Chapter Eva’s Self-Reflection Journal

Eva's Self-Reflection Journal

25 January 2019

Oh, the joy of group analysis this morning. In the windowless basement room of the clinic, we sat and we stared at the circle of floor between us, as if it was a mirrored pool that held the secrets to our poor frayed psyches. The silence skewered me.

The usual suspects cracked first. The woman with oversized red specs and waist-length silver hair sighed and told us about her narcissistic, alcoholic mother, the long shadow she still casts in her life, the father who walked out when she was a baby. I stifled a yawn, pitying the undeserving patient who ended up paying her for wisdom.

"You know it's difficult sometimes," she said, her wispy, querulous tone rising with a glance at me. "Sharing so much when others don't share at all. It doesn't feel...supportive?"

"Silence can stand in for so much," said Janet, agreeing with her.

Boredom, chiefly, I wanted to say. I was feeling nothing. But the new self-reflective me decided to play the game. I offer, "Silence can feel like a judgment, I guess."

I wanted to tell them about myself, I really did, but I wasn't sure where to start. One tabloid described me once as a "medical mutant" and maybe they were right. At the age of ten, while eating a pizza, I bit off the tip of my tongue without even realizing. I remember a moment of alarm, the crispy pepperoni mixed with blood. Unpleasant but not remotely painful. I once cut myself with a knife, and to stem the bleeding, cauterized it on the stove. The smoky aroma was like barbecued pork.

Is it that surprising I find the emotional stuff alien? I'm wired up differently. I'm a house with no alarm system, doors and windows flung open to the world. Set fire to me, break my bones, cut me open, make me bleed. Please, be my guest. I can assure you, I'll feel precisely...nothing.

If I'm not going to confide in them, what the hell am I doing here? Why do I even want to be a therapist?

Briefly, I had entertained the idea as a way of finding inspiration for my sculpture. Artists need pain, it's their fuel. But on reflection, such logic was never going to sustain me through this. I needed to really believe in this new process, as a way of finding new ways to feel, to empathize and understand.

Nate's agenda for me was different. When I first suggested it, I could see a glimmer of hope in his eyes, that maybe I could change back to the person he fell in love with. In a therapeutic setting, given time, I could become a nurturing empathetic wife, even. "You're not like the others," he used to say, by which he meant the (very) few other women he had met. Bold, risk-averse, restless for novelty, immune to consequence, he loved that in me. Until he didn't. How quickly we are repelled by what we once desired.

When Nate diagnosed me, he told me I was one of less than a hundred people in the world known to share the condition. Once he isolated the gene, SCN9A to be exact, he was convinced it was a blueprint that could unlock the key to pain. Whatever is inside me, he said, could ease the suffering of so many lives.

Was it only because of this I fascinated him? I began to wonder. He examined and studied me, wrote papers and gave lectures about me. For too long, my uniquely flawed, fucked-up brain became his calling card.