• I am at a loss. this weekend was a sucker punch to the jaw and now I’m desperately chasing my own silhouette. oh and it’s finals week?

  when I was 16, I had a string of panic attacks and a recurring nightmare about a lion chewing off my hands. my parents sent me to this wacky therapist who told me I had no cognizant sense of self and that that was the root of my disarray. I said but if that isn’t freedom, I didn’t know what was.

  she said yes. and no. lack of personal identity was a dangerous thing indeed. I could slip through the cracks of adolescence. I could be, god forbid, insignificant.

  she asked “who are you?”

  and I responded with “who are you?”

  “no!” she scolded, like I was a disobedient dog. “deflection is a defense method which…” I honestly don’t recall much of the therapy gobbledygook because I was probably zoning out and wondering what it might be like to be a coyote. or if the ocean ever felt lonely. some super zen shit like that. I remember she slid a blank piece of paper to my side of the table and I rejoiced. fuck yes, I specialized in de-blanking pieces of paper. she told me to start with the basics. “who are you?” I ended up writing some stupid story about a llama gifted with a lovely falsetto and how it conquered the Midwest.

  the therapist  read it and tore it in half, and frustration curled between my teeth. it tasted metallic, like blood. she went to her computer and printed out some sort of resume and slid that over to my side of the table. I quickly realized she stole it right from an infamous online dating website. “we’re starting with the basics” she said again. and she waited. I remember thinking it was such a bullshit exercise because everyone always lied on dating resumes anyway.  so I ended up answering as if I was a member of the Glass family. I thought I was being clever, but she didn’t care, she didn’t even notice. in her eyes, she saw that I had overcome a certain aversion, of myself, of talking about myself. even if “myself” was a fictional character I plucked from a book.

   I’m not going to do that now. I’m scared right now, terrified even. my fire’s gone out and I’ve lost my way so I’m falling back to the surefire ashes, the fundamentals. 

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