Michael Ginsberg (jewsinspace) wrote in spaceodyssey, @ 2015-11-04 00:55:00 |
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Entry tags: | 2015, 2015.09, } x |
THAT BOY NEEDS THERAPY
September 4, 2015
Karen’s office is clean but homey, with art on the walls and a mid-sized fish tank bubbling on a desk by the window. Two small blue fish currently occupy it. There is no couch, but two overstuffed arm chairs, one with a wool throw draped artfully over the back and the other with a small decorative pillow on it. Her desk is nestled in the corner, home to a desktop computer and a laptop which she opens when she sits down, the screen facing towards her though she doesn’t yet look at it. She gestures to one of the chairs. She’s wearing a blazer and grey slacks, her long dark hair pulled out of her face with a clip in the back. Her degrees and license are hung on the wall behind her in plain brown frames. A bookshelf to the left holds a copy of the DSM-IV and V amongst various workbooks on subjects like OCD and anxiety, a few titles that look like memoirs, and some binders with various labels.
“Michael, hello. I’m Dr Wu.” She inclines her head, but doesn’t hold her hand out to shake. She works with a lot of people who don’t like to be touched. His girlfriend is one of them.It doesn’t take a doctor to tell that Michael is a frazzled ball of nerves right now. He hates this already. He’s been hating it since the moment Lee convinced him (no, forced him, forced him!) to do it. All his standard signs of discomfort are there: disheveled clothing, flushed skin, messy hair, fidgeting, defensively folded arms. He’s had to take time off work for this. It’s terrible.
All the frames on the wall don’t make him feel any better. They’re intimidating and clinical and make the homey styling of the room feel like a ruse. Well no one’s fooling him, he knows exactly what’s going on. He doesn’t want to sit down. It would be agreeing to all of this. It would be admitting something, giving up.
He paces back and forth a couple steps. “I didn’t want this, you know. I’m not interested in this. I changed my mind, I can’t do this.”
Right away: massive anxiety. It’s telegraphed from every feature, you don’t need to be a doctor to see it. (Though it helps.) She sits still, not writing anything down, not taking notes, just one leg crossed over the other with her hands gently in her lap. Her shoulders are pulled back, her posture open and defenseless. Like holding your arms out to show someone you’re not armed.
“Something convinced you to come in today.” Nobody rolled him in on a stretcher. The girlfriend’s not hovering outside the door. “Can you tell me what it was?”
“My girlfriend talked me into it. At the time I thought—”
He pauses with a conflicted, confused expression on his red face, breath held, before bursting out, “I dunno what I thought! But she doesn’t get it, I’m not like her, none of this will work on me and I don’t want you people in my head anyway.”
“What is it about you that you think would mean you wouldn’t benefit from therapy?” She doesn’t try to argue him out of that opinion; you don’t start a relationship with someone by telling them no, you’re wrong. There are a lot of valid reasons to reject psychotherapy. She’s curious what the girlfriend said that got him in here to begin with, if he’s so against the idea. She works with Lee, she highly doubts it was some kind of ultimatum.
“How do you differ from your girlfriend?”
Michael goes momentarily silent with the doctor’s words. The first question by itself would be easy to discard, to yell at and turn away from. It doesn’t mean anything to him. These people never believe what he says about himself, about his own body and mind. He’s not sure why they ask the first place.
But then she mentions Lee, and that’s different. The moment Lee comes into it the situation goes from professional to personal. Michael turns so that his shoulders and feet are facing Dr. Wu and he keeps them there. His eyes wander up to hers. They’re dark and frightened and stubborn.
He’s quiet for a bit longer, until he realizes both of her questions essentially have the same answer.
“I’m wrong. I’m not supposed to be here. For a while I thought Lee might be the same way, but she can take the medicine. She can breathe the air anywhere she goes.”
“Where are you supposed to be?”
She unfolds her legs and leans forward, elbows on her knees. “I can’t discuss Lee’s treatment with you, as I’m sure you’re aware, and I won’t discuss yours with her, unless you want me to. Have you taken medication before? I’ll be frank, it’s not typically my first option with new patients. I think a lot of doctors over-rely on it for issues that could be more effectively addressed through talk therapy, which is what this would be, if you decide to continue. Just talking.” They can revisit the topic of medication at a later time. It’s not always necessary and she needs a better idea of what the problem is, first.
Just talking doesn’t seem to Michael like it would do anything aside from possibly make him feel worse about himself, but he is surprised that it’s all she wants to do. He knows she gives Lee medicine—but he’s seen with his own eyes that Lee really needs it, that it helps them. He doesn’t know what to think. His head hurts. He hasn’t really slept since the riots.
For the first time since he walked in he unfolds his arms. He needs to rub at his eyes, they’re sore and gritty. The circles beneath them are worryingly dark. He wishes he could sit down.
“School nurses used to try and give me stuff when I was a kid because they thought I was sick all the time. I told ‘em I wasn’t, it was fine, but naturally they wouldn’t listen. They thought I was gonna die or something. I’ve still never had the flu in my life. What a waste of Robitussin.”
“So nothing psychiatric in nature. That’s good to know.” When he relaxes so does she, leaning back in her chair and folding her legs at the knee again. “Do you mind if I take notes?” She gestures at her laptop.
“Speaking of youth, though — would you mind telling me a little about you? Maybe a little about your childhood or where you’re at now. Even how you and Lee met, if you’re up for it.”
Michael tenses again when Wu talks about taking notes on him and prying into his childhood; he doesn’t want to talk about that time, doesn’t even want to think about it. None of it makes sense. For a while he thought he was figuring it out, that he’d been wrong about himself all along, but now he’s lost again and Lee keeps looking at him like they’re worried instead of curious the way they were when the two of them had first met. What changed? What do they know that he doesn’t?
They’ve always been smarter than him, though. He trusts in that. It’s why he’s here.
That doesn’t mean he trusts this doctor, though. Not yet. “What kinda notes?” he demands suspiciously. “Am I allowed to see ‘em?”
“I like to write down what my patients say, along with my thoughts and impressions. It helps me stay organised. I’m only human.” She taps her finger against the plastic casing of the laptop. She’s used to explaining to anxious patients that she’s not writing an order to have them locked up in the loony bin. “And yes, you are. According to HIPPA laws you’re entitled to see your medical records at any time. All you have to do is ask. That said, I’m bound by law to refuse to share them with anyone else, unless you give me permission.”
He huffs. Wu seems to have an answer for everything.
“Fine. I’m gonna sit in this chair, but that doesn’t mean I’m agreeing to anything!” Michael proclaims once he’s debated with himself for a few long moments. He drops into the armchair with the throw on it and crosses his legs ankle-over-knee. His fingers start fidgeting and tapping on the upholstery; all of him seems to be constantly shifting.
There’s another awkward silence before he’s able to bring himself to say anything more. “I met Lee last year,” he begins, eyes darting around again. “We were at a McDonald’s, real late at night. I got her some food because she couldn’t afford anything, and then I was surprised because she… you know, she stuck around for a while. She actually talked to me and she wasn’t scared. Not of anything.”
She nods her head. Staying on the subject of the girlfriend seems wise for now; she seems to be a safe topic, though she makes a mental note to nudge about his childhood sometime later when he’s less defensive. There is a lot that can be explained by someone’s upbringing, particularly in regards to anxiety, and getting at the root of the problem can put current things into perspective.
“Is that still true? I’m wondering what she said to you that made you come here today. I suppose that’s the difference between being scared of you and being scared for you.”
Michael’s expression turns fretful. He looks away, ashamed of himself, of the thought that he’d scared them in any way at all. “She said she was really worried, she just kept saying that and she looked so sad. I can’t stand it when she looks like that. I can’t be the reason for that, I can’t. I’d die.”
“Mm-hmm.” She nods and types a few quick notes, mostly a summary of the visit so far. She stops and folds her hands in her lap. “Let’s do an experiment,” she suggests. “If she were here, and I asked her to describe you, what do you think she’d say?”
He looks up, brows knit together, a mixture of curious and wary.
“I, uh. I dunno. Really short. Jewish. Terrible fashion sense. Loud. Sweaty. Needs a haircut. Creative, maybe. Good at my job. Um.”
He hits a block. What else is there to say? He knows they love him, but he’s never sure why; even when they spell it out it rolls off of him like oil off water. He can’t bring himself to repeat any of the compliments they’ve given him, all of them seem ridiculous now. Eventually he leans his face into his hand and shakes his head.
“I dunno what else. Probably some really nice stuff that isn’t true.”
She writes all of that down. ‘Needs a haircut’ makes the corner of her mouth quirk upwards. “What is it you do?”
Michael is more comfortable with this question than he has been with anything else she’s asked and it shows right away. He’s still fidgeting and nervous and uncomfortable, but he takes a deep breath and straightens his shoulders and looks her in the eye like he’s shooting for some semblance of professionalism.
“I’m a copywriter at an ad agency. And I am very good at what I do. I’m the best, because I have to be, you know. It’s the one thing I got going for me.”
Karen smiles again, her eyes crinkling more than anything else. “Oh, that’s interesting.” Also interesting: the complete 180 when it comes to self-esteem, there. “So in a way there’s a lot of overlap in what we do. Understanding people. How did you get into that?”
“Lee’s said that too, that I understand people, but I don’t think that’s true. I mean, look at me.” Michael gestures to himself hopelessly as if to say, could a real human ever look like this? “Mostly I was just good at writing and I liked telling stories, things like that. Pop said I should try and do something I could get paid for instead of making believe all the time. Well, the closest you can get to both is advertising. So I went to night school.”
“Maybe it’s more accurate to say that you understand how to appeal to people, then. Which doesn’t necessarily make it a priority in your personal life. Nor should it be, I think. It’s a useful skill to have, though.” She taps a pen against her knee. “Is your father supportive of what you do? What about Lee?”
“Lee is, of course she is. She’s great, always.” He seems a bit defensive of them. “Sometimes she asks me to help with her business, even, like naming a new product for her shop. ...I, uh. I think she probably wishes I didn’t work so much, especially since we both have trouble sleeping. We don’t get to see each other too much. If I weren’t so messed up—”
He cuts himself off, looks away. After messing with the hem of his shirt for a few seconds, he says, guardedly, “I dunno what Pop thinks. I don’t wanna talk about him.”
“Okay.” Just like that, the subject is dropped. Apparently, anyway. She’s not letting it go, just tabling this discussion for later, when (if) he trusts her more. Not pushing people to talk about things that make them uncomfortable on the first day you meet them is a pretty decent way to get to that goal.
“Maybe that could be a goal of yours. Seeing her more often. What do you think would help with that?”
“Lee tries to help, she—“
Michael hesitates, then remembers what Lee told him. It’s okay to tell Dr. Wu anything. She knows about magic. She is friendly to mutants. She will keep our secrets. He still feels uncomfortable doing this; though he’s only talking about Lee, someone Wu already knows, it seems like a betrayal and makes him paranoid and anxious.
He looks Wu dead in the eye again, ready to measure her belief. “Lee makes these boxes, magic boxes called Dreamhavens—I came up with that name. They let you sleep even when it’s almost impossible. She, uh, doesn’t let me use them every night, she says they can be addictive, but I’m allowed once a week. It’s always Sunday, though, because of... how I am. And it doesn’t really help us see each other. It just helps me survive Monday.
“I don’t know what else to do. Her medicine makes her so tired all the time and I’m already messing up her sleep.”
She doesn’t even blink. “Do you think you could talk to her about letting you use them more often? Or coming up with something more specific to your situation? Or hers.” She’s also making a mental note to nudge Lee about the effects her meds are having on her, not that she’ll mention this conversation specifically. “Pick the night before a day when you both have a lot of free time and take one together, maybe. Timing your sleep schedules to go together for at least one day of the week might be a good start. If she’s having trouble with oversleeping, though, you might want to ask her to tell me so we can figure something out that would help.”
All of that sounds nice to Michael, but it also makes him wonder how important details like those are in his life anymore when his lover was kidnapped and drugged by the government and his neighborhood is constantly terrorized by cops. Fine, he’ll mention Wu’s idea to Lee. Maybe they’ll get a few nice days out of it. He doesn’t have to come here every week for advice like that. Where is this conversation going, anyway? He can’t follow it, it’s making him dizzy.
“Okay, sure, but look, what is this? I don’t... I don’t know what we’re talking about. Are we talking about anything? I can’t just be sitting around, you know, I’m supposed to be working. I have to make sure Lee is safe.” One of his hands slides into his hair, fingers twisting around his messy curls.
“Lee asked you to come today because she’s worried about you. I don’t know why, or what she was thinking; I’m trying to catch a glimpse of that. That entails learning a little bit about you and your life, and I usually like to start with things that are comfortable. There has to be a level of trust going into the hard things that you don’t get from someone right away. I don’t expect you to trust me with that just because I say so.
“I know it’s hard to see this as something active you’re doing for your health, but it is. If there’s anything specific you’d like to talk about, I’m all ears. We’re here for you and your needs.”
She puts her pencil down and folds her hands in her lap again, her gaze steady but unthreatening. “What are you protecting her from?” She asks it casually like she’s not zeroing in on that because of the thought that it might be from herself.
Michael’s anxiety continues to rise. He folds his arms again, pressing himself back in the chair, genuinely distraught. The muscles in his neck and shoulders are drawn tight with tension. “I can’t tell you that. You might be one of them.”
“One of who?” She considers that question, then shakes her head. She makes a mental note: possible paranoia. Only possible, because she knows a lot about Lee and a little about Michael, namely that he’s a mutant and there was just a big production in the District with the new Sentinel program. It’s not paranoia if they are literally out to get you. “No, don’t answer that. But you consider her safety your responsibility, then? Why not hers?”
“Because I promised to protect her!” he exclaims, suddenly indignant. He slaps his hands down on the arms of the chair. “What kind of man would I be? So what if she’s a hundred times more powerful than I am? She’s not invincible, no one is. I’m the one who has to be there, I promised. I promised.”
His legs unfold and he leans forward, hands covering his face. “Goddammit.”
“It’s interesting to me that you say ‘man’ rather than ‘person.’” Person implies a fault of universal morality; man implies a failure to live up to a proscribed gender role, to provide and protect. It’s touchingly quaint. “So you’re anxious about leaving her alone, for whatever reason; it makes you feel like you’re failing at something. But you know you have to, you can’t be there all the time, and that’s not a personal failing on your part. That’s a lot of responsibility for one person. Does she know you feel this way?”
Michael’s palms press into his forehead. His fingers pull hard at his hair. “Yes,” he admits, sounding pained. Everyone in the neighborhood probably knows he feels that way now. He’s been refusing to tell anyone where Lee is—even other mutants, even their friends. He won’t give them any details about what happened. He refuses to help Lee leave the house now that their door is broken and he’s been begging them not to make a new one.
So far Lee has stayed home, but they keep looking at him like he’s the one in danger.
“…Sometimes, sometimes I think she’d be better off without me. Sometimes it’s worse when I’m there. I know it is. I couldn’t even—if she weren’t so powerful I couldn’t trust myself with this at all. But I’m selfish and horrible and I can’t leave, I love her too much.”
“Michael.” She leans forward, waits for him to look her in the face. “Loving someone, having their best interests at heart — that’s not selfish. Love can be selfish, but I think you’ve been through something that rattled you very deeply and now you feel insecure and unsafe, and you’re compensating by being over-protective. Am I close?” When she leans back she rests her elbows on the arms of her chair. “And I don’t think you’re horrible, either. I think, or rather I hope, that you know she probably doesn’t feel the same — that she’d be better off without you.”
Michael is trembling. His skin is hot, his eyes are hot. Dr. Wu is blurry when he glances up at her. It’s hard not to feel abruptly shy; no one but Lee has ever spoken to him so gently and calmly.
“Something happened,” he says, much quieter now. His grip on his hair relaxes but his fingers stay where they are. “It was bad. When all those riots happened, right before that. I got her out of it—Lee, she was in trouble—but she was hurt and I didn’t know what to do. The whole time it was like I was far away, like it was someone else. Nothing worked right, I—I couldn’t control the darkness. It was everywhere. I did things and I don’t even remember how.”
“Did you feel detached from your sense of self? Like you were floating outside of yourself or that you weren’t in control of your actions? Maybe things looked distorted or blurry, or maybe you were hyper-aware of the things around you?”
Michael moves his hands away from his face and slowly leans back in the chair again. There’s surprise in his wide, wet eyes. “Yeah. Yeah, a lot like that. How did you know? Does it happen to you, too?”
“It’s dissociation. It’s when you feel detached from your sense of self, like the things around you aren’t real, or that you aren’t real. You might feel emotionally numb or empty-minded, like you can’t think or feel properly, or a loss of agency. It’s symptomatic of a few things, but it can also be caused by trauma. Which makes sense, since it sounds like it was traumatic for you. Does it happen to you a lot, or was this the first time?”
The accuracy of Wu’s words is both unnerving and astonishing. He’s sharply reminded of the unsavory fact that she’s a doctor and she’s analyzing him like a specimen, a concept that he’s been gradually becoming distracted from; at the same time she’s put something into words that no one else has, not even Lee, and it shakes something around in him that he thought would never move.
“It happens a lot,” he says, wrapping his arms around himself again. He’s not sure what this means. He’s not sure he wants to be this honest, but it seems like the doctor would see right through him if he lied. “It always feels like that when I get the transmissions.”
“What kind of transmissions?” She manages to say that with the same casual affect she’s had this entire time, not the usual revulsion and fear a revelation like that typically inspires. She is, in fact, interested in what kind of transmissions, not that he’s having them at all. There are a lot of reasons someone can experience thought insertion.
The doctor is so calm, like people tell her they hear voices every day. Maybe they do. Maybe she’s not surprised because she’s already decided he’s insane. He wouldn’t blame her, not really, not at this point. It’s not like she’d be wrong.
“Messages. From somewhere else. A different dimension, or maybe outer space. I told you, I’m not from here, I’m not supposed to be here, that’s why everything is wrong. But they don’t want me back. They told me to stay here. Right here.”
He wants to pull his legs in close, curl up and hide. There’s nowhere to go. He remembers when he realized that what he’s saying now wasn’t true, and he doesn’t understand how he can believe it again so desperately. He can’t look directly at the paradox, at his own awareness, or a schism will open up that he can’t repair.
“Mm.” She sounds thoughtful. “They don’t tell you to hurt yourself or others, do they?” She resettles in her seat, offering a lopsided smile, like yeah I know. “I have to ask.”
She takes a sip from a bottle of water and leans on one elbow on the arm of her chair. She’s made a note about possible issues with abandonment. “If you’re willing, these are all things we can work on — coming to the root cause of your dissociation, deciphering the meaning and origin of the transmissions. We can figure out what your triggers are and how you can navigate around them. It would give you some control back over your life. You’ve already done a lot; I know this is hard for you and I can see that it’s causing you significant distress, and I think it would be beneficial for you to be able to talk to someone about these things knowing you aren’t going to be judged or turned away. I know you have Lee, but I also know there are things it’s hard for us to tell our loved ones out of fear they might look at us differently. I guarantee you I’ve heard it all before; if you manage to tell me something weirder than I’ve already heard, I’ll give you twenty bucks.”
“Twenty dollars? That’s not very confident,” Michael gripes, but it’s halfhearted. He fidgets and shifts a little more and thinks everything over. The possibility of finding the ‘root causes’ and ‘origins’ for all the ugliness inside of him scares him shitless, but control of his life—of himself—is what he’s always wanted. Dr. Wu knows and is trusted by Lee, believed everything he said, took him seriously, might even give a shit. He doesn’t know a single thing about her, which makes him nervous when he thinks about everything she knows about him now, but he and Lee were the same way once. He’ll ask Lee what they know, what they think. He wants to go home, hold them, take a nap together. He’s so tired.
“Fine.” He sighs and avoids her gaze as he completely ignores the question about whether the transmissions are ever violent. “Lee’s just gonna worry if I don’t keep going.”
“Let’s schedule something for next week, then. Let me know when works for you. Even a Saturday, if you’re really concerned about missing work.” Work is her life, and it’s not unusual for her to meet patients on the weekends. Sometimes it’s the only day someone has off. And what the hell is she going to do on a Saturday anyway, watch Sex and the City reruns and eat barbecue chips?
She closes the laptop and stands up. Her tattooed sleeve peeks out from the cuff of her shirt when she holds out a hand to shake, finally.
Michael stands up when she does, trying not to look as weak as he feels. He’s sweaty, as usual (summer helps nothing), so he wipes his hand on his pants before touching hers. His skin is hot, much hotter than it should be, and his grip is firm. “Uh, Saturday would be good, except I try and sleep during the day on the weekends... What are your hours? Is four or five too late?”
She makes a note of the temperature; there are some somatic elements to the disorders she’s tentatively thinking of and it’s good to keep track of that anyway. “That’s fine. Office hours are until five but I’m usually here until seven anyway. Speak to my secretary, she’ll get you set up. It was very nice to meet you, Mr Ginsberg, and I look forward to our next meeting.”