I think of my relationship with my therapist as on-again-off-again. We met when I was seventeen under unfortunate circumstances I’d rather forget about, but I’ve never committed to seeing her super regularly. I’ll go almost a year without speaking to her, and then something unfortunate will happen expectedly or unexpectedly, and I’ll religiously see her weekly for a couple months. Then I’ll taper off again. 

I should also add that my freshman year of college, when I told my father I was seeing my therapist, all he had to say to me was, “What helpful thing is that middle-aged woman going to tell you about how to live your life and how to feel better?”

Almost like a lover, it’s probably not the healthiest relationship you should have with your therapist.

Regardless, the other day, I saw her for the first time this year – a year that I’ve spent training myself to comfort others, rather than seeking comfort for myself. I’ve learned how to appropriately say, “I’m sorry to hear that,” or “Thank you for sharing with me,” to the actors who get paid to play patients for medical students’ mock patient encounters. How to be trauma-informed. How to strike that impossible balance between being removed from a patient’s emotional state while also maintaining the appropriate empathy and holistic, unconditional support for their experience. 

So basically, I’ve been playing doctor. And what did Hippocrates say about doctors? A doctor should cure sometimes, relieve often, and comfort always.

I used to seek comfort from everything and everyone. I’d text friends paragraphs about how I felt to the point where even I knew I was being exasperating without even having to say anything. I’d talk with them through dozens of scenarios and hypotheticals, I’d pile Kleenex into my trash bin. Sometimes, I’d eat chocolate-covered popcorn and others, I wouldn’t eat at all and watch the numbers drop slowly on the scale. 

I journaled furiously in multiple lost notebooks or on Word documents I’d delete a few days later. I called up men who weren’t smart ideas. I drank. I journaled, called them up, and drank all in the same day and in no particular order.

And then one day, you realize that eventually, none of it will be enough. So you stop seeking comfort from others, and start retreating into yourself. You learn to stop asking yourself these Godforsaken questions and instead, you pour yourself into your work and become a productive worker. You might convince yourself that all is well, but once you reach that milestone you’ve been working for, you realize that the heaviness still lurks within the depths of your mind only to come out when there is nothing left to do for the day.

Maybe I’m too much of a cynic, but I also feel as though comfort is all too rehearsed – rehearsed catch phrases of support statements, rehearsed pep talks, rehearsed hand holding, rehearsed handing over of a tissue box, rehearsed episodes of TV shows you watch whenever you’re sad. 

I think that’s why I’ve found myself hesitating to seek out comfort. That and the fact that everything that seems to make my life so heavy (the fear of failing out of medical school, the fear of disappointing my family, the privileged envy I feel towards my college friends who play grown-up in their West Village apartments, the sadness I feel speaking to my grandparents, the thought that I may have wasted my youth) is so distinct, and yet so blurred into each other so that one ends where the other begins, and eventually they all become the same amorphous thing. They become inseparable from each other until I realize nihilistically that the thing that makes life heavy is arguably just life itself.

I think about calling up my parents from time to time, but I wouldn’t know what to say. Where to start, what deeply flawed aspects of myself I unfairly hold them responsible for subconsciously ingraining within me. I used to resent the fact that they didn’t seem to understand me. I think part of being almost 24 years old, though, is beginning to strangely be okay with it.

With all of this circulating, and the fact that I had a cardiology exam to study for, I figured it was the right time to talk to my therapist. I didn’t know what made me feel emptier; the fact that I had become uncomfortable seeking comfort from others, or the frightening reality that even if I did, I wasn’t sure that those well-intentioned, yet rehearsed routines could help me. Good intentions and assumed support only get you so far. You know that your comforters are there for you and love you, but you don’t feel comforted the way you want to.

And so I went up the stairs to her office, hoping somehow she could reach into my mind and take all of it out. I naively, and like a scientist, figured I could neatly present my predicaments and complexities, my idiosyncrasies and naiveties, and then ask for some evidence-based answers. How can I make these ruminations go away? How can I break free of old thought patterns? How can I successfully find comfort in anything, the way that I used to? How can I stop thinking, thinking, thinking at all?

She listened to me nonsensically ramble, and handed me tissues for tears that rolled down because of everything and nothing. And all she had to say was simply, I think you’re just looking for someone to hold this thing with you.

I’m not even sure what this thing is though. And they wouldn’t understand because I don’t really understand it. And regardless, understanding others is tiring, isn’t it?

I don’t think they have to understand though. They just need to hold it with you.