In our final session, my most recent therapist (second favorite overall) attempted to sign off with a small, unexplained laugh. It wasn’t rare to see him smiling and laughing. I took a strange pride in how many times I made him (and us) laugh in our meetings – especially when my face was still wet from “the work”. But this time, I'd made no distracting, self-regulating joke. He just laughed.
I readjusted the laptop against my thighs and matched his smile. I asked him what caused it. He said he was excited to see what would happen next.
This word “next” hadn’t been used before. We were only ever going backwards.
Wanting to elongate our last session, I asked him what he meant. He wondered aloud, with the freedom of a person who legally never had to see you again, all his possible meanings.
“Next” as in for the upcoming holidays and school year.
“Next” as in right after now, how I might exit from the heaviness of the session.
“Next” as in now that I’m coping. Now that I'm better.
He said he was curious to see who I might become with this new relationship to my trauma. He wondered aloud if I would write the same things; research the same things; love the same people; need, want, desire, reject, hate, go quiet or loud around the same entities.
I spent the last several months sitting under the small heat of my borrowed laptop and faithfully following the finger movements of this man I barely knew. ‘Back and forth,’ he'd always say. ‘Good job.’ It was my first time doing EMDR and my first time using a remote therapist. The whole ordeal – so far removed from my conscious, real-time reality – felt fictional, silly, nonsensical. But I'd already tried what felt like all the other real, grounded, and sensical “solutions”.
So, there I was. One evening a week, I’d asked everyone in the house to put on their strongest headphones lest they overhear too many parts of the “real” me. I walked to the room furthest from the common areas, shut the door, logged into our virtual sessions, and waited to go back in time.
I’d have to change shirts after my sessions. Sleeves and necklines would be covered and soaked from my processing. After, I'd float through the house quieted at what I had just done – how strong the work proved I was and had, maybe, always been.
In that last session, when my therapist congratulated me, I laughed it off; but I felt it. I had laboured. I had exhausted myself trying to uncover and recover my self. I had done something worthy of congratulating.
But now, there was this “next”. Now, there was this other, newer, person to be. To still be and keep being. My therapist’s job was done, but so much more was starting and re-starting.
When I told him it felt like he was leaving me for someone else, he corrected me. He said he was leaving me for hundreds of thousands of someone elses – a backlog of NHS waiting-list survivors and allies (immediately, he confirmed he was joking – his first joke). ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘it’s more that you’re leaving me. I’m genuinely excited about who you might become’.
As usual, our time was up before I knew what to say.
I don’t feel I’ve lived in an open-ended world for a while now. It’s intimidating – being asked to both hold, accept, and grow myself. Being expected to form and reform, trust and love, and try and want again. Of all the fears and worries covered during our time, “fear of being” hadn’t made the list. I didn't want to get me wrong.
The screen went black from inactivity. I sat in that unknowing for a while. I’m still sitting in it. I’m not sure I am ready for the responsibility of “next”. I don’t know where to start. But here I am starting.
— Ngozi "N/A" Oparah
