City Lights

The woman who shambled into the room was different from the one I had seen online. A cane was in her left hand, and she hesitantly reached out to the doorframe to guide herself into the room, almost as if she were blind. The cane shocked me, even though I had been told about it prior to this meetup, simply because it looked so out of place in her young hand. She smoked from an electronic cigarette, puffing away at it resentfully like a cigar. Observing the deeply dulled orange hair, the aggressive, Swedish features, her height––it all sort of made sense why she was allowed to continue smoking in the lobby, even though it’s explicitly banned. From Alice Thornendal, I got the distinct feeling that she was, despite her physical weakness, someone of immense will.

She waved dismissively and sat down, dropping her cane. She swore and shakily stood up to get it. She spent a while adjusting it so that it wouldn’t fall off her chair, still holding the cigarette in her mouth. I told her that if she wanted to continue the meeting, she’d have to turn it off. She looked at me blankly for a moment, as if I had called her a slur. I found that my initial observation was right––she was going to be willful. She continued to stare at me, and only after I had maintained eye contact for a while did she slowly take the cigarette out of her mouth and turn it off. She broke out into a grin. I allowed myself not to give her any positive feedback and decided to tell her about the confidentiality of therapy. I went over the usual details and she seemed disinterested. I asked her if she understood, and she nodded briskly.

The Thornendal I had seen briefly online was different from the one I ended up working with for a few months. In our brief consultation, she was so immensely ready to share and to describe exactly how she felt, even if she was at a loss for words. I watched as she faltered and stumbled––just the way she moved in person, actually––but continued, no matter what. It sounds cheesy, obviously. That’s the way it is with therapy. For every couple of insightful, deeply touching conversations I have with patients, I get a lot that seem insightful but are meaningless. And that’s what our first consultation really was––Thornendal moving through generalities of emotion: “I feel like shit and I don’t know why”, “Fucking hate this stupid place, I wish I had something better”. I was speaking the truth when I first said that she was willing to talk about herself––the first important step in therapy––but how deep those truths go is also important.

The Thornendal I got to know in therapy was decisively different.

Often, with therapy, I’ve noticed people describing patients as having ‘sealed’ themselves in, like they have created a wall around themselves. I think that can be true, but I also think that with most patients, it’s really more like sinking into themselves. I imagined Thornendal physically caving in on herself, her head and shoulders receding into her ribcage. She used every aspect of herself to prevent me from talking to her.

She couldn’t even touch upon what made her unhappy anymore, preferring to talk about other people’s problems instead.

“That fucking neighbor,” she’d say. I became acutely aware of the constant swearing she used. It bothered me, but I couldn’t exactly explain why. These sorts of things are always important in therapy, because typically, most therapists don’t really get upset based off of things their patients say. It’s part of the job to be able to not care, and when feelings like this one cropped up, I always tried to analyze them. “All she does is, is, I don’t even know, like, knit? Just sit on the steps of that gorgeous brownstone house and knit, it’s pathetic. I just know she has like, 14 cats or something.”

“Why do you feel like you have such a strong reaction to your neighbor?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you feel as if something she does feels, for instance, passive aggressive? Like, maybe you find her behavior to be posturing?”

“No, not at all. She’s just a stupid person, I’m sorry, but it’s true. Did I tell you about the state the city’s in, yet? Christ, so much to say, so much to not do… It’s like they’re adding in a new, uh, fucking… You know, they’re adding in a new deli or shop here and there, and they’re all overpriced wastes of energy. Who keeps supporting this crap?”

“Have you been out on the street often this week?”

“No. I stay at home because walking is painful. I actually made one exception because there was an interesting play on this week, so I went. Stupid decision.”

She instinctively went to her bag to take her e-cigarette out. I stopped her.

The rest of the session was spent similarly.

Upon exiting, she turned and smiled, thanking me. I was perplexed, since she didn’t appear to be deriving anything from therapy, but I knew that these kinds of harsh, judgmental feelings are what slows progress. She immediately took the cigarette out again, and before I could say something, she ambled off.

The next week was similar. I remembered that brief moment of clarity, when she said that walking was painful, and I attempted to latch on to it, to give those feelings a shape. I asked her if the reason she didn’t go out much was that it hurt––an obvious question, but she had never truly expanded on it. I was hoping that by asking the obvious, I could lure her out into actually talking about herself.

“I’m in a lot of pain these days, so yeah. No shit.”

People like Thornendal have always gotten under my skin so precisely and so quickly. It was at this exact moment that a fatigue started to wash over me. I felt too hot, too stuffy, too drained. I checked if the air conditioning was on, and it was making the air freezing, apparently. And yet, my drive to interact with anyone, even myself, was killed.

“I remember that it seemed like you talked a lot about other people and how they bothered you, do you think that’s a correct assessment, Alice?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think that maybe it’s because when you see them on the street, they’re typically doing it for leisure? Like all those people at restaurants, and sitting on the steps leading up to their apartments. Moving, for them, isn’t a necessity.”

I saw something interesting happening in her face, like some kind of a chemical reaction. It grew paler, but her eyes grew a little redder. A sensitivity wandered across her face that made her instantly seem vulnerable. She scratched her jaw and everything left her.

“Probably. I don’t know.”

“Do you have anything that you like to do at home?”

“Why do you ask?”

And immediately, I was yanked into feeling negative towards her. I had never felt this way with a patient before, and it was starting to alarm me. If I could break my composure so easily around her, it might start happening around other patients. I wrestled with my fatigue and tried again.

“I’m just curious.”

“No, I don’t play board games or read or whatever jerk-off shit people say I should. I’m a grown woman.”

“What do you do then?”

“Sometimes I scroll on my phone. I like seeing those little animals missing legs or something––not the bad ones, I mean. Like, I enjoy seeing the ones that get rehabilitated. Am I using the right word there? ‘Rehabilitated’?”

“Yeah, ‘rehabilitated’ works.”

I wasn’t sure if she recognized it, but the fact that she could project her feelings onto things she may subconsciously have wanted to become was impressive.

“But yeah. Those videos are fun. And then the algorithm starts giving me gore and I freak out, so I have to reset everything… Stupid.”

“You’re saying the algorithm…?”

“You’re not online much, are you?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“The big old machine that feeds me my slop picks up on what I enjoy watching, so it starts pushing more and more specific content into me. Finally, it just thinks ‘injured animals is what this woman wants, so I’ll give it to her’. Then I have to wipe the data it’s collected and start again.”

“How do you do that?”

“It’s easy. Just delete the account and make a new one. I’m not a genius or something.”

I was impressed by the resilience of her logic for a brief moment. I found it telling that the second she picked up on this, she made sure to put herself down.

This is one of the things I started to be reminded of more and more often with her––that emotions, for her, were something she could flip around their hinges, if that makes sense. Everything could change with every flip.

Over the next couple of weeks, I noticed that her willingness to talk about herself fluctuated sometimes, but that it was stabler than before.

We had met in August, and by late September, she had started to occasionally brush up against what made her unhappy. The swearing continued, but it became less of a conversational crutch.

One time, we were sitting across from each-other, talking about nothing, when her disease came up. I remember that she had willfully steered the conversation into it. It felt like she felt that she was finally ready to actually talk about it. When she actually mentioned it, she took a long breath. It looked like she had submerged herself in her thoughts for a short while, and when she came back up, she jumped to complaining about her neighbor. I was willing to listen for a short while before I could try to navigate us back to the feelings that had cropped up. As she talked, the fatigue was starting to wear away at me.

“Old bitch. She just sits there, all day, breathing in the smog and the pollution––can you believe this––sometimes she even brings out her shitty little radio. Do you know what she listens to? Some smooth jazz. Smooth jazz! The absurdity of this little old woman who just sits there in this noisy, evil city. She probably has cancer and she doesn’t even know it yet, just because of her refusal to just sit inside sometimes. And, worst of all, you know, she’s a hypocrite. She’s a bloody hypocrite. I’m all friendly with her––never wasn’t––and she’s all friendly with me, and when everything gets worse for me and I start needing this stupid cane and I start jittering a little, she starts acting like I’m a terrorist or something. And she does the same thing! She doesn’t have the same disease, it’s probably some old-person-setback because she never took care of herself when she was younger, but she stumbles, she fucking, you know, like––it’s just unfair. She’s a shaky, weak old woman, and she’s, she’s going to die alone. She’s going to die alone.”

I saw that her face had gone pale again. She stared at something around my knees, seeing it yet not seeing it. There was quiet for a while.

“And it’s not fair for either of us,” she said after the air had settled.

The fatigue was gone. I found myself astonished from all the emotions I was feeling. I had to rummage through them, to find what was useful in the moment and what I had to understand later. I instantly noticed that I had somehow drawn many emotions to myself. I had instantly made her words about myself and how they affected me. Excitement welled up inside of me as I started to realize that Thornendal had changed the way I saw things. She was, in her own way, showing me a dilemma. Through some mysterious, unnamable trait, she could be almost unbearable. I had dealt with patients far angrier, far ruder, and far less able to talk about themselves, and yet, this young woman was making me feel so, so tired. And even though on most days she was able to make me miserable, there were moments like this, when I instinctually knew that I had to see this to the end, that helping her was the best thing I could do for anybody.

I looked at my watch and saw that our time was up. I let her sit in her emotions for a few minutes before letting her get her things. She thanked me on the way out as usual.

When I got home that day, the weather felt special. The sky was completely grey, and the wind was sharp, the air fresh. It’s that feeling when you know that it’s going to rain, you just don’t know when. It feels so exciting to be outside when the day is like that. I sat by the window and thought about myself. I realized that yes, my behavior was slackening. I thought back and saw that there were many slip-ups ever since Thornendal had come. Many patients whom I had acted bored or disinterested around, and many lost clients. I felt deeply guilty, but also relieved, in a perverse way. My earlier assessment that this wasn’t the right job for me was beginning to gather weight in the bottom of my stomach. I felt clammy and nauseous, but too tired to lie down.

September came to a end. The air had chilled significantly.

I saw her, for the first time, stumble into the room with a coat on. By this point, she had become adept at placing her cane in the grooves of the chair she sat in so that it could fit snugly. With some hesitancy, she took off her gloves. Her right hand was burned. I asked her what had happened. She frowned, trying to find the words.

“Made a stupid mistake while cooking.”

I tried asking more questions, but she didn’t want to talk about it.

“I hate other people so, so much,” she said abruptly, “Every time I go outside I’m so, so bitter. I’m sorry, I know I’m looping. I know we already talked about this, it’s been months and I’m still saying the same nonsense. I’m sorry.”

I told her that if she wanted to, she could discuss whatever was on her mind, and that saying the same thing several times doesn’t make it nonsense or an invalid problem to have. This was the first time she had apologized for anything at all. I took notice of this and watched her intently, trying to see the other ways in which her behavior had changed. In moments like this, everything hangs on the therapist’s ability to keep their cool and to gently support the patient as the patient reaches their conclusion. It’s all too easy to accidentally come off too strong and to force the patient into what you know they want to say, and usually when emotions are this high, it can end with the patient needing a few weeks of time off, or even quitting therapy altogether. Thornendal took her time and regained her composure. Her face was pale again.

“I don’t know what to do with these feelings.”

We tried to discuss with her the healthy ways of understanding her bitterness, but she wasn’t interested enough to truly engage. I got the sense that she was trying to break through something that I wasn’t seeing. As always, she never had enough words to describe what she was feeling, but for the second time I saw an effort not just to describe the banality of her life, but an effort to communicate what what was within. Abruptly, she switched the topic to her neighbor.

“She never did anything wrong, really.”

“Who?”

“That old woman. I think I’m seeing things now. She… She’s familiar. That’s why I’m always pissed at her.”

“Familiar in what sense?”

“No––it feels so silly, now.”

She laughed, the first time I had seen her do so.

“How so?”

“I don’t know, it just feels stupid. I mean… What am I even doing? Yelling about some woman who’s going to die, anyways? Yeah, I wanted her approval. I wanted someone like her to like me. I don’t know why, she’s just a neighbor. Just some old woman. And, here I am, and I realize that all I’m angry at is that someone like her couldn’t like someone like me… Does that even make sense?”

“Yes. You said she was familiar, earlier. Could you elaborate on that, please?”

“I guess… what I have is genetic, right? It’s genetic. So, Mom gave it to me. And she had the same thing. She wanted me to be str––”

The will to continue seemed to be torn out of her. She placed her hands in her lap and looked at them for a while, nodding repetitively.

A thought that I had considered seemed to be true––she saw something of her mother in everyone, especially an older woman with some kind of physical impairment. When she couldn’t get that approval, possibly because her own physical decline was making other people uncomfortable, anger started to rise to the surface.

More fatigue welled up inside of me as I realized that if I had been a little more encouraging of her talking about her parents, most of this could’ve been gotten to quicker. Instead, I saw her hesitancy to talk about her parents and assumed that she would snap out of it––but people like her tend to find it easy to stay silent forever without encouragement, it seems. I felt ignorant and I felt useless––perhaps a mirroring of her attitude towards herself. I noticed her constant usage of the word ‘stupid’, realizing that perhaps she had been treated that way, or even directly been called that way. I wanted to see if she could open up about that because I knew that it would be important in the future, and yet, I was drawing a blank. Yes, it’s not one of the easiest things to do in therapy, but I shouldn’t have been entirely devoid of ideas. Once these feelings within me had been confronted, I made an effort to forget them, if not for just a little while.

“All she wanted from me was to be… To be… No. It was her fault. It was her fault. She made me what I am and made me feel guilty for something I couldn’t control. Years of education and––and things being shoved down my throat and I still felt empty…”

She lapsed into another period of comfortable silence, this time burying her head in her hands.

“Is this the first time you’ve been aware of these feelings or do you think they’ve popped up before?”

“I don’t know… I don’t know…”

More silence.

Once again, I found myself feeling chastised because I hadn’t had the courage or the ingenuity to trust Thornendal to come to what she was feeling by herself. I had treated her as a sheep that I would have to guide, otherwise she’d accidentally fall off a cliff, or something along those lines. Or had I? The constant second-guessing of my own understanding of myself made me feel sick. The repetitiveness of my thoughts, too, bothered me, and I realized that I had come to the age-old ouroboros of being angry at the fact that you’re thinking about thinking.

“What do I do with this?” She asked after a long pause.

“What do you mean by that?”

“What do I mean? I don’t know… I have all this, and I’m just here, now, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing with it. I have it, don’t I? What am I––What’s the bloody point?”

“You can do whatever you want with what you’ve learned. It’s yours. Like you said––you have it.”

“I just noticed all this crap about ‘having’ and ‘giving’, what’s the point of that? I mean––I said it, of course. I just don’t know what to do with it.”

It struck me as interesting that she thought, unconsciously, at least, as feelings and problems as being objects that you were stuck with––cubes you’d have to rearrange and slot into a room, perhaps, in order to reduce clutter. If she did in fact think of aspects of her mind as being arrangeable puzzle blocks, it meant that she had an analytical mind that could potentially shift through everything and figure out the best way to move forwards. Everyone does, of course, but in people like her, it can sometimes be easier.

That evening, I walked through the park. The trees had already started to change color, and the rain was beginning to become unrelenting. Since a young age, I had always felt as if Fall was the start of a dangerous yet magical time of year. The encroaching darkness, the harsh weather, the gloomy yet appealing trees––these all spoke to me of a kind of empty threat that brought me thrills. Everything was dark and ominous, and yet, I was always with my parents. Always with friends. Even in that moment, as I walked, alone, through the park, I still carried with me the warmth of a childhood that had been mostly forgiving. I wondered if Alice had to walk through a park on her way home, too, and if this time of year brought out the same feelings in her as well. I guess that the remembrance of the safety of childhood mixed with Alice in my head, and that since then, I started to feel warm around her.

With Winter coming closer, my feelings of guilt and selfishness had exponentially increased. I was losing patients and the patience for other people’s problems as my own started to get in the way. Things stayed the same around Alice, as they always did, and in fact, things were never better.

I recalled the way things had been when she first started visiting me, and I felt a surge of pride in my work, as well as pride for her. I wanted to tell her this, but I felt odd about doing so when all of my other patients were being neglected. My desire to quit my job was only counteracted by the human urge to make sure that she got through what she needed to get through. I noticed that the fatigue I once felt with her was gone, but that it was showing up in the rest of my life, taking the form of resentment and anger.

The rest of October unfurled smoothly, with Alice’s mood swings becoming less and less apparent.

Around November, though, they started to crop up more and more, and the closer it got to December, the worse they got. There were days when Alice wouldn’t show up at all, leaving some hasty last-minute cancellation message.

I recalled that her disease was degenerative, meaning that it could have gotten worse in the time I last saw her. She did seem to be having trouble walking at the time––even more than usual. Her legs had started to disturb me as they were slowly but surely being deformed hideously, making it hard for me to look at her.

I tried many times to keep my emotions under control, but it felt like I was already emotionally clogged with too many contradicting, self-immolating ideas.

Although she had gotten better at speaking about how she felt, I saw that she had relapsed into discussing the same feelings of spite and bitterness towards other people just for existing. Even though she could understand these feelings, she couldn’t make them go away. Now that I was genuinely emotionally invested, the idea of staying aloof, as a therapist should, was tearing into me. She had successfully been able to unravel my training over a few months only. Thinking on the tension between her and her mother, I realized the devastation of living with someone like her for so many years. A person as lively and expressive as harsh, demeaning and unpleasant. Someone stubborn and rude. I decided that, while I desperately wanted to see things through and to ensure her safety, I would need cut myself off from her before she derailed everything. If I was going to quit a job I had spent years training for, it needed to be on a high note. At least then, when the money stopped coming in, I would feel a little better, maybe.

December. She had been frustrating to talk to and more uncooperative than ever. In a moment of pure, unabated weakness, I had implied that it may be better for her to quit therapy. I understood that in many cases, it very well could be the right answer, but in this case, it was purely something said out of spite. She showed me every time we met the unbounded capacity of the human mind to change. She had changed me for the worse without having a single bit of ill-intent. I had changed her mostly for the better.

We were supposed to meet the day before Christmas. She didn’t show, and I ended up spending the night the way she said she had spent most of her days––scrolling idly on her phone, full of pent up resentment.

A few days before the year ended, we had a meeting. I struggled to keep my composure throughout; to not let the vulnerable, constantly edgy part of me into the dialogue. The burns on her hand had healed a long time ago, leaving only faint, white scars. White like snow.

“I’ve been thinking a lot this week,” she said after a bit of silence. I knew that at this point, it didn’t matter whether I responded or not. “I had just gotten out of the subway. I took the steps because, I don’t know… It felt like I wanted a challenge, I guess… I was winded, of course. I was just sitting there, with my vape, cold and confused, and I’m looking around me, and the sky’s this deep blue color, and there’s fog… Fog everywhere. I can see my breath in the air. There’s so, so much light. People everywhere. People and light and color, and for once, I feel so, so happy. I feel vulnerable but in a way that doesn’t make me feel inferior to anyone. I walk, slowly. And I see so much information to take in. This myriad of people has become one living organism, and I’m just a cell passing through it. I feel so, so much innate… wonder… Wonder at the fact that I’m alive, that I’m here, but that I could also be there, for instance, if I wanted to be. I wanted to be absorbed by this whole so much. In the way I thought about it, it felt suicidal. But at the same time, I felt so much admiration for this whole. I loved it. And I’ve just been thinking––if I can love the city so much that all I want is to fall into it forever, maybe I can somehow… Goodness. That’s too cheesy. I’m not… No. This is st––no, not that, either. I… Maybe it’s like a thing where if I say it, it can come close to being true? If I can, step by step, come to appreciate other people, I could, hypothetically, appreciate me. Myself. That sounds so silly. Goodness. I don’t even know where I got that from. And––no. It’s… I’m, I’m tired of pretending that I don’t know what to say, obviously I’ve always known, I just like stopping myself because I’m afraid of what I’m saying. I want to be happy, you know. I’m probably going to regret everything I just said to you in a week. Or maybe I won’t. It’s just a matter of time, of seeing and healing and enjoying the fresh air. It’s nice to not be paranoid, it’s nice to appreciate that other people can live their own lives without constantly pitying me. I’m… Does anything I’m saying make sense anymore? Or is this just a stream of consciousness, meant only for me?”

I nodded dully, too entranced to say anything. She must’ve gotten my meaning, because she continued.

“I keep coming back to that moment as I was walking back to my apartment. The wonder of that, it’s just… I can’t place it. It’s so lovely. It makes me feel good. It’s not like I’ve never felt good before, I don’t know why I’m so insistent on making this seem like it’s goodness 2.0 or some kind of new update. It’s just called happiness, and I’m not a stranger to what it feels like. I guess it’s not even the happiness––I could’ve been completely miserable and I would’ve felt the same that night. It’s the fact that I was shown something new. Not given. Shown. Because it felt like a peek behind the curtain, right? An eternal truth that I was presented with that allowed me to move on from something, but it isn’t mine. I can hold the memory as mine in my mind, but what I was shown will never be mine. But it isn’t anybody’s. It’s purely eternity’s. And I feel courage coming from that, you know? Like, just to kind of wrap what I’m saying into a little bow: that day showed me something new, and that brought me a sense of resilience I didn’t know I had. And I feel altered, even if I’ll inevitably lapse back into misery, because what I was shown lasts forever, even if my mind doesn’t.”

I had a distinct feeling of finality, sitting in that room with her. She saw that I had nothing to add to what she had said and relaxed in her chair. The rest of our session was unremarkable. Just catching up on life together. She asked me a few questions, I asked her a few. I felt glad to know that she hadn’t just stopped existing in the long absences between treatment, although I was no longer sure whether I could call any of this treatment. When our time was up, she came to me and hugged me. I had never felt so much distinct human love for a person of the same sex. Love in the sense that it was entirely removed from context and from role, just admiration and kindness towards someone else because you believe them to deserve it, and you believe yourself to be deserving of giving it. She took her cane and put on her coat. It had a beautiful dark blue color to it, reminding me of the night she had described––almost as if she had become a fragment of the city, like she said she had wanted to become. I noticed that my observation a long time ago was correct: it had become significantly harder for her to walk. A brief thought of helping her leave flashed through my mind, but I didn’t want to feel the cold and see the night sky with her. I wanted her to see it alone and to come to her own conclusions.

This is where I now sit. It has been a month and I haven’t heard from her since. I’ve realized that I did succeed as a therapist, but in a way that completely breached my code of conduct. I see that the past is too subjective to really understand how badly I breached it, and that for Alice, things were probably vastly different. This seemed to have been her first brush with therapy, so I’m sure that if she has another experience with it in the future, it’ll be unpleasant to realize how blatantly unprofessional I was.

I no longer want to really quit being a therapist, but I’m also not sure if I am cut out for the job. I am, it seems at my core, incapable of the detached empathy needed of a therapist. I cannot be equal to all patients, I cannot all dedicate time and effort to them if one of them trumps the rest in terms of perceived value. I am too self-immolating, too vain, too self-conscious, and too psychologically weak. And that’s where I think I’ll totter for a few more weeks––unsure of how things will turn. I realize now that this year was one large night––exactly the kind of night Alice described––where I was shown the eternal and was never meant to really keep it.