I Had Therapy Today

Trigger Warning: This essay contains discussion of trauma, sexual assault, depression, and suicidal ideation. Reader discretion is advised. If you or someone you know is struggling, please consider reaching out to a support resource. In the U.S., the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255).

I had therapy today. My 2,443rd session, give or take. I stopped counting precisely years ago, but the number lives somewhere in my body, a tally of hours spent trying to understand what happened to me, why I react the way I do, how to keep living despite it all.

Thirty years of therapy. Dozens of therapists. CBT, DBT, EMDR, somatic experiencing, psychodynamic, trauma-focused, ECT, tens of thousands of milligrams of psychotropic medication, ketamine shots... I have tried everything. All the things have kept me alive, but they have not made me whole.

Honestly, every day feels like therapy. There isn’t a clear line between treatment and living. Trying to understand myself has become my life’s work. I’ve spent so much time in constant self-examination that regular conversation feels strange. While others talk about errands or the weather, I’m tracking my thoughts, watching my breath, replaying memories, and always bracing for things to fall apart.

For years, I chased ideas instead of goals. I confused frenzy with progress and compulsions with purpose. My life went in circles. I told myself survival was enough. For a long time, survival was all I knew how to do.

In the earliest days of my adulthood, I lived in terror. I was afraid of my thoughts, my body, people, stillness, and movement.

The first time I met what would become the darkness was January 1994. I was eighteen. A high school senior. I lied to my parents, said I was spending the night at a friend’s house. I went to a party instead. My friend bought alcohol with her sister’s stolen ID. I thought it was a terrible idea and tried to stop her. She got caught. My parents found out. They blamed me for everything, but at that point, nothing really mattered. 

At the party, my ex-boyfriend violently raped me.

My parents did not know until spring. They punished me for the lie, for the party, for the fake ID that was not mine. Three months grounded. No car. No friends. Phone privileges revoked. No extracurricular activities. No television. School, chores, and extra house projects only. That was my penance. My parents’ standard consequence for my disobedience.

I didn’t care. It did not matter. Something inside me had broken open and would never seal. I did not want to leave my house. Did not want to see friends. Did not want a conversation. My parents thought I was being dramatic about the punishment. I was not.

I wanted quiet. I wanted to disappear.

For the first two weeks, I stayed in my bedroom. School was out. I did not have to pretend to be okay. I lay on my bed for hours, staring at the ceiling, dragging my thumbnail across my wrist. I wanted to feel something. Anything besides numbness. Sometimes I would tiptoe down the back staircase at night and sneak one of the small paring knives up to my room. When things felt overwhelming, I would sit under the combined light of the moon and the streetlight on the corner and drag the blade across my wrist. The knife was dull. It never even left a scratch. But on some days, it was the only thing that made me remember I was still alive.

When I picked up a pen, I did not write words. I drew lines.

Shapes filled my notebooks. Boxes within boxes, words trapped and sometimes violently crossed out, page after page with no progress. Without deciding to, I stopped eating. Hunger seemed irrelevant. Outside my window, the snow turned to muddy slush. I watched my world turn cold, heavy and gray.

At some point during those weeks, I was given permission to go to Blockbuster Video, my brother assigned as my escort. Across the parking lot from the strip mall stood a pay phone: the metal cold, the cord heavy, the receiver faintly sour with that public, unidentifiable smell.

I called the person who hurt me.

I do not know what I believed the call would give me. Closure? Proof I was not insane?

I was traumatized. Confused. Full of guilt and shame. I had lost all self-respect. When I finally got a break from being stuck at home, I used it to hurt myself. I did not know how to do anything else.

I do not remember the exact words. Who do you think you are? How dare you? Why would you hurt me like that? What do I do now?

But even as I spoke, I wasn’t really there. My voice sounded distant, like it came from someone else’s mouth. I heard the words leave my body, but could not feel them forming. My hand gripped the receiver, but the sensation was dull, as if my skin had been replaced with something synthetic. I was standing in the parking lot, but I was also somewhere else entirely: floating above myself, watching a girl use a pay phone, her breath visible in the cold air, her lips moving. The disassociation was so complete that I could not tell whether I was angry or numb, whether I was crying or simply shaking from the cold. My body had become a vessel I was no longer inhabiting, a thing that moved and spoke while I hovered somewhere nearby, untethered and weightless.

The response was quick. Shut up. It’s fine.  You were drunk and hit your head on the toilet seat. You just don’t remember anything right. Leave me alone. This isn’t my problem. You’re not my problem. Slut.

The dial tone came. I hung up.

In the silence that followed, I became aware of my body. Cold air whirled around me. I was dressed for a quick errand, not for standing outside in January. The cold passed through my jacket, through the buttons of my shirt.

That was when the blackness arrived. Not sadness. Not fear. Something heavier. I would face it many more times. But that night, standing in the Blockbuster parking lot in January 1994, it overwhelmed me.

The world did not end. Cars passed. People came and went from the video store. Families argued about which movie to rent. Life continued without me.

The depression that followed was not sadness. Sadness has an ending. This was a flattening weight that pressed down on every thought until thinking itself became exhausting. My body became impossibly heavy. Getting out of bed required a negotiation with gravity I could not win. Showering or even just  trying to lift a fork to my mouth felt like trying to move through wet concrete. Sleep offered no rest. I woke already depleted, as if I had been running all night. Time warped. Hours disappeared into nothing. Days blurred together. I could not remember what I had done yesterday, or if yesterday had happened. The present stretched thin and endless. There was no future, because I could not imagine anything at all. My mind had gone blank.

I stopped feeling connected to my own life. I watched myself go through motions: answering questions, nodding, performing the small rituals that signaled I was still functional. But I was not there. I was nowhere. The world continued around me, vivid and loud, while I existed behind a pane of thick glass, muted and distant. Nothing brought pleasure. Music sounded flat. Food tasted like texture without flavor. Sunlight felt like an accusation. The things I loved became impossible to complete, because I could not figure out why they even mattered.

The worst part was not the pain. It was the absence of pain. Emotions seemed like a language I used to speak but could no longer access. I would watch other people laughing, crying, and getting angry. I understood intellectually that these were appropriate responses. But I could not reach them. I was hollow.

Winter break ended. I went back to school. My body moved through the day, but my classmates and teachers moved like blurs of color, and they all sounded like muffled voices on a television I could not quite hear. In French class, just after the teacher led the Hail Mary, I heard the three boys behind me talking about that night. The moment. The rape, they did not call rape. They laughed. Stupid children. Little boys who had stepped into something way above their heads. They thought collectively shaming me for being an easy girl was amusing. They found my brutal assault funny to joke about during prayer. They did not realize I was already dead inside.

At some point, my friend  asked, while dragging on her Marborolo Light 100 in the bathroom by her locker in the old building friend, if I was okay. I said yes because I did not know how to explain that I was not sad, not angry, not anything. I was simply gone. And worse, I did not care that I was gone. The caring had been erased along with everything else.

I started drinking. Alone, in my bedroom, with the door locked. I stole bottles from my parents’ liquor cabinet, replaced what I took with water, and drank until the numbness became something I could control. The alcohol did not make me happy. It made me less aware. It softened the edges of thoughts I could not bear to think. It turned the volume down on the voice in my head that replayed that night on a loop. For a few hours, I could stop being tortured by my own mind. The relief was immediate and total. I moved through the world like a ghost in my own life. Breathing but not living. Surviving, barely, and only because I had found a way to make surviving slightly more bearable.

A glass jar over my head, sealed tight. Inside, everything sounded muffled and strange. Outside, life went on as usual.

I carried that feeling with me through high school and into adulthood. Sometimes it faded, and light came in, but other times it returned completely, and I forgot there was ever another way to feel.

Now, after decades of therapy, I can see how everything connects back to that pay phone. My fear of my own mind. Always being on guard. Blaming myself. The constant need to understand myself just to survive.

I have learned this: survival is the work. It means living with that feeling but remembering there was once something better. It means writing and naming what is happening. Standing in the cold long enough to feel it, and still choosing to go back inside.

I had therapy today.

Tomorrow, I will have it again.