Hey fans.

I now have thirty chapters and over 116 pages of novel to edit, and I can't do it in this format anymore. It's impossible to go back and find a chapter and edit it and have any coherence with the novel as a whole when everything is coded by date and on separate pages.

When I can, I'll post updates and revisions, but I need to work on it in one piece now. It got too weirdly dramatic trying to write a book in journal entry form, and I want it to flow better as a whole.

Meanwhile, this frees up my LiveJournal to post about my very, very exciting life, so woo hoo there.

Thanks for staying tuned. I hope you'll be at my book signing (I don't have to FLY THERE for that to happen, do I?)

I tried to make the diagnosis fit. After all, it had been seven years of therapy at that point, and I finally, at long last, had one. I used my naturally categorical mindset to come up with a structure: from my reading, it seemed that there should be a "personality" for each year of my life, which would correspond to a specific incident. Then, I'd remember the trauma, and be healed. Since I was 24, I only needed to come up with 23 other parts - myself, plus one additional person for each year I'd lived - and that would leave me with 24 traumatic memories to uncover. And then, I would enroll at long last at Roosevelt University or DePaul or even Harold Washington College, and begin my real life. I was overcome with happiness that it was so clear now, and that it was going to involve something I actually loved: list making.

I sat down with a legal pad and numbered 1-24. Number 24 of course, was myself - I was the 24 year old, real person in the group of personalities - and #1 seemed like it should be more or less advisory. I obviously couldn't have spoken or remebered anything at that time. I left it blank, for the time being.

Here is another one of those strange facts that lent itself to the drama in a very unfortunate way: I have always loved girls' names. I especially loved cultures where women were given unique, beautiful, differently spelled names, or names in native languages. Although I didn't plan to have children, as a child I would think about what names I'd choose if I did have many girls one day, and even with up to 10 daughters with very unique both first and middle names, I still wouldn't have used up all the names I someday wanted to bestow on someone. This was like my dream come true: I now was charged with the task of naming 23 imaginary daughters. Beyond that, I didn't really know what to do with them.

I brought in the list to my next session, and we got to work. I felt hope for the first time: I'd made a list, and as I checked off one by one, I'd be closer to freedom. She asked which one I was. "Amy of course," I said.

"There isn't anyone named Amy," she replied.

"What? Why not?"

"Your real self is buried under layers and layers of personalities. Anyway, that's not your real name; your mother named you that, so I think you should choose another name that she didn't give you."

Although my mother had been a very difficult person to get along with, when I was young and undiagnosed and constantly in some sort of agony, I didn't hate her at anywhere near the level I was apparently supposed to. I didn't feel anything at all. I didn't feel attraction or repulsion or love or hate or yearning; it was an empty space, content to be empty. Dr. Leib was invested in getting me to hate my mother, actively, for reasons I didn't understand.

"I'm your real mother, anyway," she reminded me, "and I know that's not your real name. I never would have named you that."

"Ok," I said, my head pounding. I never had liked my name. I found it too forward, too bold, not really representative of me at all. I looked at the list; number 23 was Elizabeth. "Well, actually, I'm Elizabeth," I said, feeling almost like an Elizabeth already. My middle name came from the same place as my first: Little Women. My mother told me, although I have no idea if this was true, that she'd named me after two characters in Little Women, Amy and Beth. The fact that she might have made that up on the spot, having thought of the idea only seconds before it came out of her mouth (which often occurred, when she was reciting historical facts) notwithstanding, it had always disturbed me. The admirable characters in Little Women were Jo, the independent, strong spirited girl who became a writer, and Meg, the successful, happy wife and mother. Amy was a brat, whom everyone despised; Beth died of scarlet fever. "Facts" that made little to no sense were common in my childhood world, and this was a great example of the dissonance that spun my head a good percentage of the time. Lost in this thought, I'd missed something.

"What?" I asked.

"Did you turn into another girl?" she looked quizzically at me, energized, creepy.

"What?"

"Are you still Elizabeth?"

"Yes, I guess, I just didn't hear you."

"Another girl must have come to see me for a minute," she decided. "I was just saying that that was supposed to be my name."

"Elizabeth?"

"Yes, my mother had chosen Elizabeth, and then for some reason in the hospital she got the bizarre idea to name me Prudence, after one of her friends. That's why my children have common names. My goal was to name both of them something that would be on the 10 Most Common Names list for their entire childhoods."

Elizabeth was kind, compassionate, listened to the stories of Dr. Leib's life with understanding and patience. I didn't really feel it was another person, but I supposed that would come, in time. Dr. Leib was separating me into fine strands, a little bit at a time, the final step in destroying everything I came with, but I didn't realize it; I was excited to be creating characters, like I'd done in the creative writing and theatre classes I missed so much. I hadn't been on a stage in many years, but here it was like I once again had an opportunity to perform. The pressure felt just as great: no one else would be watching, but this performance would win me back my entry into personhood. I could be Elizabeth. I could be Sarah, or Rachel, or Arielle, or anyone she wanted. I didn't think I was capable of being a man or an animal, but I was hoping it wouldn't get that far. I started listening to Bach a little bit again, started writing and composing for a few minutes at a time, until I'd start to cry. Hope was back.

Seventy five dollars was a lot of money for me to spend in one place. My groceries - vegetable oil, unpopped popcorn, peach frozen yogurt, five Dannon yogurts a week (those were my lunches at work, in addition to the bialys left over from everyone else's infamous kosher-style deli meals), and an occasional carton of eggs or head of lettuce, when the burning need for variety struck - averaged less than $10/week. My rent included utilities, and was $330 a month; I didn't go to movies or out to dinner, very rarely bought music or clothes, and never spent money unexpectedly. I didn't have a car, or even renters insurance. I paid my rent, spent about $50/month on groceries, and the rest went to therapy, which was, at $500 per month, over fifty percent of my yearly gross income, according to my Schedule B. The investment in the conference was a jump start on my life finally beginning, so it wasn't at all difficult for me to part with the money, but what it represented was so emotionally charged that I couldn't sleep for the weeks remaining. I was going to find out the truth about my family, my memories, the truth that would allow me to recover and go through the rest of my life like a normal person. After I recovered the memories, I'd be able to do what other people did because they liked it: have sex, eat a variety of foods in front of other people, not react with panic at accidental touch, enjoy seasonal things like sunlight, beaches, swimming, picnics, going barefoot, or hay rides, Christmas parties, staying up until midnight on New Year's Eve, chocolate and kissing on Valentine's Day, ham and church on Easter. The seasonal and social customs that filled me with dread, repulsion and bewilderment would make sense, and feel fulfilling and necessary. I'd welcome the presence of other people, rather than being filled with instant fear and growing suspicion. $75 seemed like very little to pay for the miracles that would start to happen, once I understood where these issues were coming from. The truth will set you free... knowing the truth, speaking it, would release a lifetime of missing pieces to settle quietly and quickly into their places.

I spent quite awhile figuring out what to wear. One would not want to be inappropriately dressed in that sort of setting, it seemed. Basic black, my typical garb in a new setting where I wanted to appear somber bordering on tragic yet slightly hip, might be potentially triggering. Any cult survivor with an ounce of sense would know not to show up in head to toe office-black. I hated the other basics, though: khaki conjured up visions of golf and cruises, navy was, well, navy, and I had sworn off gray ever since my sophomore year of high school, when the season's hottest combination - gray and mauve - took hold of my life. I was completely, utterly gray and mauve for the entire year. I settled on a red, white, and tan theme: not at all my preference, not even something that felt like myself, but I felt my chances of being accepted were much greater in the right color scheme. As difficult as it was, I decided to forego eyeliner, as well; I didn't want to resemble Morticia, or someone's relative's incarnation of such, and ruin things for another unsuspecting attendee.

t occur to me at any point that my preoccupation with wardrobe might belie a less psychiatrically disabled state than Dr. Leib had convinced the federal government about, and I had been brainwashed at that point to believe that my pervasive belief that I wasn't really "disabled" disabled, as in an actual disability, was just more denial and lack of understanding about my true condition.

A few nights before the conference, there was a made for TV movie on ABC: "Voices Within: The Lives of Truddi Chase." It portrayed the complicated and difficult life of an adult woman who had been horrifically abused in childhood by a sadistic stepfather, while her hyperreligious but hypocritical and cold mother looked the other way and allowed almost unsurvivable events to occur. Truddi had developed a dissociative disorder to cope with the abuse and compartmentalize it, so that she was able to continue to function into adulthood as a successful real estate agent and wife. Her dissociative abilities allowed the abuse to be sealed away in a remote corner of her mind, while what was left of her - an intelligent, attractive, funny, high functioning woman - went on. I didn't normally watch television, but one night it was uncharacteristically on, and I saw the promo for this upcoming TV drama. Dr. Leib had seen it as well, and told me to watch it, as she was planning to do.

Now, here is the absolutely most bizarre twist in my entire life story: I look exactly, utterly, inescapably, identical to Shelly Long, the actress who played Diane on "Cheers." And in this movie, the main character - Truddi Chase, who had sealed off her horrible childhood abuse memories into other parts of her mind, and then underwent therapy for a dissociative identity disorder - was played by Shelly Long. Dr. Leib later said it was just like watching me on television. Because it was: she looked, acted, spoke, gestured, flung her same-length hair, held her tea cup, averted her eyes, intoned various moods and spoke in similar phrases - exactly like me. In Dr. Leib's, and perhaps as well my own, mind, the dissociative character of Truddi Chase, switching from one identity to the next, recalling terrifying and brutal scenes of childhood abuse, was forever imprinted with an exact replica of my physical self. At my next session, it was all she could talk about: how strange, fascinating, enlightening it was to have watched the movie. "It was just like watching you," she exclaimed. "I've never seen anything like it. It was like I was watching the movie and seeing you for the first time, who you really are, what's really going on with you." I was very dramatic, exaggerated, opinionated, forceful at times. At other times I was shy, hesitant, couldn't find words. I don't know what I was like during the abuse, but I know she'd created hypnotized versions of myself that would cooperate, because in my regular state, I still refused. I was very tired and felt heavily drugged at times, still on quite strong medications; at other times, when I'd go for long periods without eating, I was extremely energized, almost manic. My handwriting changed, depending on a lot of factors; my tone, volume, pitch, accent, manner of speaking had all been created by imitating hundreds and hundreds of others, so it varied depending on who my bus driver had been, what I'd heard on the radio that morning, any encounters I'd had with sales clerks prior to therapy. As a person with autism who fundamentally couldn't speak but was verbal, couldn't tolerate social interactions but was disguised as a normal, even attractive, 24 year old woman, and had severe sensory issues combined with an overwhelmingly pervasive need not to have special needs, I was the embodiment of the famous quotation, "All the world's a stage," and I acted out the self I had created that moment or hour or day to survive and be recognized as a non-autistic human. That's why I was inconsistent, took on many personalities, even different voices or language. I still had no language, having never heard the term "high functioning autism," to describe or understand myself, so there was no way I would ever convince her, at that point, that I was not, in fact, what she archaically referred to as a "multiple." From then on, I was not only a ritual abuse survivor, but a multiple, and our mission was two-fold: recover the memories, and meet the parts.

At the next group, we got a brochure. There was going to be a conference, the following month, on recovering from sexual abuse. There was a schedule of speakers and, given my love of schedules, it was all I could do to set my brochure aside and put on expressions of empathy as we checked in, voted on a topic ("how I feel about and cope with my angry feelings after I've talked about the abuse in therapy," during which I shared that I hadn't had much anger yet besides frustration at not recovering my memories, because the topic was anger about childhood abuse, not anger at the current abuse being perpetrated by the therapist.) And anyway, that wasn't "abuse" yet in my mind; that was my unusual and embarrassing treatment, which if I ever told anyone they would never understand according to Dr. Leib, who had forbidden me to disclose any of it. If I did, she said, people might interpret it wrong and I might have to stop treatment, in which case, I'd never return to school and work. There was deep breathing, check out and goal setting for next time ("try to get to bed before midnight" was my goal; I tried to imply my lack of sleep was somehow related to abuse, because for other people, it was), and then I was free to spend the subway ride home drinking in the beautiful many-columned conference schedule.

At approximately the Addison stop, I saw it: a three-part series on the main conference day covering Satanic Ritual Abuse. I couldn't believe my good fortune. Now I could get a huge jump start on my memories. I filled in the registration form and preregistered for the SRA (that was the acronym for Satanic Ritual Abuse) series.

A month later, our group got handouts about Satanic holidays and speakers who talked about triggers, abandoned buildings, churches, code words, secluded settings, forest preserves, and being forced to harm animals. I had a vague memory of being forced to do something terrible, something that literally ripped my heart out, to an animal in the forest preserve. I had very clear memories of being in church and being terrified I'd run up to the front at any moment, yelling out that this was all a bunch of crap and everyone there was a hypocrite, or just screaming out of frustration and boredom. I also had a strange seasonal cycle and very bizarre periods, which would start normally enough but then never end. I'd have most of the symptoms of early pregnancy for a long time, several weeks, getting more and more bloated and uncomfortable until finally at long last, 60 or 70 or even 80 days since my last cycle, I'd finally bleed. I had an intermittent sensation of knives stabbing deep into my vagina, at completely random moments, causing me to double over in pain in elevators or grocery stores, or waking me up in the middle of the night. I experienced the world in somewhat of a fog, constantly trying to fully clear my head and participate without the numbness and almost tunnel vision of my mind. I was terrified of evil. I melted with pain and rage at the mere thought of an animal being harmed, or a child being hurt, or the fate of women on most of the planet. It was all I could do to keep myself on the bus or train, still, when parents were speaking harshly to their miserable, exhausted, deprived, sad, scared children. Sometimes I still got off and waited for the next train, when I could no longer listen to what to me sounded like abuse, not any recognizable (not to mention effective) form of discipline.

I was hypersensitive to the phases of the moon and to the seasons, and always had been. Back at home, in church, we learned about the ignorant pagans who were replaced by the enlightened Christians at a point in history, and this seemed incredibly counterproductive to me: of course the sun was god, in a way. Our distance from the sun, specifically, is exactly what allowed life to occur; without it, we'd be Jupiter, or Mercury, or another inhospitable planet. The interrelatedness of the cosmos to our very lives, the amazingness of gravity and the miracle of water... all those things were to be worshiped. Taking such beauty and perfection and channeling it all into the annual dramatization of a few events in the life of one dead rebel seemed like a joke in comparison to what we should be worshiping: the solar system, the resulting seasons and all the mysterious forces in our expanding universe that we might never know or harness, those were the miracles. It seemed obvious to me why we needed a big huge celebration just as we crossed that line to where the days get longer, and the first unconscious hint of spring began; why did we have to make that about one Palestinian baby? That the world renews itself over and over and over is so breathtaking, and that in all of that we, the women at least, are able to bring forth one perfect child from our own bodies, is both mammal and divine at once, as anyone who's ever gently, agonizingly pushed forth a tiny human head from between her two heavy, spread legs, moments later holding in her arms a copy of her own genetic code, looking deeply into the eyes of her soulmate, smelling the euphemistic "newborn baby smell," that unparalled fragrance that is, actually, the scent of amniotic fluid, allowing the creature to latch on and suck from her body, can attest. Of course we'd have a holiday to celebrate birth, and what better time than when the earth itself experienced rebirth from the sun?

In the spring, at the vernal equinox, I'd become depressed. I could see no purpose in this endless busy quest we called "life," or find meaning in any of my usual activities. I'd become restless, unsettled, trying to find new projects or structures, driven to invent schedules or programs of study or life directions, as the squirrels and hibernating animals do, as the spring cleaning cultures do, as the earth itself does. The increase in light stimulates the pineal gland into productivity in some way, mating or building or planting, and I was incredibly sensitive to the change in light; but because in my human life, spring was when things started to wind down - school for the year, choir on a break, musicals on hiatus, even first communion and confirmation classes were coming to a close - I'd become slightly frantic. Our system is based on the old agricultural need to have the kids help in the fields starting in May or June, so everything for children comes to an abrupt halt just as energy levels and light stimulation peaks. I didn't know that though. I read through the handouts and thought, well that does really explain some things. Not how the people in my town got away with worshipping satan under the radar for all those years, not where they parked, not why I never once saw any of the necessary supplies in my entire life growing up there, and most importantly, not why I had not a single memory of the alleged events: but it was one explanation for my seasonal, holiday related depression and anxiety. It was my first listing of facts that might explain me to myself, so I searched for more.

As it turned out, satanic ritual abuse, autism, and mercury poisoning have a frightening number of elements in common.

The group was run by a woman named Melody. I couldn't tell if that was a good sign. She looked like she was about nineteen, although she had to have gotten her degree in counseling, so she was probably in her mid-twenties. My age, and she was already running a group for other women in her spare time, and I was on disability, doing nothing. Taking drugs, sleeping, waiting for trains and busses to and from the north shore, waiting for two entire years to pass. Melody was thin and naturally white-blonde and she had a boyfriend named Kris who worked with computers and wrote guitar music and lived with her, and she had become a counselor because she survived sexual abuse by her father when she was growing up. (It was a support group, not a professional therapy group, so the leader was also a participant, I learned in Melody's "check in.") There was an older woman, Delores, who broke down and cried because her childhood abuse by her uncle had caused her to spend the rest of her life in isolation, not trusting or committing or becoming close to a single person, and now she was in her early sixties and just entering therapy for the first time. "I'm most afraid," she choked, through huge round tears that spattered on the tissue pack she'd brought along and set neatly on the desktop attached to her chair, "that I'll die before I have the experience of trusting one single person in this world." Jamaica had been abused by her stepfather, but her mother believed her and they left him. Still, it affected her sexually, and she was struggling with relationships and acting out abusive patterns. Kaye had been used in child pornography, and now she looked to be well over 400 pounds. I was surprised she could fit into the small chairs that had been set into a circle. They were the kind with wire baskets underneath, and small surface deskettes attached to the right side. Her makeup was impeccable, and her crimson rayon shirt matched both her lips and nails perfectly. I wondered if the ensemble was always going to be red, or if there would be other matching colors to come. That, I looked forward to finding out. Natalie, who was abused by her father as well, had a strange feature in that whenever she moved her mouth in speech, her entire nose bobbed and twisted, almost like a second pair of lips. I couldn't stop staring in fascination. It was my turn. The "Group One: introduce yourself!" check-in instructions were on the dry erase boar. I followed them, in order.

"My name is Amy, I'm 24, I work (I imaginary put on the "-ed" at the end of that word, but it didn't quite make it into audible speech) as a receptionist, I don't know who my abuser(s) were although I'd feel comfortable naming them if I did, I'm sure. I'm comfortable with contact outside of group." Also, I silently added, I'm too ashamed to have any real friends whose lives aren't devoted to therapy, so I'm hoping maybe one of you will click with me, and I can have one person in my life with whom I'm not invisible, to whom I don't have to lie. I was afraid, however, that most of them probably had very interesting lives, and the prospect of a disabled friend who did nothing but go to therapy and sleep off heavy medications would never work. I was barely through my introduction when the decision to not-tell had already been sealed. "And finally, my goal for the group is to try to find some of my repressed memories. In advance. I'm scheduled to work on them intensively in a hospital, but that's awhile from now, so I'm doing some preliminary work."

I don't know if anyone noticed the bizarrely schedule-oriented entry in the midst of the circle's recollections of pain and trauma, or suspected that perhaps I didn't belong, because they chanted "Hi, Amy" like they had for all the others, and we moved along to Ina, from Eastern Europe, who had a harrowing story about childhood rape by a cousin in a communist regime where there weren't even vocabulary words for basic psychological terms we take for granted in our language. Perhaps they were distracted by their own pain; perhaps they'd all been there at one point, wishing it wasn't true, not wanting to know, recapturing their tragic stories, and they recognized that twilight phase in my introduction. I was a sympathetic, caring, deeply intuitive group member so although I knew next to nothing about abuse and its resulting trauma, I could offer more support and empathy than most of the members doing their own work, immersed of necessity into their biweekly allotment of pain and grief. I would chat about what could almost be described as philosophy during my turns, and lend cheerful, or somber, support, as needed. People instantly liked me. I automatically, due to that eerie "failure of empathy," couldn't help getting an instant, complete impression of their inner state and automatically mirroring that rather than anything internal, so they expeienced me as genuinely parallel, focused on their needs, their experience, their emotional state. I was still a chameleon and maybe the raw grief of retelling abuse stories made them more appreciative of, or vulnerable to, a young tan groupmate with huge eyes dripping with concern, sympathy, horror, outrage, pride, astonishment, that knowing nod-thing. That last one made me a little uncomfortable, but sometimes, it was exactly the gesture that the situation called for, so I'd force myself to do even that.

I honestly thought I was participating. The fact that I had no memories whatssoever, and very likely hadn't been abused in childhood in anywhere near the ways they had been, never really surfaced in me until afterwards, when I'd go home confused, frustrated, lonely, the girl who, once again, didn't quite belong: I was Most Supportive Member in a sexual abuse memories, but I had no memories. I was there as almost a remedial, pre-credit step to get my wings; nothing else mattered. During the re-telling of inappropriate touching, clothes being brushed aside, boundaries violated, children serving as confessors, best friends, surrogate wives, it never popped into my mind, not once, that this was occurring to me at that very time in my life. My autistic process was so rigid that I was unable to process the discrepancies between childhood and adulthood, parents/steparents/uncles/cousins vs. a therapist. The therapists in these stories were the heroes, the rescuers, and the family members were the villans. Thus, I dutifully looked for scraps of evidence to piece together my sexual abuse quilt in the place I'd been sent to look, and only there: it could not have happened that I spontaneously thought outside the structure of what had been programmed in.

My memory work in therapy intensified in response to my frustration at being a group member possibly about to be found out as not even having been abused. I said I felt like a fraud, because I had no real memories, not like those women did, and thought it was disrespectful of me to continue.

"Maybe you're just the kind of person who needs more help remembering," Dr. Leib suggested. "You remember being bored and upset, and not liking afternoons, right? That must have been when the abuse occurred." I felt a chill, that tingling freezing numbness that meant something was, I couldn't finish the thought, I was too cold. I began shaking.

"Sweetie, you're shaking. Have a blanket." She covered me with a blue striped blanket and sat right next to me, our legs touching through the thick padding. I was instantly self conscious; did she notice how big my legs were? Could she feel that? What was she thinking about them?

"I think she started," she crooned, gently pushing me backwards onto the couch, "right here." Her hands stroked my head as I pulled away, grabbing at her wrists to stop the unwanted touch. "That's it, you can do it. You didn't want her to touch you. That's it, sweetie, fight her." It was psychotic; she brushed and stroked and pinched as I pushed, struggled, yelled at her to stop. "Say your feelings. Put them into words, like you couldn't do then. What did you want to say then? Say it to me now."

"STOP IT! Get off of me!" She was sitting on my knees now, her long arms holding my shoulders down on the couch. "Good, yes. Tell her again."

"No, I mean it! Stop! I don't want to! I can't!"

"Oh, I know honey, I know you hated her. You're doing such good work," she crooned, "Did it hurt when she did this?" I screamed, tried to get away, my hair flying into my eyes. She took one hand off my shoulder to smooth it out of my eyes. "There you go honey, keep telling her how you feel." Pinch. Stroke. Slap. There was a safety pin that she kept under the couch cushion, and she opened it with one hand. "Look at that, I got it open without you getting free," she laughed, and then there was electricity on the side of my thighs, lightning, ice, fire, then what felt like spiders, marching, throbbing, my underwear

She was lowering my underwear.

Everything spun intensely, and went black.

During the year I waited to get disability and then the two years I waited to get Medicare, I prepared myself to re-enter life. After all, it was just a matter of months at this point: 24 from the time I was approved for disability until I had Medicare. Then, I estimated, maybe 3-6 at the most to recover the memories, and then off to music school. I could almost hear the piano bench scraping across the wood floor, smell the greasepaint backstage at the dress rehearsals, hear the disrespectful, whispering teenage girls waiting to audition for Bye Bye Birdie and Grease and Fiddler on the Roof and The Wiz. I walked three buildings east to the beach and sat on a towel on the sand, meditating, clearing my mind of anything but music. I could never really get the constant music out of my head. It was like having my brainwaves permenantly tuned to the greatest hits of classical music. Sometimes, it was distracting, but mostly, I didn't mind, especially now that I had no one to talk to for days at a time, other than pharmacists or clerks in grocery stores, or when I had therapy. I tried to enjoy the time off, thinking this was my last time until retirement with nothing to do but sit on a beach. I tried to enjoy it. Surprisingly, my skin has a huge amount of melanin, which I never would have guessed, being so fair. I turned a deep reddish brown, my hair almost white from the summer sun. I didn't have a girlfriend, or any friends at all, to appreciate my young tan white-blonde anorexic (but good-anorexic) thin body. By the time I'd made it out into the world, I was wrinkled and bony and my hair was coarse and grey-brown and flew everywhere; the beautiful years had been wasted, every day of them, in total isolation.

On non-therapy days, I'd walk a few blocks to the grocery store and buy my supplies: fruit, frozen yogurt, popcorn, oil, kool-aid, Sweet n low, toilet paper, Wrigley's Spearmint gum. I was self-conscious around all people; could they tell I was psychiatrically disabled? The diagnosis I'd been given was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, resulting from satanic ritual abuse by my parents. I'd insisted that Dr. Leib amend it to my mother, as I didn't feel comfortable desecrating the memory of my dead father, but she said it was too late, the paperwork was already submitted, and anyway, since I couldn't remember it yet, she couldn't really say who had or had not participated. Did I look like someone who'd been in a cult, or on psychiatric disability? Even the baggers made me nervous; several of them were clearly disabled, but not as disabled as me. They still had jobs. I didn't talk to anyone anymore, even the clerks. I kept my eyes on the ground at all times. I never looked people in the eyes; I was ashamed to be living off of their social security taxes. I told myself it was for their own protection: they might see evil in me that I had repressed, didn't even know was there. I imagined anyone who'd been in a satanic cult must have done some horrible things. Or at least, witnessed them. Occasionally, a friendly Rogers Park stranger at the beach or on the train would try to engage me in one of those mutual young single getting-to-know-you conversations, but I pretended I had somewhere very important to be and I'd race away, apologizing brusquely. I knew where the conversation would go: "what do you do?" And how could I answer that question? "Nothing, actually. You see, I'm waiting until I get Medicare so I can retrieve my memories of ritual abuse, then I'm going to be a high school music teacher, choral emphasis, which I'm planning to start exactly, wait let me think a second, okay, five and a half years from today."

I got very lonely, and extremely bored. I created rituals and routines for every minute of every day: laundry, walking the 20 blocks up to Evanston and back, riding my bike down the lakefront path as far as Montrose Beach (sometimes, all the way to the infamous totem pole at Addison, a mile east of Wrigley Field), lifting my two dumbell weights, eating my one large and two miniscule meals, reading free weeklies, sitting at the library. But it started to get dark early, and cold. I had to cut many of my routines short or eliminate them altogether on really bad weather days, so I sat inside for long periods, tracing the patterns on the iron sides of my bed, climbing from the top to the bottom bunk and sitting, practicing what I'd say in therapy the next time.

Eventually, Dr. Leib approved a group. Additional therapy, she thought, couldn't hurt, as long as she could be in contact with the group leader before and during my membership. Since I was supposed to be recovering from abuse, I enrolled in an abuse recovery group for women, and started going twice a week. It met on Tuesdays and Fridays, which were my non-therapy days, so I had something to do each day of the week. I loved it for that reason alone, before I even started. Now besides Saturdays, when I took extra meds and slept most of the day, I'd have a schedule, sort of, at a point anyway. On Sundays, I went to between two and four different masses, at different parishes. I never spoke, met people afterwards, looked into their eyes at the Sign of Peace, registered at any of the churches. I'd put a few dollars in cash into the offertory, but never a check, never fill out the membership cards or visitor log in the vestibule. I didn't really fundamentally believe that Jesus had died for my sins, and it bothered me to see people acting out the details of another human's life in yearly cycles instead of living their own. I pushed that aside though, and chanted and prayed in my own sort of suspended state; it was like group meditation, except done in a variety of not very comfortable positions. I really just needed a place to go, a time to leave my house, a route to take, like other people my age had every morning, every evening, took for granted that rhythm and feeling of being expected somewhere. The group would give me a place to belong, with peers. My name would be checked off twice a week on the attendance sheet. It didn't occur to me to consider group dynamics, the subject of the conversations, the emotional content. I didn't care about any of that. I just wanted to be counted, my name to appear on a form next to a little box where there would be an "x" filled in each time I arrived. Two more times a week, I had a reason to find something to wear, wash my hair that day, eat on a schedule. That is all that mattered. It was enough to make me dizzy with anticipation. Group, hospital, music teacher. I could feel the momentum.

I thought the great tragedy, the one singular trauma, of my life, was going to be the high school music thing. I hadn't predicted that was but the gateway, the stone rolled away just enough, beckoning, for me to enter my own tomb.

My sessions lasted longer and longer. I was now coming three times per week, she said to accelerate the pace of my eventual recovery, return to life, entrance at last to places like Music Theory I class and student teaching. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. I was the last patient of the day, before she went home to her children (who lived with her every Wednesday and Thursday, every other Friday, Saturday and Sunday.) The Monday evening appointments went on endlessly; she had nowhere else to be. Sometimes, I'd be there over three hours. I was still heavily drugged, and practically comatose by the end of the treatment. Wednesdays and Thursdays, I was supposed to be done at 12:30, but I'd often be there until well past 2:00. I didn't have to be at work until 3:30; that would leave just enough time for me to stagger back out into the sunlight, catch the bus, then train, then bus to the office, answer the phones and man the front desk as if I'd just stepped out of my simple, happy, uncomplicated life to spread cheer and write impeccable memos until dusk. I was still doing award-winning acting, from the time I got into my own shower in the morning until I fell fitfully asleep well after midnight, the drugs taking longer and longer to work, even at double doses.

She thought I should consider hospitalization. She said that my sensory issues, which we didn't have a name for then, just a growing, overwhelming list of "the things I'm afraid of," had to have been caused by years of horrific physical and probably sexual abuse, as there was no possible alternative explanation for my revulsion and fear of simple things like tags in clothes, touching, kissing, loud sounds, crowds, smells, being too close to people on the bus, a person's hand or face or a stain on their clothing or a dried piece of food in my line of sight. The more she focused in on what they were, the emotions they elicited, and the possible causes, the more the discomfort and exaggerated responses themselves intensified. In particular, I was averse to distress of any sort. Children being mocked or teased by slightly older peers, parents being insensitive to the needs of their children of any age, and especially, babies being left to cry, set off alarms in me that no amount of therapy or medication or self-talk or explanation could begin to get anywhere near. I'd be on a bus going to work, and a baby would start to cry. The baby's mother would sort of shake the stroller and look away, as if it wasn't her child there. The baby's cries would grow louder, more frantic, fighting against the tidal wave of fear at seeing its mother's face clearly ignoring the sounds, becoming louder and more panicked. The mother might, sometimes, reach down and try to rearrange the plastic pacifier; she more often just sat on the bus seat, not even glancing at the child. I think there is sometimes a general agreement that "babies cry," and they don't register as signs of distress so much as the normal sounds of people that age. To me this is preposterous; the sounds are biologically adaptive, and the clear, distressing signals are supposed to set off the kind of alarm signals that, it seemed, only I was receiving. I've probably heard over a hundred versions of excuses for people to ignore their children, from "he just wants attention" (what child doesn't? but since when did this become an acceptable catch phrase for 'I don't feel like getting up off my ass and doing something about my child's distress?) to "she has to learn that she's not going to manipulate me/get her way/run this family" (this is sometimes said about infants as young as a few weeks old, clearly crying in some sort of agony or discomfort; how does a mother know, from two rooms away, sarcastically brushing off the monitor's sounds, that her child isn't freezing, wet, in pain, ill, or being mauled by an animal that somehow got into the room from an attic or window or door left open in the basement? Where is not only the mother's empathy, but imagination?) and the classic suburban 1970s urban legend: "babies need to cry to exercise their lungs. If you pick them up, their lungs won't develop, and they won't breathe fully as adults." Which was our circle of friends' firm belief, growing up, and so I grew up with babies exercising their lungs, being ignored, dismissed, ridiculed, belittled, or, in the words of their parents and grandparents, saved from being willful and spoiled and getting their way. Because god forbid you'd commit, as a 1970s suburban parent, the high crime of giving too much attention to your child. Everyone knew that a child who wanted attention was the family equivalent of a rotten fig in the bunch, and the only thing to do with attention-seeking was ignore it. The more attention you needed, the less you'd get. The children I grew up with, for the most part, drank a lot, sold and took drugs at school, developed panic and eating disorders and weight problems and dropped out of school, or got kicked out, or ended up working at gas stations and insurance companies and going home at night and drinking and smoking pot with their friends on weekends. There isn't much motivation when you've grown up being ignored. If you can't even get attention for a not-really-bloody but could have been knee or a really expertly drawn-on tattoo or the sting of a playground insult, what's the motivation to go to law school, become a surgeon, do anything but continue to live on your parents' couch?

Failure of empathy doesn't always mean an actual failure to experience empathy. Sometimes, empathy fails in the opposite direction, and in my case, that was what happened. I was plagued every time I entered the world from my tiny apartment with the state and experience of people around me. I'd feel their tension, drama, anger, hesitation, joy, earnestness, wanting. It drained me to become them, but I hadn't learned that my experience was out of the ordinary, so mainly, I envied people their ability to be, hang onto, themselves in the presence of other forces, myself included. No one ever 'became' me; I, a chameleon, took on their emotional states simply in order to interact. A simple encounter at the grocery store ended up with my face contorted into the exact smile or expression of disgust or tired going through the motions of the day, of the sales clerk who rang up my items. I was incredibly nervous about how she'd judge them, because I could sense that, as well. I'd unconsciously, immediately, find myself copying her exact speech patterns, inflections, tone, facial expression. People like attention, regardless of 70s parenting lore, so my inability to refrain from slipping inside them and responding from a place of such supreme and total empathy usually made a very compelling impression. I was loved by most clerks, bank tellers, handymen, anyone I encountered casually throughout the day. I often thought of the story of Jesus being touched by the bleeding woman in a large crowd; the story goes that he turned and asked, "who touched my robe?" In that throng, probably a hundred people a minute touched his robe, which his disciples quickly pointed out, but he persisted: "I felt some power go out of me," he reportedly said. Or, something like that. That's how it felt, each time I interacted with humans; I'd slip into the role of the person opposite them, mirroring, empathizing, mimicking, unable to stop myself, unaware of any other way to be. I'd commiserate, inspire, motivate, laugh at what they found funny, just bring a little friendly ray of sunshine in some way if that's how they wanted to see me; and then, as I turned back into my blank, zombie-like self, a little bit of power would go out. One less watt.

But with helpless babies, children who were still at the mercy of too-often ignorant and self-centered American parents, my empathy went into overdrive. There were not strong enough words to describe the fear and panic a baby who was left to cry was experiencing; I found myself searching for descriptive terms that didn't really exist in the English language for the state of being abandoned the way American culture abandons its babies. Attachment parenting hasn't trickled down very far, and I'm not sure that it will; it's a lot more work than microwaved bottles, pacifiers, and the self-congratulatory state of not having spoiled a baby today (not to mention, all that lung-building). All I had was my limited vocabulary and literature, so I came up with terms like "soul murdering." My visual way of thinking intersected with the strong emotions of hurt and neglected children and as I tried to describe my painful experiences in therapy, it sounded more and more like actual abuse: "It's like being left forever on a rock out in the woods. It's like being strapped into a stroller or car seat and no one's coming back for days." I struggled to try to define abandonment, lack of empathy, just basically very primitive, often religiously-based parenting philosophies where children are seen as inherently evil, and it's the adults' job to drive that evil and narcissism out of them, from day one. I had no vocabularly or background in that sort of thing; all I had was a severe adrenaline response on mid-day busses and trains, which I would have been spared had I been allowed to work normal hours at a real job, thus commuting with adults during rush hour.

Once, I stopped at a music store after work, which was open until 10:00 pm. I couldn't stop looking through every single classical item they had: recordings, sheet music, instruments. My dream was starting to brown and crinkle a little around the edges, but in the center, it still held firm. I was going to be a high school music teacher one day. Twenty-two was hardly too old to return to school. Any day now, I'd be recovered enough to be allowed to begin. I mentally sorted through all the recordings and music I'd like to start stocking up on, should I need it sooner rather than later, categorically going through the pieces alphabetically by composer, then by type: sacred choral, instrumental, solo vocal, chamber music, oratorio, opera. That last one was a challenge; I despised opera. I'd have to overcome that. Before I knew it, the store was closing, and I'd waited until 10:00 pm to head for the train.

By 10:20, I was waiting on the platform, and a train arrived ten minutes later. In the car were two young men, seated at window seats at opposite ends, and a single mother, screaming at the top of her lungs at her approximately four-year-old child, swinging her fists, beating him over the head. "You'll listen to me like your brother does," she shrieked, over and over: just that phrase, and the loudest slaps and punches accompanied by the shouts and cries of the child.

To the side stood a tall, thin boy, about ten years old, holding a large diaper bag, small folded up stroller, and a grocery bag brimming over with a loaf of Wonder bread and the top of a carton of Camel Lights. He stood erect, eyes straight ahead, posture like a soldier, his hands almost invisibly clenching and unclenching the bag and stroller handles. "You'll listen to me! You'll listen to me like your brother, you demon!" the woman screamed, her fists and hands slapping and punching out of control. I was frozen like the boy: if I moved, I thought I'd make it worse. If I made my presence known in any way, she might completely go over the edge, and kill the boy. If I just stood there and did nothing, I'd be guilty of conspiracy; I hadn't intervened.

They got off a stop before mine. I was rooted to the floor. Should I get off and follow them, and make a report? Should I hope that someone else, a school social worker, a neighbor, had done that already, or would do that soon?

I got off the train and followed, subtlely, behind them. The woman continued screaming, dragging, punching. The little boy sobbed, setting off the woman's rage more each time he sucked in a staggering breath. They turned a corner and within a few steps, were gone. I saw a police car sitting under the train. I didn't know what to report; how could I identify the child? I didn't know where they lived, or even a first name. I walked back up the stairs and onto the platform.

My bedroom faced an alley, and at night I could hear what I was sure were babies who had been left in dumpsters, crying out. Sometimes I'd race outside, looking for the source of the cries, but they'd be gone. No one told me there were cats in the alleys overnight, and that their cries sounded eerily like infants'. When I told my psychiatrist I was having trouble sleeping because it sounded like people were leaving newborns in the dumpsters outside my window, and that there were mothers on the busses and trains that were so cruel to their children I sometimes had to get off before my stop from the panic and pain I was feeling, she didn't ask me any questions about empathy, or help me put into words the real source of my distress. She didn't recommend reading books by William Sears or Stanley Greenspan or Alice Miller; she wasn't probably really thinking of what I needed, but perhaps, what she could do with this new twist.

I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder from probable ritual abuse. That explained my obsession with babies and children being hurt, my references to "murder," my aversion to outdoors, cold, certain types of touch, all sexual activity, people's bodies, the recurring and intrusive taste of blood in my mouth. Now, the task was simply to find the lost memories, which, she insisted, could best be done in the hospital. There were places set up to help quickly and accurately retrieve these repressed memories, and if I signed myself in to one of them, my work would be done before I knew it.

There was a catch. My receptionist group insurance policy had a $40,000 lifetime limit on mental health services. So I'd need to quit my job, and apply for social security disability. Once I was approved, it would take two years until I became eligible for Medicare, and then at that point, I could go into hospitals freely, for as long as I needed to. The government would take care of everything.

"I don't want to do that, though," I protested. "I want to work. What will I do all day? What will I tell people I do?"

"What people?" she scoffed. "You don't really have any friends."

That was true, but I had coworkers, and dreams of friends. My mind started to twist: I'd have friends if I could go to music school, which I could do if I was well. If I went into the hospital, I'd get well quickly; she'd just said that. Two years of waiting, then a few months maybe in the hospital, and I could be starting music school that fall. I had a lot of credits from my bachelor's degree in religion, so I could probably get through the music education requirements in three years, easily; I'd be a high school music teacher before I was thirty. A few years ago, adding another decade onto my plan would have seemed unthinkable. At this point, just getting to do it at all, much less before 30, seemed like a wonderful option.

I couldn't say yes, though. I'd been raised by Republicans, after all, and we were people who worked for a living. We didn't take government handouts; we didn't think the government should be giving them to others, either. My reaction surprised me. I'd voted democratic since I could vote. I didn't really believe those things, in relation to other people. But apparently I'd internalized quite a bit of the Reader's Digest, Norman Vincent Peale, Ronald Reagan world in which I'd gone through my original moral and ethical development phases, and I simply could not, for any reason, even my own dream, take a handout. "I'm sorry," I said, "I just really can't do this. What about just using the $40,000, and seeing how much I can do from there?"

She said that $40,000, in terms of inpatient psychiatry, was nothing. Not even change. And that this also would be a lifetime limit on her fees, as well. And that if I didn't agree to resign and apply for disability, she'd call my supervisors, and report that I was too mentally unstable to be around our clients. I didn't know she needed consent. She wasn't kidding, either. She had their numbers. I'd said their names, dozens of times. I'd never get my job back if I needed it, and my supervisors wouldn't be able to give me references for other jobs, once they'd heard that. I didn't have a choice. She was going to win this. There was nothing I could do. I started to cry. "I really don't want to leave it there. Everyone loves me. They say I'm a really good writer. They love my memos; they call me the Memo Fairy. They won't be able to get anyone as good as me to replace me. There are a lot of people I like... and what about the bread they bring me for lunch? What will I do about lunch?" She said there would be plenty of bread in the hospital, and she'd bring some in the meantime, during the two years of waiting for Medicare. She softened her stance a little, at my grief.

"I'm sorry. I know this is hard. You'll be so glad you did it when you get better, though." And then: "Come over and sit by me."

"I'm ok. Really."

"You're not. You're so sad. Let me take care of you."

Float, float, float.

It took almost a year of interviews, paperwork, waiting for people to get and read and approve the paperwork, emergency expedited checks that you can get while waiting for disability to be approved, days on folding chairs waiting for appointments with Medicaid case workers and Social Security agents, fingerprinting, intake forms, psychiatric testing and reports and interviews, before I was approved for disability. This is what happened at my interview: I couldn't cooperate. I was supposed to cooperate, but I absolutely couldn't make myself say that I couldn't work, that I needed their money. I didn't think it was true. An small, older, balding doctor in a white wrinkled coat sat across an enormous walnut desk from me, dwarfed in a huge brown leather chair, and I said, "I don't really think I'm disabled. I'm sure I can work. I have to work only certain hours, because of my schedule, but I can work. I'm pretty sure I don't qualify for this."

He had read the extensive reports by my psychiatrist before I'd come into the room. They included things like, "She cries out 'no, no, don't touch me' during sessions" and "appears distant or blank for long periods of time; unresponsive at times." She hadn't included the type of therapy she was utilizing, the induced dissociation by hypnosis, the touching, pinching, pins stuck into my flesh, biting, or the fact that she sat on my torso and forcibly removed my pants to "work on" areas I was particularly averse to having looked at and described in detail, twisted, and slapped. "Cries silently for long periods during sessions" stood alone, as well.

"I just don't think," I tried again, "this is what I need." He scribbled furiously for a few moments, looked up through his thick black plastic glasses, blinked. Apparently, he'd been trained in the old school of psychiatry; the longer he sat there silently, he seemed to be thinking, the more likely my true insanity, as detailed by the then-Vice President of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society, would appear.

I looked down at the floor, counted the squares of carpet. It was such an odd pattern: it was tan carpet, but it had been made to look like square tiles, so that you could count actual squares of carpet, as if it were a tile floor. I suddenly loved that floor. It was soft, yet provided something to count. I began to arrange the squares in rows: there were twelve across and, it looked like, probably twenty from one end of the room to the next. That made 240 squares. My chair covered four of them. I mentally rearranged the legs of my folding chair so that they were placed exactly in the center of each square.

I had missed words. He'd said something. I wasn't finished arranging the tiles.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?" I asked pleasantly, not looking up from my arranging.

"I think I've got all I need," he repeated neutrally, the human equivalent of a bowl of dry Rice Krispies. He was wearing a grey lab coat, with his name embroidered on the lapel; in his pocket was a stethescope. He did psychiatric interviews for Social Security disability; was he kidding, with that thing?

It was over that quickly. Something about the rest of my life had been decided, and I didn't know what, or which way the decision had gone. If I didn't wait two years to go to the hospital and find my repressed memories of satanic ritual abuse, what would I do instead? Could I become a music teacher if I never found them? At that point my life was entwined so deeply in the secret, dissociated world of therapy abuse and its denial during the rest of my waking hours that I probably could no longer have just walked away. Not without massive intervention, or at least, something else to cling to. She was slowly taking away everything and everyone in my life that could have supported my escape. Other therapists couldn't be trusted; other doctors wouldn't understand my aversion to touch, my sensitivities, my unique fears. As she'd convinced my parents years before, she now had me convinced as well: the world was a dangerous place, people really didn't understand me very well, I had been acting out most of my life while secretly hiding my intense sensory misery, confusion, social ineptness. I had grown up suspecting that there might not be a single other person on the planet like me, and there definitely hadn't been one so far who truly understood. I hadn't met anyone with high functioing autism; I didn't know there was a whole world of people like me, places where I'd have permission to stay just exactly how I was, and a huge vocabulary with which to describe my valid, if unusual, experience of life among humans. All I knew then was that I was still very different, in ways there were no words to describe, and that she deeply believed that she was the one person I'd ever know who could know me well enough to bring about real, healing change. I also knew that she was wrong.

She stole the next fifteen years.

My sessions began with her confessionals and my life coaching. I had no idea I had such skills. They were particularly surprising given I had no actual life experience, outside of full-time therapy and solid reception work. Towards the end, she'd lament, "I feel terrible. We've talked about me the whole time, and I haven't helped you one bit. You have to let me help you, so I won't feel guilty later." Sometimes: "If I didn't have you to talk to, I know I'd take out my problems on my kids; they're so lucky!" or "No one knows I even have any problems; you make me seem like such a brilliant psychiatrist!" or "I always wanted someone to understand me. You're the only person who does."

I had started living almost my entire life from the ceiling, after the touching started. She explained that in her professional opinion, I had a phobia of being touched (this, I would later learn, wasn't a phobia or fear, it was a sensory issue.) People with sensory aspects of autism generally either crave certain types of touch or pressure, or find it intolerable; I was in the latter, rarer, category. But the more she attempted it and talked about it, the more it in fact became an intense fear, sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And eventually, I had a huge phobia of the mere subject, which she could then point to and use to justify my treatment, prescribe higher doses of anxiety meds to control my fear during the treatment phase, which lasted over a decade.

The end result of her whining, pleading with me not to leave her in a state of guilt and despair over not having helped enough, was that she'd realize that in my phobic state, there was no way I could possibly agree to allow her to touch me, so it was her job, as my psychiatrist, to make sure I got the necessary treatment even if I couldn't ask for it or consent to what I needed. Imagery became part of the mix, then hypnosis, suggesting that I wouldn't be able to move, suggesting imaginary restraints.

When that didn't work, real restraints. And her 250-pound body, on top of me, as well.

I had never had a real sexual feeling or experience in my life. I had attempted to imitate what I thought that was supposed to entail a few times, but I'd found it revolting and utterly uninteresting. Not having so much as felt a spark from someone else's lips, I was absolutely unprepared to recognize anything but a penis in a vagina as sexual activity. I had not encountered, in my full-time therapy and part time reception work while living in the dreamy clouds where in some brightly lit future I directed a high school choir in sacred chant and oratorios, the sort of thoughts or images that would lend themselves to the certain knowledge, much less the vague discomfort, with the fact that she was beginning to act out sex scenes. BDSM scenes, to be explicit, which were part of a world so far removed from psych meds and answering phones and daydreaming about running afterschool musical rehearsals that they couldn't possibly register as anything that already existed, much less intersect with thoughts like unethical practices, inappropriate behavior, abuse. There wasn't any penis. There wasn't any risk of pregnancy. I wasn't struggling with some sort of shame over having enjoyed it or having had a sexual response. One of these things, at least, would have been necessary for me to have somehow recognized or understood the nature of what was happening, if I even could have accessed those sorts of thoughts at all. More likely, someone would have had to tell me directly: What she's doing is sexual, it's abusive, it's unethical, and here's why: laid it out concretely, so that I could have understood. "This is what the B and D and S and M in 'BDSM' stand for," they would have had to begin, "and although it's terrifying to someone like you, it's actually a type of sexual activity that some adults, consenting adults who know what they're doing, enjoy."

Actually, even that information itself might have seriously traumatized me for awhile. Being unwittingly made part of that world, in the absolute sense, without any introduction, any official invitation into that realm, had the eerie effect of utterly silencing me. I didn't know what to say was happening. I was completely dissociated, traumatized, terrified, going through what was left of my life like a frozen, brain dead robot, and I couldn't find words to explain why. I would come up with phrases like "I hate having to go to therapy," "I hate the kind of treatment I need to get better," "I wish I was already finished with it." No one was going to sense a problem or feel any alarm from those words.

I couldn't even consider telling anyone what, exactly, I was afraid of, or what was going on. She'd said if anything ever happened to her, I would just pick up with the next therapist where she'd left off; I was supposed to say, "I have a phobia of touching," and they would instantly know what to do. She had also told me not to tell anyone, because other people couldn't be trusted to understand what I needed, and painted horrific pictures of what would be done to me in the hands of the ignorant, insensitive masses of other psychiatrists out there. I was isolated, brainwashed, and ended up convinced I was lucky that it wasn't any worse. I also knew that if I told anyone, either I wouldn't be able to come up with an accurate vocabularly to try to state what the problem was, so I'd just sound crazy or like nothing so bad was happening, or they wouldn't believe me, point blank, because of who she was. Being slightly psychic was still one of my greatest gifts; both predictions came true.

There were two things that pulled me under, and that is how the first one started. After that, she slipped subtle (and not so subtle) discussions about her life into almost every session. She explained to me about psychoanalysis, which she was studying in order to become an analyst: the theories had to do mostly with the relationship between the therapist and the client, wherein the client's problems were all reflected in conflicts, feelings, and fantasies about the analyst. Therefore, much of the focus of analysis was on the process of analysis itself and the clent's relationship to the analyst, rather than things going on the client's outside life, behaviors the client wanted to eliminate, or anything concrete, immediate, "boring," as she put it.

I developed an intense fear of being boring. I was, after all, supremely bad at talking about myself. Trying to have a conversation with geniune emotional content felt like chewing cardboard to me - pointless, tasteless, endless, dry, absurd. Without any real idea of what "interesting" would mean, I focused on what I could see. I started shopping a lot. I tried to never wear exactly the same outfit twice. I changed my nail polish daily to match my therapy outfits, like I'd done in high school. I tried doing creative things with my hair: little braids on the side, barrettes, combs. I started doing therapy crafts; art projects seemed inherently more interesting than conversation. I made an incredibly complex diorama of the office in a large shoebox, down to a miniature version of her paperweight (a tiny shell from the beach), a Barbie phone with a thread phone line going into a tiny wedge of an eraser cut to the size of a miniature phone jack, tiny book jackets stacked one after the other on small balsam bookshelves I'd sanded and glued together. I arranged the room in the interior layout I thought she should have, rather than the cumbersome and disorganized way her furniture was arranged. A few months later, she completely reorganized the room, to match the diorama.

I assigned myself journal entries, library research, art, occupational and music therapy work. I came and went with a portfolio. Most of all, I recorded in great detail everything I had eaten, down to crumbs I'd licked from my fingers. I didn't share that; eating disorders were dumb, after all, and we were pretending I didn't have one; but it was concrete, knowable, and somehow I thought it was important to record my intake, all of a sudden. A Freudian might say it was a metaphor for wanting control over what exactly was going in, since I no longer was in a therapy situation where there were appropriate boundaries in that regard. I don't know though. Maybe they wouldn't. Maybe, they'd just say that eating disorders were boring.

The sessions had a predictable pattern, now, for the first time. This was both reassuring, because up until now I'd had a terrible time navigating the course of what was supposed to happen over those 45 minutes, and frightening, because I felt inexplicable power that I wasn't sure how I'd gotten, or whether I wanted. I'd come in awkwardly and sit down, still stiff and uncomfortable in my size 2 body that seemed always on the verge of clinically morbid obesity. I'd look at her for a few moments, divining the atmosphere, the mood of the day. I didn't realize then how similar it was to the old days, coming home from school and standing just outside the door, sensing the air: was my father home? Had he been drinking? Was my mother about to blow, was she just waiting for someone to blame for the day's trouble, for my father's drunkenness? I could smell whether it was whiskey or gin, whether the air was thick with fabric softener, casserole, tears, frustration, meatloaf, anguish, a dog accident, fruit cocktail. Each scent had a specific meaning, and each would result in a different kind of evening, for all of us. I was an expert at not only smelling but intuiting the air in a dysfunctional setting, and unconsciously, I slipped on my old skills and put them to use in the service of my own survival. It was, in fact, like riding a bike.

"Something's wrong," I said, hesitantly. It was true, it was what she wanted me to notice, to say, but I felt manipulated, trapped somehow, wrong in a way I couldn't articulate. I had no other experiences with interpersonal relationships; since high school choir, I hadn't had a friend. What would I tell people I did? I was a receptionist, because I had to work the hours around my therapy appointments? I was socially awkward to begin with, but now, I was too ashamed to even try. And I was being violated in a secret, metaphysical sense that I couldn't even define, much less report: she was using my psychic powers, overdeveloped empathy, autistic sensitivities, to turn my mandatory therapy, the thing that I had to successfully complete before I'd be allowed back into the world, into her own personal rap sessions.

"I knew you'd pick it up right away," she said coyly, her eyes concerned, her lips in a seductive smile. "I love you," her expression read: "you feed me." I was being eaten alive, in spirit. I didn't know what to do, who to tell. I froze at this point. Floated away, a little, at just a safe enough distance that I could escape without totally leaving myself at her mercy.

"I've met someone, and I think it might be the man I should have been with all along. His name is Mark, and he's almost divorced... Can you tell if I'm doing the right thing, with your powers?"

"My ex-husband is suing for joint custody. The bastard! Who does he think he is, ripping two young children, practically babies, away from their mother? Monday, Tuesday, and every other weekend. That's inhuman; a child can't develop normally in two homes. I'm fighting him. Do your powers say I'll win?"

"My best friend Judy... we had our kids together, hung out laundry, had beer in the afternoons. We were so close. I've never had a better friend." There was a pause, with tears that slipped down one cheek. I moved a little farther away, up towards the offices on the second floor. "Judy... has been seeing my ex husband. She's moving in with him. They're talking about getting married! I've never been so betrayed!"

"Do you remember your friend Ruth's analyst, Dr. Grover? He sent a patient to me because they were 'thinking about' seeing each other romantically. I worked so hard with that woman, for six months, trying to talk her out of seeing her ex-therapist. That is always a mistake. And come to find out, she was sleeping with him all along! There was never any question! It's not that he screwed his patient, it's that he lied to me! He was one of my closest friends! We went through analytic training together! What do you think I should do...do you think I should report him? He's my friend, but he did sleep with a patient... and he LIED to me!"

It went like that, and then: "I know this is going to affect you, because you're like a sponge; you soak up whoever you're with. I just want to make sure you know the details so you don't get my feelings, then blame yourself for why I'm upset. I'm telling you these things so you know that it's not you, because I love you - you're so special to me! Who else could I tell these things to!"

The answer to my question, apparently, was: me. I was the person she'd tell things to, when she got separated. When I'd asked that question, I had NOT meant it as an offer. And then, one day, she was talking about one of her doctor's appointments, and I was not feeling well from having eaten an entire half gallon of peach frozen yogurt the night before, then thrown up, and I just couldn't listen. And she said: "you seem like you're not here."

I was never there.

"Really?"

She said I seemed so far away, like I was on another planet, and that she kind of wanted to come over there and shake me awake. I recoiled in terror; I didn't want to be shaken. I hated doctors, I hated hearing about her appointment, and I definitely didn't want her to come over here and do anything that involved touching me.

"You're afraid."

"I don't want to talk about this."

"Not wanting to talk about something is a sign that it's what you SHOULD be talking about, you know?"

"I really just don't want to. Do you want to tell me more about your doctor's appointment? It seems like maybe I'm just getting your feelings, so maybe it would help." I might as well use her strategy, to get myself onto a less terrifying topic.

"I can see that you're terrified of something, and I can't just let that go - I wouldn't be doing my job. Is it the idea of me coming over there, being close to you, touching you?"

I was definitely no longer in the room. No longer, possibly, in the state of Illinois. I could see her mouth moving, but like an old Speed Racer dub; she was poorly defined, and the words sounded like an old scratchy 78 record playing on 33 1/2. My body was cryogenically preserved in the position I'd last seen it: seated on the couch, legs folded up underneath me, arms crossed in front.

I didn't entirely see her get up and move, but I felt a heavy presence sink into the couch next to me, and then something warm on my arm, as my body turned to ice.

"It's called desensitization," was the last thing I remember. "You experience a small amount of the thing you're irrationally afraid of, and then increase it, and eventually, you won't be scared anymore. Can you feel me touching your arm?"

I don't know if my head moved, if I made any sound. It weighed a thousand pounds, and I was struggling to keep it upright, struggling not to fall over from the weight and dizziness of being so far from the room yet so present, in the space where her hand was. I didn't realize my body could be so hot and so cold at the same time. How could I not be able to feel any of the rest of myself, feel where I was sitting, see where I was, hear what she was saying, yet be intensely aware of the heat of her hand, almost branding its heat and weight into my arm? It seemed like it was imprinting itself there permanently, and I'd be forever marked with something I wasn't expecting, like a tattoo you get when you're drunk, and regret later.

At some point, there must have been an ending. She must have released me, I must have stood up and gotten on a bus and then the train, transferred to another train and come home. But the next thing I remembered wasn't even that day. It was days later, when I was rummaging in my pocket for my keys, outside the apartment building. It was a bright, almost humid spring day. The hint of summer sun burning the moisture from the earth was unmistakable. It must be June already, I was thinking; then with a start, I realized where I was, and that I didn't remember getting there, or anything since the moment of facing my fear of being touched. I let myself inside, turned on a local news station, and tried to figure out how many days had gone by.

Three.

I hadn't had therapy in the meantime. I hadn't been touched a second time.

"Do you ever lose time (hours, days, weeks), not remembering where you've been or what you've done for long periods?" This was a question on a quiz I'd take many years in the future, to determine if I was suffering from a trauma-related level of dissociation. The problem was, it didn't ask "Did you ever experience these episodes before you went into therapy?" or "After which events in your life do these episodes tend to occur?" or even more helpfully, "Does your therapist ever touch you, causing the disappeared segment of time to begin?" So that when I answered "yes," the evaluator nodded sagely and diagnosed me with a trauma-related disorder, most likely caused by a history of physical or sexual abuse. No one ever, in all the years to come, asked me whether she touched me, or what set off the episodes, or anything that could link her to the problem. The first time she touched me, she'd graduated from analysis training and already been elected an officer in the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society. Her reputation was impeccable, and her charisma was legendary. If there was ever a clear cut case of probable childhood abuse, it was my circumstances: I was a receptionist in long term therapy on Klonopin, Wellbutrin and Xanax, and I was, for the most part, inchoate in the best of circumstances. I was the perfect victim: desparate to please her, to do well enough that I'd be let out of therapy in order to become a music teacher; concrete, limited, cognitively rigid; naive, isolated, heavily drugged, orphaned, lonely, empathic, caretaking, loyal, easily convinced and tricked by complex, emotionally charged language.

Overwhelmed, uncertain what had happened, I thought I should take some extra medicine that first time. I took a second xanax, and fell asleep early. It was Wednesday night, so I had my 90-minute trip to therapy in the morning.

It started like this.

It was the beginning of my session, and Dr. Leib said she had something to tell me. Usually that meant a vacation.

She leaned forward, hesitated, folded and unfolded her hands, smoothed her too-short skirt, which hardly needed it. She had a tendency to emphasize her long legs a little too well in stiff wool or linen mini-skirt suits; where she found them in her size, I have no idea, but they were not as attractive as she intended.

"I'm getting a divorce, and I'm telling all my patients."

I had no idea how to respond. What did that have to do with anything? Her husband wasn't any part of this; I barely even registered that he'd existed, prior to this moment. There were the maternity leaves when I was back at that Christian college, so obviously there was somebody at some point, but why would I need to know they were splitting up?

It was time for me to speak. I went on automatic pilot, quickly pulling up and downloading the Socially Appropriate Response file.

"OK."

My character continued the response nonverbally: lowered eyes glanced away with empathic melancholy; hands twisted in a combination 'wow you felt I was important enough to share that with!' and 'I'm so sad to hear that terrible news!' gesture.

Several seconds passed, while my character nonverbally continued to express empathy mixed with concern. After a long enough pause, the plan was to switch the conversation away from the sad intrusively personal topic to a more appropriate therapy theme.

She interrupted the scene with unexpected dialogue.

"What do you think about what I just said?"

What was the answer? How could I answer questions like that, which I did not understand? Would there ever be a person on the planet who would ask me questions that I recognized? When in extreme doubt, a good policy was to answer with a question. This one should be a statement of support and care, disguised as a problem of my own.

"I was wondering, why did you feel like you had to tell us? The patients? Is something going to happen - are you going to have to move away, or stop working?"

She looked up sharply, startled. It had seemed like a perfect response; my usual confidence in my ability to fake that I was present drained just the slightest bit.

Her expression softened, back to the usual nurturing/authoritative stance. Decidedly not neutral; her 'therapist' character was a good mother, not a couch. "No, I'm not planning to work less. If anything, I'll have to work more," she slid a little further into her personal world. "I'm telling my patients because sometimes, when therapists go through something difficult and intense in their personal life, as much as they try, the stress can make them less able to concentrate or do their work. So by knowing that something is going on, it will help you understand why I might seem different for awhile, and not take it personally."

"Oh." Cold molasses moving slowly through a labrynith: my thoughts couldn't connect, words didn't seem like they'd ever gone together and I couldn't find a single imaginary person to become. This only happened at very extreme interpersonal moments. Perhaps this was one.

I couldn't figure out what a person no longer living in your house would have to do with concentration. It seemed to me that, if someone lived alone, especially after a difficult and disagreeable relationship had been present, that person's ability to concentrate would rise exponentially. How would being alone be worse, instead of better? In my world, one of the worst nightmares would be having someone share my refrigerator, television, bathroom, bedroom, god forbid: bed, shower, dining table. The chance to be free of the oppressive presence of the other, to once again breathe freely, seemed to me about the most welcome news a person could get. I didn't even berate myself for not fitting in with other people, or having a normal response; partly in my dissociated state, I didn't think of it. Partly, it was just so beyond my ability to conceive that having a roomate, an intimate, intrusive, "partner" type roomate, would be something anyone wanted. The act of separating, to me, was one of ultimate victory and freedom.

There was a question in the air. I had missed it.

"What?"

She repeated, "I was wondering what you're thinking."

I flashed to the one time I had called her, late one night when there had been an emergency room visit due to side effects from my Stelazine. I'd spoken to her with a tiny occasional clattering in the background, enough to tell me she was home and not alone. It sounded like the wall next to a large well appointed dark wood kitchen, with either a cook or husband doing something constructive with pots and pans. After she'd instructed me to go to the ER and what to request - IV benadryl, which was not available over the counter in 1986 when I was at the height of my adverse reactions to Stelazine, and a prescription for more - I'd thought about those sounds, and the fact that it was almost 10:00 pm. I assumed she'd talk to whoever was there about her call, or that maybe they'd even heard parts of it. It was reassuring to me that she had someone to talk to. Her job couldn't be pleasant, and she wouldn't legally or ethically be able to talk to almost anyone about any of it. But if she had a husband, that would be an exception, so I had hoped she did, and that she could tell him about people's late night calls.

"I was thinking that you're not going to have anyone to talk to, about me."

There was a long, chilling pause. And then, she began to cry. At first, it was so subtle I wasn't sure it was real; then it got loud, terrifyingly obvious.

Float, float, float. And I disappeared through the ceiling, without leaving so much as a seam. Long before she embraced me, sobbing, putting her head on my shoulder, I was gone.