Meg Jerit

My mother began therapy with Dr. L after he seemed to cure my younger sister of a spontaneous bout of compulsive hand-washing. Nobody wanted the younger siblings to end up like me: the eldest who was afraid to touch, to be touched. Paranoid—I’d sooner fall down the stairs than risk grabbing the railing. My mother was also a notorious germaphobe. Whenever I had friends over, I had to keep a close eye so that I could enforce her rules— squirting hand sanitizer into reluctant palms.

When I was a junior in high school, my mother decided I would also start therapy with Dr. L. By then, body dysmorphic without yet knowing the terminology, battling obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety and wholly resistant to accepting that I had a problem at all. But what was obvious was the excoriation—screaming on my face.

The skin picking began around age nine. I remember, in a room of stained-glass, unsheathing the epidermis on my fingertips so that they became like little, glistening strawberries missing their caps.

The white, southern, catholic, overly-gendered bubble of the piece of Memphis I was born in lacked many real world sensibilities. I could feel this as a young girl without having all the language for its mechanics, (and certainly, no one was offering any.) Even if we had to write the latin word for truth—veritas—on everything in school, for years, I felt an unintelligible loneliness—grasping within for the unfound real in this place of superficiality—wishing for belonging, even if I didn’t.

I denied myself my feelings and suppressed—only descending intermittently into the sinkhole where self love’s true voice should have been. But, even if I was smiling, the cysts, scabs, and open wounds on my face said otherwise. In them, I searched futilely for the unspoken, the missing pieces.

***

This is the part that I’ve written over and over, again.

My mother came with me that day to the therapist’s office in Germantown, a suburb outside of Memphis. Generic calming music was playing on a little stereo in the waiting room, and I was sixteen and there against my will. This was the time before therapy was so societally normalized—widely accepted and expected. When Dr. L opened the door, I was surprised by his smallness, his Ray Romano-ness. My mother and I sat on the couch, and he sat in his swivel chair. He explain-droned how therapy would work. His multiple certificates hanging on the wall behind him.

My mother had just started seeing him herself. She thought Dr. L was great. She told me once, while she was driving me from high school to his office for our weekly sessions, that she recorded his voice once so she could listen to him in difficult or anxiety provoking moments.

Soon, we began one-on-one sessions. I found it very easy to evade a formal diagnosis of anything, and he focused on solutions anyways. It wasn’t long before my surrendering to the methodology of talk therapy. I indeed found it safer to hold the feelings on the outside, to externally process at arm’s length. The therapist doused me in compliments, telling me I was charismatic, beautiful, smart.

It was after eight months of sessions when Dr. L suggested I meet his son, only a grade level below me, who could introduce me to some of his friends. Despite my internal struggles and the other attempts I had made to find community, I remained an optimist. I said yes.

When I remember, I see ivy—a naive English ivy un-spiraling, sprawling between us: adult man and teenage girl. When I remember, I forget that English ivy is aggressive: an invader that can threaten all levels of vegetation. It can collapse elms, even oaks, by impeding photosynthesis, choking them with darkness. Vines like suction cups climbing up; leaves pressing against neural pathways, and flowering over. Seeds littering psyche space. My bark would bear the blare of inflammation, a rash from this invisible, poisonous sap.

And the ivy continued to take as it grew, spreading beyond me.

***

Years later, as an adult, I regard the N-acetyecysteine pills in the cabinet—a now common OCD prescription—how much detoxification I would require from our sessions—reducing free radicals in my blood, yes—but what about bloodlines trespassed. Blood still caked into my nail beds.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder comes in many different forms. The one most people know of: a propensity towards cleanliness and organization.

But there’s more, of course—“black and white thinking” is characteristic of the disorder, which can lead to obsession with and trying to find control around the unknown. A preoccupation with controlling reality, fearful obsession of death. It was saying words to keep myself safe, knocking on wood to keep us all safe, saying “I love you” compulsively because being alive seemed to be strolling on a constant brink.

OCD could look like rituals—for instance, eating certain foods to maintain a sense of predictability and safety in the world. Always, the same breakfast of a banana: using the same tablespoon for measuring the same quantity of peanut butter to evenly distribute over its flesh each morning.

The very first unsolicited gift the therapist gave me—a jar of Justin’s almond butter. Try this, he said from his chair. You’ll have to stir it, so that the oil and butter blend together.

Blend. Blend was what they told me. It’s not so black and white, you see, my mother had said. People lose the forest though the trees. Like with catholicism.

You can totally do this. You can meet the therapist’s son. You can: trust me.

It’s just a color— you’ll just be / grey.

Grey, the color my little brother named the summer—when his mother has decided to leave our father, without seeking couples therapy. Leaving our father before he knows if he’s cancer-free. My brother didn’t understand this; hadn’t borne the same witness to the same things as his older sister.

Who crept to the window alongside the therapist’s son—her boyfriend of nine months. Slowly, like shadows, over the carpet of his bedroom at his dad’s new apartment. (The therapist and his wife suddenly deciding to divorce that past November.) The four of us—mother and daughter, father and son—caught in strange attachment. All at the apartment at the same time. But, the kids still needed the proof only a goodbye could provide.

And they watched as her own mother and the therapist, his father—kissed.

The teenagers / let the blinds fall / from their fingertips.

***

How does a tree fall?

At first, silently. Microscopically.

English ivy modifies the shape of its root hairs at a sub- cellular level. Then comes the chemical adhesion—the ivy threading glue at points of attachment.

Blocking out the light, leaf by leaf.

Then, seemingly—all at once.