Dear Blog Readers,
Theo is nineteen and very funny and working very hard not to let you see that the funny is doing a job. This piece made me smile and then it made me sit very still. That combination, I think, is exactly what Theo intended, whether they would admit it or not. Read it the way it deserves to be read: all the way through, including the parts that make you laugh, because those parts are telling you something too.
Be kind to yourself and remember to nourish your body, mind, and that place inside you that makes you who you are.
Your blog moderator, Kira
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The therapist my parents found me has a small succulent on her windowsill that is clearly dying and I have not said anything about it for six sessions. I keep looking at it and thinking: same, honestly. Then I think about what she would say if I said that out loud and I decide it’s not worth the follow-up questions.
Her name is Dr. Aroha and she is originally from New Zealand and she has this way of tilting her head when she’s waiting for me to continue that makes me feel like a documentary subject. Like I am being observed. Like at any moment David Attenborough is going to begin narrating my eating habits in hushed, concerned tones.
Here we observe the young person, Theo, aged nineteen, avoiding the question by making it a bit.
I do that. The bit thing. My friend Soo-Yeon calls it deflection and I call it personality and we are probably both right.
Here is what I have actually told Dr. Aroha, in six sessions: my pronouns, my program (first year, creative writing, TMU, which she called Ryerson once and I corrected her and she thanked me), my parents’ names, the fact that I have a cat named Parliament, and that things were hard during COVID. That last one took me four sessions to say. I said it like I was reporting on the weather in a country I had never visited. Things were hard during COVID. She waited. I looked at the succulent. Session over.
What I have not told Dr. Aroha: anything real.
This is not her fault. She is good at her job. She has a very calm face and she never makes the noise, the small sympathetic inhale that makes me want to dissolve into the floor. My mother makes that noise constantly. My father has a variation of it. My older sister Bex makes it and then immediately tries to fix whatever I’ve said, which is somehow worse, like my feelings are a problem to be solved rather than a thing that is simply occurring.
I love them. I want to say that because it matters. I love my family. They are trying. My mother put a note on my door last month that said thinking of you with a little drawing of Parliament the cat, which she is not good at drawing, so it looked more like a potato with ears, and I kept it. I still have it. It is on my wall next to a printout of a Mitski lyric and a photo of me and Soo-Yeon from before everything, when we were fifteen and stupid and at a concert and completely unaware that we were happy.
Before everything is how I think about that time. I know that’s not a healthy framework. Dr. Aroha would have thoughts about it. But that’s how it lives in my brain, divided cleanly into before and after, with the pandemic as the hinge.
Before: I was fine. Or I thought I was fine. I was fourteen and weird and figuring out gender stuff and deeply committed to a webcomic I was writing that I now recognize was extremely derivative of things I liked, but I was into it, and I had Soo-Yeon, and things were manageable.
After: March 2020. School closed. I went home. I did not leave for a very long time.
I’m not going to get into the specifics of what happened in that apartment. Partly because some of it I’m still sorting out and partly because I’ve read enough about safe messaging to know there are things you don’t put in writing when you don’t know who’s reading. What I’ll say is that I was alone with myself for a long time, with no body but my own to focus on, and that turned out to be a problem.
The body thing started quietly. It always does, from what I’ve heard. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t show up at your door wearing a sign. It seeps in. It offers itself as a solution to a problem you haven’t named yet, and by the time you notice it’s not actually a solution, it has rearranged the furniture of your brain and started forwarding your mail.
I became, during those months, very interested in rules. I am a person who responds to chaos by making systems, and everything was chaos, and so I made systems. Some of them were fine. I made a spreadsheet for my homework. I watched every episode of a British baking competition show in order, twice. I organized my bookshelf by colour, which is aesthetically pleasing and organizationally useless, but whatever. Some of the systems were not fine. Those ones I’m not listing.
By the time I went back to school I had lost some weight and gained a reputation for being a little bit strange and a lot bit quiet and I want to tell you something true about that period: I liked the quiet. I had built a very small world and I knew exactly its dimensions and I could move through it without touching the walls and that felt, at the time, like safety.
It was not safety. I know that now. But knowledge and feeling are not the same room.
Here is the thing about being nineteen and non-binary and having something you can’t name: there are no pamphlets. There are pamphlets, technically, but they are for people who look like a stock photo, and I do not look like a stock photo. I look like someone who thrifts their entire wardrobe and has opinions about fonts and once got into an argument online about the Oxford comma that lasted four days. The pamphlets are not for me.
Or they weren’t. Until I found Sheena’s Place.
I found it the way I find most things, at two in the morning, in a research spiral that had started somewhere completely different. I read the website for forty minutes. I read that you didn’t need a diagnosis. I read that you didn’t need to be at any particular stage of anything. I read that everyone is at a different place in their recovery and that language, everyone is at a different place, sat in my chest in a way I didn’t expect.
I had spent so long arguing with myself about whether what I had was real enough to count. Whether I was sick enough. Whether I was performing something for an audience that didn’t exist. Whether naming it would make it more real or whether it was already real and I was just terrified to look at it directly.
I did not want to take up space that someone else needed more.
I signed up anyway. I went to one group. I sat in a room with people who were not stock photos either, who were all kinds of people, and nobody asked me to explain myself, and the facilitator said something in the first five minutes that I have been thinking about ever since.
She said: your presence here is not a question that needs to be answered.
I cried a little bit. Very quietly. I’m pretty sure Soo-Yeon, who came with me, noticed. She didn’t say anything. That’s why she’s my person.
I’m still in groups. I’m still seeing Dr. Aroha, the succulent is still dying, and I am still, on many days, more committed to the bit than to the feeling underneath it. But I am here. I keep showing up. That is, I’m learning, the whole thing. Just keep showing up.
Parliament just knocked my water glass off my desk. I think he’s trying to tell me something.
Loading, I think. That’s what I am. Still loading