Iremember how I’d first sat there with my legs crossed, staring at the pale wall in front of me, biting at my half-chipped-up nails, waiting to get out of there. Then this woman had come in with a mug of hot chocolate and it reminded me of broken dreams and promises.

She’d asked if I’d like one and I’d shaken my head or maybe I’d nodded, I don’t remember. Sitting down with her perfect posture, she’d wanted to know what my favourite colour was.

“Burgundy,” I’d mumbled.

Today, this very woman sits in front of me the same way she’d done almost three years ago and this time it reminds me of patient-therapist confidentiality but, then again, I wouldn’t really know. She handed me a piece of crumbled paper and asked me to draw myself, the thing I saw in a mirror.

I fumble, I can’t. There’s just too much to see, a territory I’ve never wanted to delve into, for it’s like drowning in a shallow ocean. Too deep to be saved, yet too shallow to be bothered with.

I take it anyway and start to flatten the paper ball up. It’s an hour before I’m able to produce some figment of lines and scattered agony here and there. Contemplated with the effort, I hand it over to my therapist, fully prepared to get a lecture about how ‘a shellfish can choose to become a starfish anytime it chooses it believes it can.’ However, all she does is set the paper aside.

“Why did you straighten it?” she asked.

“What?” that’s not part of the questions I’d prepared to answer for her.

“You straightened the paper. I’d like to know why?”

“Oh well … it just needed straightening.” I don’t know why she’s asking me that, it’s a genuine response, to fix something broken.

She has that half-crooked smile when she looks at me again, “And why did you think it needs straightening? Because you thought it convenient or because it’s conventional?”

“That’s half what’s wrong with our society today?” she explains, “We just must mould something that’s not even broken to fix our own desperate twisted needs. Just because something doesn’t suit your idea of what it should be like, doesn’t mean it needs fixing.

“I think it’s part of us that we, as a community, fail to see that every subject under study has its own variation and it’s essential to realise that we do not get to label a particular form of the same thing as the ideal for there is none. We, humans, have no degree of knowledge to know what to classify as the standard, and it’s that standard that eats at the product, even if the product is a young girl who sees her reflection in the mirror only to see imperfections and flawed ideas of everything she should be. Either that or the fact that we do what everybody else does.

“We follow blindly, followers with no vision of their own, but the back of the leader they supposedly believe in. And just because everybody else does it, doesn’t confine you to a particular room or space of thinking.”

I like the way my therapist perceives things the way she wants to. It mingles reality with the perfect touch of something I do believe, as part of this generation, every individual must get a good grasp of, for it’s that very accumulation of conscience that takes you places.

Published in Dawn, Young World, September 21st, 2024