Chapter 13: My Therapist Made Me Do It
About writing vulnerable letters and living to tell the story. Shame doesn’t kill us, after all.
My father had reminded me of memento mori and of my fear of dying alone. So, naturally, I started going out on dates again.
But as I was unintentionally repeating flat numbers, I was also repeating mistakes in the same absurd way. As if following a script some film director handed me, the short-lived stages of courtship, dating, and ultimately implosion were taking place one after the other.
I was like a hungry person, going from one date to the next, in the hopes someone else would give me what I hungered for most, love. It was a project with a selfish objective: not dying alone. I wasn’t looking to connect with someone. I was looking for a caregiver, for a man to take my heart into his hands and take care of it, for a man to sleep by my side every night, so I don’t sleep — and maybe die in my sleep — all alone.
In the darkness of that February, after the last implosion took place with yet another guy, something fundamental shifted in me.
Until then, I was used to walking around carrying an armor of perfection. I’d been made to work to get love for as long as I could remember, so I performed for love during those dates, from my makeup to the rehearsed stories I told that would put me in a good light. That would make me loveable. Because leaving that armor aside made my cortisol levels spike. But my dates could only see a pretty, painted armor when they expected a real-life person. When it all imploded, I blamed my slip into imperfection and strengthened the armor further.
Until the day my therapist told me to write an honest letter to the last guy I dated.
I met her suggestion with a sarcastic laugh, knowing that I’d rather burn myself with boiling oil before I’d do it. Because shame burns your skin worse than hot oil.
But my therapist pushed me, making it a challenge. What did I have to lose? I’d lost the guy already. So I gave in. I wrote him a letter to express all that I didn’t have the courage to say while we were going out. All the little moments between us that I had enjoyed, all the glances sideways that gave me butterflies. The only way I could go through with something that made me feel so ashamed was thinking that my therapist had made me do it. It wasn’t me, it was some homework I had to do. And homework was homework.
I emailed him the letter and hid under the covers in bed as if shame couldn’t find me there. The ding on my phone announcing his possible reply gave me heart palpitations. But his answer was a string of admiring words towards what I’d just shared, and said in turn a few kind words towards me. He had seen a glimpse of me, after all.
That, right there, was perhaps our one single moment of true connection. It was something I had craved the entire time but blocked off with my armor. I had been starving and gulping on false intimacy like on fast food, but that conversation gave me a taste of what real food would taste like. And how much it would nourish me.
Writing that letter liberated me from my self-imposed prison. I felt light. A lightness of being that wasn’t unbearable. Because shame thrives in moldy drawers and heavy, unspoken feelings. But once you expose it, it loses its imagined power over you. That was the first step, in a series of more I had to take before I would stop looking for a savior.
But soon it was Friday, the 13th of March, 2020 — that day we will never forget — when the world came to a screeching halt. Saviors were needed elsewhere.
What do you mean shame won’t kill us?! Are you sure! As usual a lovely piece of writing.
Well done. Communication is the universal solvent!