Instead, the door down the hallway opened about twenty seconds later.
“Zoey?”
Dr. Ellie stood in the doorway, holding a notebook and a pen.
She looked exactly how a therapist in the Adirondacks named Ellie would look. Comfortable blouse. Calm expression. Neat hair. Posture that suggested she was capable of sitting quietly while people cried for an hour.
“That’s me.”
She stepped aside and gestured toward the hallway. “Come on back.”
Her office looked less like a therapy space and more like someone’s living room that had accidentally become licensed for psychological evaluation. Two chairs faced each other with a small table between them. A plant sat in the corner next to a bookshelf that held titles about trauma, boundaries, and nervous system regulation.
I sat down and folded my hands in my lap, but that seemed performative and not something I would normally do, so I adjusted them.
Dr. Ellie settled into the chair across from me.
“I know this appointment was scheduled quickly,” she said. “So, we’ll keep things simple today. Mostly introductions, and a chance for me to get a sense of what brings you here.”
That sounded manageable.
“So,” she said gently, “what made you decide to come in?”
I considered lying. It seemed polite. But I was pretty sure lying in therapy was frowned upon.
Instead, I said, “An eleven-year-old.”
Her eyebrows lifted slightly. “Interesting.”
“She told me therapy helps organize your brain,” I said. “Then she demonstrated several coping mechanisms while building a tower out of drink coasters.”
Dr. Ellie nodded slowly, though I noticed she didn’t write anything down yet. She seemed content to let the comment sit between us for a moment.
I shifted in the chair, suddenly aware that I had just opened a therapy session by quoting an eleven-year-old.
“She also said my brain probably has too many thoughts at once.”
Dr. Ellie watched me with the patience of someone who had clearly done this many times before. She didn’t rush to respond. She simply waited.
Silence stretched across the room.
It became clear that she was not going to step in and finish the thought for me.
“That seemed possible,” I admitted.
Her pen moved across the paper in her lap. “And what kinds of thoughts tend to show up the most?” she asked.
The question sounded simple, but answering it required a brief negotiation with myself.
My first instinct was to deflect with something vague and socially acceptable: stress, work, the general complexities of life.
My gaze dropped to my hands.
Responsibility.
The word arrived uninvited and uncomfortably accurate.
Responsibility for my mother. Responsibility for people who needed help. Responsibility for situations that somehow became mine even when I hadn’t created them and hadn’t consciously volunteered to manage them.
