Who are They?

Charlie 

“So, Charlie, what brings you into my office today?”

His voice was calm. Too calm. Like he’d asked the question a thousand times and already knew the shape of every possible answer.

The office was warmer than it had any right to be—cozy, almost home-like. Soft lighting, a couple of plants that were somehow thriving, bookshelves cluttered with thick Psychology texts and, weirdly, fantasy novels. It made my brain spin a little, trying to square the clinical with the escapist. Fixing minds or escaping them—maybe he was leaving the door open for both.

I shifted in my seat, tugging at a loose thread on my sleeve. My chest tightened again, that same ghost of a burn reminding me why I was here. I knew the logistics—phone call, paperwork, drive across town—but putting the emotions into words felt like dragging wet laundry up a hill. Heavy. Sloppy. Embarrassing.

And worst of all, vulnerable.

“Charlie?” he prompted gently.

I swallowed. My mouth tasted like peppermint chalk and dread. I lifted my eyes toward him, tried to arrange my face into something socially acceptable. A half-smile, maybe. Something that looked less like I was falling apart.

“Right, yeah,” I said, aiming for light but overshooting into something brittle. “Sorry. I’m just… trying to figure out where to start. A lot’s happened since the last time I had a therapist. And I’m not exactly sure how to say it without sounding—”

I huffed out a breath. “—like someone who’s held together with tape and denial.”

The attempt at humor sagged under its own weight, the mask slipping even as I tried to hold it in place.

He nodded slowly, absorbing my attempt at humor without flinching at the edges where it cracked.

“It makes sense you’re overwhelmed,” he said, voice warm but steady. “Starting therapy again can stir up a lot, especially when you’ve been carrying things alone for a long time.”

He shifted slightly forward in his chair, not pushy—just present.

“Why don’t we take it piece by piece? Maybe we start with what brought you to the ER last week.”

The doctor didn’t waste words. His questions landed with the clean precision of someone who’d spent years learning how to cut straight to the marrow of a thing. But his voice—low, steady, almost metronomic—softened the impact, like he was trying to coax my breathing into sync with his. It was a strange contradiction: clinical efficiency wrapped in unexpected gentleness.

I’d walked in braced for judgment, armor strapped tight, already rehearsing jokes to make myself seem fine. But he studied me for a long moment—really studied me, the way someone looks at a photograph and notices what’s missing rather than what’s there.

“You mentioned feeling overwhelmed,” he said quietly. “I can see it in how you’re sitting—like you’re waiting for something else to go wrong. You don’t have to hold all of that by yourself in here.”

The words weren’t poetic. They weren’t dramatic. But they hit clean and deep, sharper than anything I’d prepared for.

I felt my shoulders drop before I even realized I’d been holding them up.

I’d Googled him beforehand—standard due diligence, or at least that’s what I told myself. Really, I’d just needed to know what kind of person I was handing the inside of my head to. Predictability helps. Surprises… don’t. His profile was simple: credentials, a worn-looking headshot, a few quiet endorsements. Nothing flashy. Nothing performative. And somehow that steadiness made it easier to stay seated in the chair.

He waited. Not impatiently. Just… steadily.

“What brought you to the ER, Charlie?” he asked again, gently. “Start wherever it makes sense to you.”

I opened my mouth to answer—and the room seemed to tilt, just a little, like someone had nudged the world off-level.

Sunday mornings were supposed to be quiet. Instead, they always seemed to find me already exhausted, already bracing for whatever fresh chaos waited behind the counter.

I walked into the store and was hit by the smell of brake cleaner and stale coffee, mixed with a chemical haze that clung to my clothes and lingered even after I got home. Fluorescents buzzed overhead, flickering in one corner where the ballast was dying. In front of me, the screen glared: numbers, hours, names. Six more hours I had to shave off payroll. Six hours that I would need to work myself to ensure the store was covered.

I rolled a bottle of antacids in my palm. The nearly empty bottle felt light and fragile in my hand. I could feel my stomach burning, the acids threatening to eat through me until I was just a puddle of ooze beneath my desk. I popped another into my mouth.

The chalky-sweet taste of peppermint made me think of Christmas clearance at Walgreens. I should’ve bought more while I could. I washed the antacid down with the last dregs of my energy drink, the carbonation scraping the back of my throat. But my stomach just kept burning.

A hundred hours a week. Open to close. Out the door at five, back home at eleven, asleep by one if my brain didn’t keep buzzing like the dying ballast right over my head. Rinse and repeat until the days blurred together into one long, greasy fingerprint on the calendar. A store built for fourteen people run by six—and me, the fraying patch slapped over every leak. By midweek I felt like the corporate equivalent of duct tape with a god complex, holding everything together while slowly peeling at the edges, trying to pretend there was still plenty of tape on the roll. Yet every shift siphoned off another piece of me, bit by bit. I was scraping at the cardboard core, desperate to magically make more tape appear.

My stomach tightened again, that deep, twisting burn flaring up as if it were trying to warn me of something I didn’t have the luxury to hear. For a second, the pain hollowed me out—made me feel too breakable, too mortal, like the seams holding me together were starting to give way.

I thought of Dad in his hospital bed, tubes in his arms, his chest rising shallow under the blanket. Pneumonia, they’d said. Complications. Then: congestive heart failure. As if his heart had turned traitor.

I looked at the schedule again and felt the burning in my chest spark, sharp and hot. The same spot that tightened in Dad’s hospital room when the doctor said “heart failure,” like the words had reached into my own ribcage and squeezed. I pressed my palm against my sternum, half expecting the pressure to ease something in me the way I’d wished it would ease something in him.

That was when I thought of Ed. He was the store manager in Joliet who’d died at his desk after closing. Heart attack. They didn’t find him until morning. I used to think that was a cautionary tale, but lately, it felt more like a blueprint.

The schedule glared at me, all red lines and empty slots, a warning label slapped across my life. The burning in my chest pulsed again—not a cute little spark, but a full-on flare, sharp and hot, like someone was dragging a branding iron across my sternum. I pressed my hand there, not gently, like I could push the pain back into whatever corner it crawled out of. The room tilted a little. Just enough to make the world feel like a boat rocking on a choppy tide.

The fluorescents hummed overhead. Loud. Too loud. The dying ballast buzzed like a mosquito right in my ear, vibrating straight through my skull. I tried to blink away the dizziness, tried to pretend my vision wasn’t tunneling at the edges. I told myself it was stress, or lack of sleep, or maybe I hadn’t eaten enough—excuses stacked like sandbags against a flood I refused to acknowledge.

Dad’s face flickered across my mind again—pale, drawn, sinking deeper into that hospital bed with each passing day. His chest rising shallow beneath the blanket. A traitor heart, the doctor had said. Mine felt like it was staging a coup of its own.

The front door jingled. The sound cut through the haze like a snapped wire. Becky’s footsteps echoed down the aisle—crisp, decisive—until she rounded the corner and froze. She didn’t even have to speak; her expression said everything. Concern sharpened into something close to fury, like she was mad on my behalf that I was doing this to myself.

“Charlie… what the hell are you doing?”

Her voice hit me harder than the chest pain. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out—just air, thin and useless.

She stepped closer, arms crossed, eyes scanning me like she was looking for the part where I’d cracked.

“You look awful,” she said, not softly. “And I don’t mean ‘long shift’ awful. I mean ‘you should be horizontal in a hospital bed’ awful.”

I tried for humor—reflex, habit, a shield I didn’t have the strength to lift.

“It’s Sunday,” I said, with a shrug that hurt more than I wanted to admit. “This is just… how I look on Sundays.”

The joke fell flat. Becky didn’t even blink.

“You need to go to the hospital,” she said. “Right now.”

I let out something that was supposed to be a laugh but sounded more like a cough drowning in defeat.

“Becky, I’m fine. I just need—”

“No.” Her voice snapped like a broom handle. “You are not fine. You’re sweating through your shirt. You’re white as copy paper. And you’re grabbing your chest every two minutes like you’re auditioning for a medical drama.”

I looked down.

Yeah. My shirt was damp. My hand was still pressed to my sternum like I was trying to hold my ribs together.

The room swayed again, subtle but unmistakable. A cold ripple crawled down my spine.

“If you don’t go,” Becky said quietly, “I’m calling an ambulance.”

That should’ve scared me. But what actually punched the air out of my lungs was what she said next:

“And then I’m calling your mom.”

That did it. My throat tightened. Mom didn’t need this. Not with Dad gasping for breath in the hospital two towns over. Not with the weight she was already carrying.

My voice came out thin, frayed around the edges.

“Don’t… do that. Okay? Don’t.”

Becky softened, but only slightly. Like she was willing to be gentle as long as I stopped being stupid.

“Then get up,” she said. “Please.”

I stared at the screen one last time, as if the numbers might rearrange themselves out of pity. They didn’t. I saved the file, though my hand shook as I clicked. My coat felt heavier than usual when I shrugged into it—like lead, like guilt, like the universe had stitched bricks into the lining just to make sure I felt the weight of leaving.

“If anything happens,” I muttered, “call me.”

She huffed, the closest she’d let herself get to laughing.

“I won’t,” she said.

And this time when we both chuckled, mine cracked in the middle—hollow and tired and a little bit terrified.

“Charlie?”

Dr. Sook’s voice floated in, soft but firm, and the store dissolved—the fluorescents, the brake cleaner, Becky’s voice—all of it replaced by the muted warmth of his office.

I realized my hand was pressed to my chest again, fingers curling over my sternum like I could still feel the branding iron there.

“Sorry,” I said, my voice rougher than I expected. “I was… back at work for a minute.”

He nodded, like that made perfect sense.

“So the pain started at work?” he asked. “With that level of stress. Long hours, staff shortages, your father in the hospital at the same time?”

“Yeah,” I breathed. “That’s when it stopped being just… stress and started feeling like something else. Like something was seriously wrong.”

“And after Becky pushed you,” he said, “you went to the ER.”

I exhaled. “Yeah.”

The air in the room thinned again. My mind slid sideways.

The ER smelled like antiseptic and fear—sharp and sterile, like someone had tried to scrub the panic out of the air and failed. Beeping monitors spilled their rhythms into the room, a discordant symphony of heartbeats and dying batteries. Squeaking shoes skated across linoleum. A child whimpered. Somewhere behind a curtain, somebody retched. The whole place felt stretched thin, humming with life on the verge of breaking.

The chair beneath me was cold plastic, too small for my body and too narrow for my thoughts. It bit into my spine like punishment.

Becky had dropped me off with a look that said she’d drag me inside by my hair if I tried to run. Then she’d driven off before I could argue. Now I was alone, or as alone as a man can be in a waiting room full of strangers trying not to die.

Time stopped meaning anything. The second hand on the wall clock ticked like it was making fun of me.

“Mr. Robinson?”

A nurse with tired eyes held a clipboard like a shield.

“We’re going to get you checked in. When did the chest pain start?”

“I’m not—I don’t know.” My voice sounded borrowed, hollow. “It’s been… a while.”

“Hours? Days?”

I wanted to say years, but I swallowed it.

“A few hours,” I lied. “Maybe.”

She nodded like she’d heard that one before, scribbling something that probably translated to: this man is hanging on by dental floss.

A doctor eventually materialized—tall, soft voice, accent that folded around his words like cotton.

“Mr. Robinson,” he said, settling onto a stool. “How long ago did the panic attack begin?”

Panic attack.

Like that explained everything. Like I hadn’t been bleeding hours into this job for months, like my body hadn’t been sending up flares I kept stomping out with caffeine and stubbornness.

My hands trembled in my lap. My fingers were blotched red where my nails bit into them. I tasted peppermint chalk—the antacids dissolving at the back of my throat.

“I… didn’t think it was a panic attack,” I murmured.

“That’s very common,” he said gently. “Chest tightness, dizziness, shortness of breath—it can feel like a cardiac event.”

“Yeah.” My laugh cracked in half. “Felt real enough.”

“Your EKG looks normal,” he continued. “Your bloodwork isn’t showing signs of myocardial distress.” Then, softer: “But your cortisol is very high. Your heart is working harder than it should.”

My heart. Dad’s heart. Both traitors in their own ways.

“Are you under a lot of stress?”

I almost choked. Stress?

The word felt so small compared to reality. Stress was running late to work. Stress was forgetting to pay a bill. Stress was not… this.

“Yeah,” I said finally. “I guess you could say that.”

“Do you have support at home?”

Dad in the hospital. Mom unraveling quietly. Support? I almost laughed again.

“Sort of.”

The doctor talked about follow-ups and therapy and reducing workload—as if reducing hours could resurrect the corpse of my job, as if burnout wasn’t woven into my veins by now. His words drifted over me like smoke.

What scared me wasn’t the diagnosis.

What scared me was how relieved I felt.

Some small, broken part of me welcomed it—the collapse, the quiet, the permission to stop. To lie down and not have to get back up again.

And that thought kept echoing, bouncing off the antiseptic walls, louder each time.

“I’m guessing it didn’t feel like ‘just’ a panic attack,” Dr. Sook said quietly.

I blinked. The ER dissolved, the plasticky chair resolving back into his upholstered one. My hands were clenched in my lap. I made myself loosen them.

“It felt like proof,” I said. “Like… my body finally filed a formal complaint.”

He nodded, absorbing that.

“And he referred you here?” Sook asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “He told me I needed to talk to someone before I ended up back in the ER for something worse. Gave me your name. After that, I called my boss, Rich, told him what happened. He freaked out about the words ‘ER’ and ‘cardiac specialist,’ put me on emergency leave for a week, told me to ‘do what I need to do’ and call him before I come back.” I shrugged. “Somehow, I don’t think anything at the store is going to magically get better, but… here we are.”

He hummed thoughtfully. “And is that also when you decided to look me up online?”

His tone stayed calm, but the way his body shifted made something in me jolt. I suddenly felt like a kid caught with his hand in the candy jar.

“Yes,” I admitted.

A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “You forgot that when you pay for the premium membership on LinkedIn, you can not only see when someone checks out your profile, but who, didn’t you?”

I felt my face go hot. I wanted to sink into the couch cushions and vanish.

“Honestly? Yeah. I did forget that.”

“It’s okay, Charlie,” he said. “It’s not uncommon for new patients to look us up and try to get a read on who we are. If anything, it can help avoid working with someone you’re incompatible with. Partnering with the wrong therapist can have a damaging effect on your healing. So, what did you learn about me?”

I huffed out a breath, somewhere between embarrassed and amused.

“Well, between LinkedIn and Google, I learned that you were born in August of ’79 in London, which means you’re several years older than me. Your father was from Hong Kong. He died in a car accident when you were really young. Your mother raised you—Yasmin, from Baghdad. Your uncle Josif, the religious scholar, helped take care of you both after your dad passed. You graduated from Oxford the same year Obama was elected and moved to Chicago in 2010. You’ve been practicing here ever since.”

I hesitated, then added, “Reviews were glowing. Especially from autistic adults and LGBTQ clients. There was one that stuck with me—some guy calling himself ‘NoodleZilla94,’ with a Godzilla avatar holding Cup Noodles. He talked about shutting down for no reason, lights and sounds being too much, staring at paperwork for hours and not processing any of it. After working with you, he found out he was an undiagnosed autistic. And once he had a name for it, he started changing things at work so he could actually function. He sounded…happy. Or at least less miserable.”

“NoodleZilla,” Sook said, a faint smile tugging at his lips. “I think I know who you’re referring to. And I do think I see some similarities between the two of you.”

My pulse jumped at that, stupidly. “Yeah,” I muttered. “I kind of figured.”

“I want to delve a little deeper into that,” he said. “How often do you feel the need to look up someone you’re meeting for the first time?”

“Truthfully?” I sighed. “Every time. As long as I know their name ahead of time.”

“I see. Why do you feel the need to look people up?”

“I like to know what I’m walking into,” I said. “What to expect. It feels… safer that way.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “What do you think would happen if you didn’t?”

I sat for a long moment, picking at the seam of the cushion, flipping through memory like a Rolodex. All the times I’d met someone new and felt my brain scramble: What’s okay to say? What’s not okay? Am I allowed to fidget? If I fidget, will it be seen as weird? Are they going to think I’m rude? Lazy? Stupid?

The one thing that kept floating to the surface was the same thought:

If I wasn’t careful, they’d see something I didn’t mean to show.

“I worry I’d be blindsided,” I said finally. “Or I’d say something wrong. Or they’d see me… I don’t know. They’d see something in me I didn’t intend. Especially in a work setting. I don’t want people to think I’m unprepared or incapable, or worse, that I’m not capable of being responsible and in charge.”

He nodded slowly. “From what I’ve read of your history in the pre-appointment paperwork,” he said, “you’ve had a hard life.”

The pre-appointment paperwork. My stomach twisted. I hadn’t actually finished it myself.

I’d been sitting at the dining room table with the forms open on my laptop, the words blurring together like fog.

“Hey, what you got there?” Mom had asked, sliding into the chair next to me.

“It’s some forms I have to fill out,” I’d said. “For my new therapist.”

“You’re going back to therapy?” She’d been a little taken aback, but recovered quickly, leaning in to scan the screen. Seeing everything still blank, she’d looked at me and asked, sweetly, “Do you need some help?”

“Yeah,” I’d admitted. “I do. I have no idea what to put on any of this stuff.” I gestured vaguely at the laptop. “I managed the health insurance and address stuff. Numbers and boxes. That was fine. But then it got into the family history and the ‘do you agree or disagree with the following statements’ bit, and… I just froze. I never know if I’m supposed to answer with what I actually think and feel, or what I think the person reading it wants me to say.”

In the end, Mom had filled in the family history—her cancer, Dad’s health, their military service, Grandpa Ed’s prostate cancer, Grandpa Keith’s lung cancer, Grandma Mary’s dementia, Grandma Anna’s breast cancer that metastasized. When it came to the agree/disagree statements, she’d sat there, looked me square in the face, and said, “Charlie, you need to be completely honest. If getting therapy is going to have any sort of benefit for you, you need to be honest about how you really feel about everything listed here.”

I’d been terrified of how someone might read it, but with her help, we’d worked through it.

“I often feel moments of extreme sadness for no apparent reason.” Agree.

“I often have moments where I feel incapable of moving or reacting or responding to outside stimuli.” Agree.

“I am often bothered by bright lights or loud noises.” Agree.

And on and on the list went.

“Do you find yourself needing help with things like that often?” Sook asked now. “Paperwork, hospital forms, contracts?”

I thought about it. I really thought about it.

“You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize… yeah. It happens a lot,” I said. “If I’m alone, I can get through it. It just takes me longer than other people. But if I have someone there to help me read through and decode what the hell the form is actually asking for, it’s…” I rubbed the back of my neck. “It’s a lot easier. And faster.”

He nodded, then his expression shifted slightly, sharpening.

“Now I’m going to blindside you, Charlie,” he said. “When did you first feel like you had to mask? When did you start hiding what was going on inside you so that you could fit in and function with everyone else?”

I let out a nervous laugh—the kind you give a cop who’s just pulled you over for blowing a stop sign. Well hi there, officer, looks like you caught me.

“I don’t even know how long,” I said. “I’d say since I was six? Right after Mom was diagnosed with cancer. Dad used to say I was too sensitive, and teachers thought I was either too mature or too lazy. I got diagnosed with ADHD around that time, but the school psychologist suspected more.”

“Do you remember if anyone ever mentioned autism?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yeah. They did. Dad wouldn’t let them evaluate me. Said I was like him as a kid and just needed more discipline. Later I found out he didn’t want me labeled. He was afraid it would change how people saw me and hold me back.”

“That’s not uncommon,” Sook said. “Especially in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Honestly, until recently, our understanding of autism was… lacking. It’s still evolving. I’m involved in a lot of research, particularly around autistic adults. One of the most common things I see with late-diagnosed patients is that they were prevented from being evaluated by their parents at a younger age, out of fear of what the label might do to them. How do you think that affected you?”

“Taught me to hide,” I said. “Memorize scripts. Learn how to act how I was supposed to, not how I felt. That’s probably why I started researching people before I met them. The internet made that a whole lot easier. I used to dread meeting new people as a kid. There wasn’t a way to learn about them ahead of time unless you knew someone who knew them. I didn’t connect with a lot of people growing up. I have very few friends. I’ve had shitty luck with women. And I’m just…” I exhaled, everything sagging. “I’m tired.”

He nodded, and just then an alarm went off on his watch. He silenced it with a quick tap.

“Well,” he said. “That’s our time for today.”

Of course it was. It felt like we’d just cracked open the lid on something enormous and ugly and complicated—and now I was supposed to stand up and walk back into my life like I hadn’t just admitted I was held together with tape and denial.

“I’d like to schedule a formal evaluation,” he continued. “There’s a medical center near Chicago that I work with. They specialize in a wide range of tests that cover a variety of conditions. It’s an all-day event, so be prepared for that. It’ll give us a good baseline—reevaluating the pre-existing diagnoses and checking for overlap in other areas. I have a strong suspicion you are somewhere on the spectrum. The evaluation will help confirm or rule that out.”

I nodded, throat tight.

“Also,” he added, “your first assignment from me: make a five-month plan. Talk to your boss. Tell him what you need and give him a chance. If he can’t meet you halfway, start looking for a way out. You deserve to do something that you enjoy. It’s not wrong to want that for yourself.”

As I stood to go, a stray thought drifted through my head, so absurd and oddly comforting that it made me smile.

“You know,” I said, halfway to the door, “a friend online keeps asking if I’m ever going to sit down and start writing that book we talked about. It might be nice to shift gears. Try a new career. I miss writing stories.” I glanced back at him. “Remind me at some point—we ought to talk about what I minored in at college.”

He smiled, just a little. “I look forward to it.”