. I noticed that if I stopped judging others so harshly, then I judged myself less harshly as well. I decided Nora might be right, but only about this one thing, and I’d continue to evaluate her advice going forward on a case-by-case basis.
—
The problem with planning outyour entire life is that you never think that you’ll need a plan B. For the first time ever, I harbored no vision for what the next year would look like. Suddenly, I was the person in my friend group who had no idea what she was doing. Me: the person who helped her friends plan fortheir course requirements, who went to office hours every week for all her classes, who submitted her law school applications just a couple of days after they opened up. All my friends had figured out their futures. Eunjin was going to Austria. Alex would be a copywriter at a health startup in SoHo. Even Leah, always the most bohemian out of all of us, had committed to a teaching fellowship at a school in the South Bronx.
After each of my sessions with Nora, I lay in bed and closed my eyes. The future looked like a dark abyss, simultaneously opaque and tumultuous like ocean waves colliding against each other on a moonless night. I recalled Nora’s tip of trying to channel my anxiety into anticipation. I could see how this strategy might work for others, but it didn’t for me. All I could think about was the endless terror lying below the surface of my directionless and unknowable future.
“You might not like what I’m about to say, but I have a feeling that someday you’re going to look back and think this is the best thing that ever happened to you.”
I rolled my eyes. She couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, I found this comment quite insensitive. I hoped for the sake of her future patients that she would stop with the gaslighting.
“Hard to feel that way when so far my ‘someday’ just looks like unemployment,” I said.
“It’s hard to see now, but this experience has started to give you a certain perspective that didn’t exist before. And it’s better that it’s happening when you’re still so young, when your entire life is still so malleable.”
“Young?” I snorted. “I’m twenty-two now, not exactly sixteen.”
“Oh, honey.” She took a sip of her coffee. “You think you’re old?”
“I’m not old, but I don’t think I’m young either.”
She tilted her head back and laughed. If I were her boss, I probably would’ve told her this was unprofessional.
“If I didn’t know you, I would think you were fifty years old. You’re twenty-two. You didn’t get into law school. You’re graduating three months later than you originally planned. So what? Your plan A didn’t work. That’s how it is for most people. Plan A doesn’t work out, so you go to plan B, plan C, so on and so forth.”
“But I’m not most people.”
“You aren’t most people. That doesn’t mean you can never fail. Everyone fails. This isn’t the last time you’re going to make a mistake that feels like the end of the world. But you’re alive, aren’t you? You’re still going to graduate, aren’t you? The important thing is that you learned from this experience and that you’re growing from it.”
“You’re telling me that throwing away my future will be good for my future?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
“I have no job, no plans, and I’m still a Boring Asian Female, as Robert basically told me, just in a more politically correct way. And almost everyone I know has seen a video of me having a meltdown in a very public place. It seems like a pretty big price to pay for a couple of life lessons.”
“You’ll figure it out. I believe in you,” she said.
I looked at the clock. Our time was up. “I’ll see you next week,” I said. I clicked the red button and shut my laptop.
—
The fog gradually began tolift from my mind. I didn’t like how happy Nora looked when I told her this. I held back theurge to say that I did not attribute this to our therapy sessions but to the medication and a break from campus life. But once the fog did start to lift, I missed the way that it obscured the worst truths of my plight. The fog obscured more than just the fact that I was probably never going to go to Harvard. It obscured the shape of the void, obscured the fact that it wasn’t a void at all. The outline of its figure came into view, the source of the pull that I felt almost every day for the past few weeks. The source of the black hole. Guilt. It was impressive the twisted logic I was capable of weaponizing to hold it off, the clever, insidious reasoning that led me to believe I held no fault in Laura’s death. I could not stop the fog from dissipating, and once it was gone, I could see, with painful, glaring visibility, the tragedy that I had caused.
