Jamie: narrative - going to therapy Who: Jamie Mayer When: Recently (last month or so) Warnings: None
Words, Jamie figured, were hard. Routinely. He couldn’t make them fit together, a jigsaw of things he meant to say and the things he said and the things he didn’t say at all. He liked to do instead. To cope.
Jamie had never liked the therapy thing.
He hadn’t been. Dad wasn’t big on talking (shocker) and it wasn’t like the family didn’t have enough to deal with: Amy’s illness, Mars’ disappearance and then Si. Jamie was like and unlike Dad or maybe he just wished he was unlike Dad. Dad was locked in time and it was probably a stretch to say Jamie had figured out he probably was too, because he hadn’t.
But it had come up. At class. At the company. The occasional nervous breakdown, the occasional injury that took someone out. They’d offered it to him at the hospital: hey, your career’s toast, feel like talking about it to someone with no idea? Pass. Pretending? Was something Dad did. Maybe it had gotten handed down, a survival tool or something. Jamie had pretended a lot. And he had other ways to cope.
But it was like shit was unstaunched. The family wasn’t even pretending it held water, it was a sieve. Jamie hadn’t seen Dad in literal years. He hadn’t seen his stepmom in longer. And his family felt unbraided? Like the strands were coming apart further and further, which would have bothered him less before, but it bothered him now. Or maybe it was how fucked up it had been, yk? The unbraiding. It was probably literally the opposite of how you were meant to approach therapy: with an open heart or some shit like that, not for someone else.
He tried three. Like Goldilocks and the bears, the first one was a woman about his mom’s age, if she was still around. She had bouffant hair that looked coiffed, and a cardigan and he couldn’t like, sit there and talk about all the ways he coped, as she put it, stepping delicately around the bones of old shit unearthed. It felt like telling his Dad about his latest hook-up, seedy af in the light of two armchairs in a back room of her home. Words weren’t going to come, so he ditched five minutes before time and he didn’t pick up the phone to her calls.
The second was a dude. He thought maybe that was easier? Sitting across from a guy. A guy would get it, and that was as far as Jamie got, with the furled knot that didn’t pry open: masculinity a box you could throw all guys into. Except it wasn’t. The guy was dapper, short, with a bald head that shone and a throat he cleared and he talked slow and carefully, like the bones were breakable, smashable, like Jamie was broken before he’d even begun.
The third one? Dawn. He picked her because her bio said she dealt with trans kids, with LGBT, implied cool with the shit he didn’t know how to talk about, the way that stuff felt important, more important than being from like, Florida or what he did now instead of dance. And her apartment - the Capital, because fuck doing this thing in his backyard - was thrift-heavy, an afghan over the back of a dull yellow chair was where he sat, and he figured out half-way through the second session that along with cats-eye glasses, perfect lipstick and a tattoo that peeked against her shoulder, she had a no-shit attitude about bones. The buried stuff? Was kind of expected, and she sat there waiting and filled no silence at all. The silence was his, to kind of color in. And after the third time? He started mostly because he was bored of silence completely.
She unpicked, Dawn. Like the afghan hooked together, stitch by stitch. She unhooked and she unpicked, until the stitches holding him together felt way fucking loose. She set the kind of rules he thought were stupid, and then she told him, with the curl of her mouth flicking around the words like he was predictable, that he’d think they were stupid but still rules. She knew stuff, without knowing it at all and it made it easier.
She killed off ‘do’. And she left nothing behind but words. Which was like, counter-intuitive. But it made it easier, after all.
She told him, in a voice that was fair and nonjudgmental, but he imagined pretty exasperated when he played it back, that he needed to stop. Like, stop it all, not just the days when he drank hot water and lemon and smoked cigarettes to forget the stomach cramps. ‘You don’t sound like you like this,’ she observed, and she said stop, like pause. Like you could do that in life, hold off on the direction you were headed in, what felt like juddering, nauseous inevitability and the person you didn’t know you were but you didn’t like.