V

He looked up from drawing a picture on a little notepad. A few strokes of pencil that continue to haunt me.

“Is this as bad as you get?” Dr. Counselor asked at our last meeting as I wept continuously over little, white and fluffy.

“What?” I sniffled and reached for another tissue and squinted at the V he’d drawn.

“Let’s say this is you. Are you at the deepest part of the hole? Right now?”

I immediately flashed to a picture of myself curled under a towel on my bathroom floor in the middle of the night, winced and shook my head firmly.

“No.” I offered decisively. “I’ve been much worse than this.”

“OK.” He accepted that easily since I seemed so sure. “So let’s say this is you.” He pointed to a point a meager way up the right side of the V (Please see NowModel). I frowned, disappointed in his assessment of my progress. “You’re out of the worst part of the hole.” I nodded, met his gaze. “The question is, do you want to go back down there or do you want to keep climbing out?”

“I don’t like it down there.” I said quickly. “I want to keep climbing out.” Then I stared at the V, a bit fearful, feeling sick at the thought of going back to that scary place. The more I stared at that bottom point, the more awful it seemed. Sharp, consuming, small and filled with suffocating pain. I almost drowned in it. So when he pointed at the uppermost point on the right side - Eventually, he smiled encouragingly.

“Some day you’ll be here.” He assured, and I shook my head at him, near panic, and he frowned.

“You don’t want to be there.” He guessed because I wasn’t saying anything – just sitting in the chair, legs crossed, arms folded protectively around myself until I had to wipe my eyes with another tissue. Then he offered me his pencil. “What’s wrong with there? Can you fix it?”

“I don’t know how..." I paused, thought for a moment. “I don’t know who I’ll be when I’m there.” I said. Pointing with the pencil to the Eventually point and watching it tremble in my hand.

“When I was here,” I said, getting hysterical as I pointed to the top left point looking so high and far in the past, “I was a good person, but painfully naïve. I read romance novels, for goodness sake! Really believed that the world was benevolent and that people who deserved love would eventually find it! I will not be that naïve again! After my defense? When my world fell apart then? One of my committee members said I was smart, capable, good at what I did – but painfully naïve. But I decided he was an ass, so I stayed the same. But look at me now! Being naïve leaves me in the hole! I can’t go back to the hole!” Then I stopped, realizing I had started to sob sometime in my tirade. Shocked, I realized I was leaning angrily over the little sheet of paper, pointing with my pencil, both feet on the floor, both hands placed on the desk.

I leaned back in my chair, blinked at him, and placed the pencil gently by the paper. “I’m sorry.” I whispered.

“No,” he corrected. “You’re angry.”

I nodded, looked down and focused on breathing for a moment. I’m deeply uncomfortable with crying in front of people. I do that in private. So my copious tears were vaguely awkward to me, but sobbing? I don’t do that. So I stepped back, gulped back the pain, and settled myself a bit. I acknowledge now - and did to some extent then as well - that I'm viciously angry that I had to abandon my worldview. That I allowed myself to push too far and give too much - not just at one point, but over and over again over the past years - until I lost something.

“My point,” I continued, because I wanted him to know, “is that part of my being a good person was naively believing that it was the best way to be. That any minor pains were worth the reward of being truly available to love people.”

“Can you repeat that statement now?” He reminded me which one. I was supposed to parrot it back to him, then state how true or false I found it. For this one, I just stared at him. Finally shook my head. He repeated it several times, I blinked back tears and started to disengage. So we moved on.

“It is…” I rolled my eyes and sighed. This was bizarre! I could say whatever I wanted.

“It is…” I tried again and twisted my mouth. Shrugged. He said the phrase again, gently, and waited while I thought for a moment. "I should be able to say it!" I offered, frustrated.

"No 'should'ing." He reminded me. "You could say it. If you want to. It's just an option I think might help."

“It’s better to have…” I broke off again and frustration at myself took over. I’d just pick up where I left off – only a few more words to go. “loved and lost than to have never loved at all.” I finished in a rush. Then, before I had time to censor it, I finished with “Whatever. I don't know that I believe that. I don’t know that I want to.

“Which brings me to the point I was trying to make. I don’t know how to hope for that Eventually point because I don’t know how to be realistic and good any more than I knew how to at the far left point. It’s one or the other. And being naïve is too damn dangerous to do.

"But I don't want to be a bad person. That's not OK. But I can't let someone hurt me that badly again.”

Though he told me we’d work on it, I still don’t know how it’s going to come together for me. But I do have a couple of notes as I went though and made these graphs.

• I can get stuck when focused on local minima or maxima.
  
• The total picture is only available for retrospective analysis, so I’m faced with working with what I know now.
  
• Zooming in on a particular region – even if said data is acquired over years – doesn’t mean I can predict the future.
• “It’s not linear.” –Friend, many times.
• Though I can fit a line to my moods when I look over a large enough range of time, when you get closer, it’s clear that there are days where improvement is constant, then there’s a dip backward.
  
• I wouldn't remember all the nonlinearity without the blog. Even in my head, the healing so far has been slow, but steady. It's good to note that's not the case (see green line of actual data). I've slid backward quite a bit, only to move forward again.
• My V is lopsided.
• The slope downward was steep, though we're zoomed in too far to note my problems in July (which were pretty severe) or my breakdown around the time of my defense the July before.
• Regardless, it will likely always be easier for me to fall than climb. It's OK that the blue model doesn't match the green prediction based on recent data. It'd be lovely if I made huge jumps forward, but I'm content with taking small, comfortable steps.
• The smaller slope will get me to the Eventually point more slowly, but that's OK.
  
• I'm afraid of the Eventually point. I don't know how to picture it. I don't know what I believe. I hope the anger will pass and that I'll start to feel to a greater depth than I'm currently capable of accomplishing. But I'm nervous about it.
• We hate the hole.
• It's very scary and dark in that place.
  
• Once I got out of that place - and I wasn't there for all that long - there's room for laughter and distractions and all sorts of lovely things. Perhaps there's less room than there could be, but there is joy. I look forward to certain days now - to work and friends and Christmas. Church, dates, family - all sorts of stuff.
  
• I'm capable of much more joy than I can currently feel, so it's worth the effort to keep climbing, regardless of the slope I take.

"I can't force you to get better." Dr. Counselor said. "I think I can help you. I know you can do it. But you have to want it more than I do - and I want it a lot. Do you want to get better?"

"Very much." I answered. It's scary and I kept thinking about the V enough to create another blog entry about that session, but I do want to get better. So while I'll say that therapy isn't nearly as terrifying as I thought it would be, it does have moments where I'm vulnerable and afraid.

Since I don't like crying in front of people, being vulnerable and afraid, or thinking about areas of my life that continue to cause pain, it's important to remind myself that I really do want to get better. It confuses me that Dr. Counselor so sincerely wants to help when I don't have that much faith in the good in people lately. I'd like to recapture that - truly believe in good again. So I'm climbing out of my stupid, scary V. We shall see what emerges.