The After

Fiction, Monica Anderson

Your therapist declared that your thoughts were the source of your suffering, so you decided to change them.

“CBT,” she said, leaning forward slightly in her armchair, legs overlapping like a litter of puppies, eyebrows raised. 

“Like the weed that doesn’t make you high?”

“No. CBT, not CBD. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.”

She pointed to a triangle on a worksheet with a therapisttools.com insignia watermarked all over it.

All of human experience reduced to three segments of a triangle. Objective, straightforward, precise. You felt hopeful. Still wrapped in your puffy winter jacket, heat amassed where it touched you into a hot, itchy sweat. The amethyst night light plugged conspicuously into the outlet next to her feet clicked on. You had determined months ago that it connected to the self-check-in buttons you pressed upon arrival to the waiting room. You tended to schedule your appointments for different times each week, and you always feared seeing someone you knew while you perched on the couches, gazes directed anywhere but towards each other. You were pretty sure the shame of recognition in a waiting room could undo hours of work behind closed doors. And now you knew that her next client was here, and you swallowed the guilt that bubbled up for taking any of her time at all.

Whenever ________ came up, she explained, you were supposed to neutralize and/or transform the thought. Amend it into an alternate thought. You were editing your brain, reparenting it, silencing the part of you that believed yourself to be worthless and disgusting and despicable. That seemed like a stretch.

But you hadn’t really thought that about yourself before. It was only after ________, after one day marked the difference between walking with ease in the world and buckling over in every interaction, terrified to say the wrong thing, use the wrong word, make the wrong joke. It was like your skin peeled off—no, it was like they peeled your skin off, then left it piled next to you, a heap of facade. You were powerless—or so it felt at the time—and so you let them pick and prod to reveal the festering sinews of your ugliest self, and you could do nothing to stop it. 

After, always, even at home, when no one could see you, you worried that they were all thinking of your flaws, shaking their heads at something else you did, venting to each other about your discomfiting presence. That someone was always watching you, taking notes, deciding whether or not you were worthy. That you might predict, even, which parts of you they would deem acceptable and unacceptable. 

Or worse, maybe they weren’t thinking of you at all, and your brain was spiraling into a panopticon of your own creation, a vortex of imagined public opinion.

You stopped going on social media. Once, before, you could post what you wanted, slightly personal, slightly poetic missives about the trees that day, a song lyric paired with a nice scene, the occasional selfie in a beautiful place. They’d get a smattering of likes, maybe a comment or two, and for the most part you found the whole thing mildly pleasant. But now you would open an app and your stomach would clench, your chest would burn, your head would lighten and you would catch a glimpse of this person commenting on that person’s cat picture with such improbable kindness and admiration and love, and you would feel vomit rising in your throat because this further confirmed that they did not love you, could not, and maybe no one ever had.

Correction: This person made a nice comment on that person’s picture. That is nice for them and has nothing to do with me. It’s not my picture. Maybe they secretly hate each other anyway and it’s all for show and attention.

But you couldn’t delete the accounts. That would mean defeat, somehow. It would mean that it was true, no one cared about you, no one wanted you to exist at all. As long as the accounts stayed up, though maybe not active, then you had not entirely corroded.

Though you wanted to. Oh, how you wanted to. For a long, long time after ________, it was like you were hiking down into a cave, cautiously at first, one step at a time just to see what was down there, and then without realizing it you were engulfed in darkness, beneath the surface without a light and without a way up, no ropes to guide you. Soon enough that was all you knew. You forgot that you had ever felt any differently, forgot that there had been days without the weight of dread pulsing inside you.

Your therapist said you could start with any point in the triangle, but thoughts were the easiest. They were controllable, she said. When you first tried to change your thoughts, you tuned in to your head, ready for the dispatch, but all you could hear was emptiness. Your body was tensed and heart racing and temple throbbing and sweat pooling and trembling all over, but your thoughts were nothing. White noise.

So why did you feel so terrible?

You tried changing your behaviors. You said hello and how are you to the people who had short-circuited your self-understanding and no matter what they said back you assumed that beneath it they were thinking only of ________. Then you replayed both ________ and this new interaction in your head over and over and over. And then you felt worse.

You took short walks throughout the day and listed three things you were grateful for before bed at night (rain clouds, pugs, Mariah Carey, ramen) and tried to ignore the part of you that insisted you did not deserve any of it. Still something inside you exhorted, with a great sigh and an eye roll, that it was useless. You were done. You would never recover, so pretending to care for yourself was stupid when no one else cared about you. Were these your thoughts? Could you change them?

I can recover. I’m not stupid. Somebody cares about me.

The truth is you weren’t completely alone. You had a significant other, whom you cried to immediately after ________ and told them how shocked and sad and afraid you were, and you knew they wouldn’t judge you, wouldn’t believe the things they said because they were removed, part of a different landscape and texture of existence. They held you and let you cry and told you they were wrong, they didn’t know what they were talking about, you weren’t the things they said you were.

But then they said, “Anyway why do you care? Why does it matter what anyone else thinks?”

Why did you care what they thought? Why did I care why did I care why did I care why did I care why did I care why did I—

But you did care. You cared so much. Does it matter why? So you stopped talking to your significant other about it. You didn’t want them to think you were weak and fragile. You had only been together for a year. You could still end it if you wanted to, it wasn’t too late, you hadn’t yet fused your lives together in any significant ways.

Your emotion for them was love. Maybe too much went unspoken and unaddressed between you, and maybe your intimacy could deepen with vulnerability or authenticity or secure attachment or whatever, but you cared for each other. And you weren’t afraid of what they thought of you. But you also couldn’t show them what you had become, this tangled, fraying knot.

You weren’t like that before. Before, you laughed easily, you were affectionate and teasing with your friends, you would tell them anything. You believed that people fundamentally leaned towards goodness in the world, that for the most part they had the best intentions, and you assumed that they would offer you the same grace. You sensed some unspoken agreement to take care of each other, to choose kindness and default to the benefit of the doubt.

Of course you had encountered the horrible side of humanity, too. Of course, you knew the seedy underbelly of existence, knew how much hate and judgment and greed and every other unsavory trait ruled the world. You were not naive, and you would not tolerate these things if you could help it. You wanted to help. You wanted to stand for things that mattered.

After ________, it was like none of that had ever meant anything. Now you were one thing, and if it was true, then you had always been that thing, and you could not have possibly offered anything close to love or goodness or care.

Your therapist told you good was a fraught word.

Good meant perfection. It meant never fucking up, never having the wrong intentions, never having a dark or ugly or mean or ignorant or offensive or selfish or hurtful or violent or unsympathetic or illegal or unformed or unrefined or unedited or confusing or inaccurate or intrusive or destructive or harmful or disturbing thought, always having the correct opinion and take ready to go, aligning with the people who practiced the ideal moral purity, but not a religious one, believing that the world was ending while also believing in the hope that we could fix it, floating in the appropriate amount of existential angst while also understanding that every action you take is actually a vote, a stance on what you stand for, and you better stand for something, and that something better not have any gray area, because in the quest for good, there is no gray area. To be good you cannot hate anyone, except for the people whose beliefs do not align with your own, the people who vote differently than you, the people who value different things in life; it’s okay to hate them, on principle, because there must be something deeply wrong with them to not have had the same set of circumstances lead them to figuring out the exactly correct response to everything that ever happens, and to know immediately how they and you and everyone are supposed to feel.

And: to be good, you must never, ever falter. You could be good for decades, acting with intention and integrity, but in a moment, you could lose everything. Because it was not you who decided if you were good or not. It was other people.

“Okay,” you said. “I get it. I shouldn’t try to be good. How do I change that thought?”

“Well,” your therapist said. “Let’s unpack that other word first. Should. Who am I to say what you should or should not do?”

You were exhausted. You started losing memories, losing track of your life, losing your identity. You had believed yourself to be one thing, and then they made you believe you were the opposite. They had been so sure. You had never been that sure about anything. Open-minded, you would have called it. You wanted to be open to experiences, to people and difference and opinions. You didn’t want to live in a world of sameness.

But since ________, you had shrunken. You were a shriveled, withering leaf leftover from the fall, frozen through the winter, caking and disintegrating in the hot spring sun. You were a mouse that crawled into a car overnight seeking warmth, now clinging and clawing anything you could reach while barreling forward at sixty miles an hour. You were a tablet, dissolved in a glass of water, writhing and sinking and unable to escape.

Maybe there was an easy option: leave. Exit the environment, say goodbye to everyone who had been present at ________, make a new life somewhere else, exist constantly on guard to ensure that this never happened again. And, sigh of all sighs, hope and pray that ________ didn’t follow you, that they would not block you from every opportunity and chance at progress forever, that the repercussions would yield.

You wouldn’t leave. You couldn’t. You were striving for something, and they were part of it, and for a thousand reasons you could not walk away.

You wouldn’t have to stay for the rest of your life, but you would have to stay for now.

When your therapist asked you to articulate the negative thoughts swirling inside you and you once again could not recount anything specific, just this general, overwhelming terror and panic, she scrunched her brow together. Maybe she hates me, too, you thought.

“Oh!” you said. “I just had one. A thought. I thought maybe you hate me.”

Her brow unfurled, as if relaxing into a comfortable seat. “Interesting. I wonder why you could hear that thought but not the others.”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I feel safe here. Or, like, mostly safe. I feel like I can actually breathe. I don’t feel so small.”

“Huh. Let’s try something.” She turned to her desk and shuffled through several manila folders stuffed with neat, unrumpled papers. Then she placed one on the table between you. Beneath the therapisttools.com watermarks, a black outline of a vaguely human shape filled the page. It looked like the chalk on sidewalks after crime scenes.

“Let’s say this is your body.” She gestured at the blob with one hand, still rustling through her desk with the other. “I want you to draw what you feel like when you’re around them. How it feels in your body.” She dropped a fistful of crayons on the table. You knew that she sometimes saw children, too, and the thought of a child using these crayons for a similar exercise humiliated you. “I know it seems silly, but I think it’s important.”

You nodded, skeptical but relenting. What choice did you have?

So you spent ten minutes shading and labeling and texturing the body, and when you finished it looked like a blob on the verge of breakdown: words like tight and racing and knot and exhausted and alert and hunched and clenched and heavy, heavy, heavy dotted all over dark, dismal colors. But it was accurate. That was how you felt most of the time, most days.

You stared at it together. “Tell me about it,” she said, and you did.

“You’re living in fight or flight,” she said. “You can’t hear your thoughts because your body is always bracing for danger.”

You shrugged. “Maybe that’s because I’m always in danger.”

“See, that right there! That’s a thought you can change. Try it out.”

“I’m…usually in danger.”

“No.”

“I feel like I’m always in danger.”

“Closer. But try it like this: instead of I’m always in danger, think, I am safe right now.”

Now you furrowed your brow at her. “That doesn’t feel true. How could I know that that’s true? We’re all in danger all the time. Anything could happen. Someone could bomb this building right now.”

“Is someone bombing the building at this current moment? Is anything at all dangerous happening in this present second? Not two minutes, or even two seconds from now, but presently.”

You didn’t yet believe her, but you knew you were defeated. “No. I guess not.”

“Okay. So try it. Say: I’m safe right now.”

“I’m safe right now.” You felt ridiculous. You were a full-grown adult, but treading, it seemed, into the territory of traumatized children.

“Say it again, this time like you mean it.”

You inhaled. “I’m safe right now.”

“Great! Did you notice how you used your breath that time?”

“No.” The amethyst lit up.

“Well, you did! Now, this week, I want you to practice this when you’re around them. You don’t have to say it out loud, but try to say it in your head. And remember to take a deep breath when you do it.” She inhaled audibly. “I’m safe right now.” A whoosh of an exhale. “Like that. Does that seem doable?”

You swallowed a sigh. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll try it.”

She grinned. You envied the sense of accomplishment she must have felt. To assign one tangible task to a person—maybe that was what gave her meaning. To reach the end of a session with a sense of tidiness and momentum. For her, you were a one-hour slot in her week, an entity with sides and edges. You could see the art in therapizing, how one person’s mess became manageable in the container of the appointment.

But your life was all lava, rushing and spreading post-eruption, obliterating anything and everything in your path. You could not see where the real you ended and the post-________ you began.

That night, you experimented with your significant other. While you nestled together on the couch, eyes glued to a show about some complicated but lovable woman who always gets into hijinks, but also always finds her way out, wiser and better than before, a memory from the day—encountering one of them and flooding with preemptive fear—surged through you like an electric shock. On another night, you might have fought with it, willed it to leave, surrendered, succumbed to the oozing shame around you, but this night, you inhaled, you thought, I am safe right now, and you exhaled. 

The first time did nothing. But you repeated it, desperate for something different, and when it transformed into a chant through your brain—I am safe right now I am safe right now I am safe right now—the touch of another became an alive, loving presence on your body. You registered that you were on a couch, with them, that you were calm and sharing an experience, and then the next time you inhaled you released a choking sob. The warmth of before evaporated, and you were all vibration, gasping for air, shuddering and leaking snot and salt and grasping for some sense of what swirled around you, anything to hold. You descended and spiraled and wailed like an animal that’s lost its young. Your significant other, bewildered, unsure what to do, unsure if it was their fault, held your shoulders, asked you what’s wrong what’s wrong what’s wrong until your breaths shortened and your shakes lengthened and then they said it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay.

You don’t know how long it lasted. Somehow, eventually, you emerged. Your breath steadied. You tried to explain but all you could manage was that you did not know, it was inexplicable to you. You were both too disturbed after to linger in the muck much longer.

So you didn’t try it again that week, not with them, and not around the others.

“Panic attack,” your therapist said when you saw her again. Somehow she always had the labels to diagnose what you felt beyond words.

“You’ve been repressing your feelings,” she said. “That’s why your body’s been so activated. It’s holding on to so much. When it starts to calm down, it will have a lot to release.”

You asked her why the fuck she didn’t warn you about this. She smiled back.

“I can’t predict how your body will respond to interventions. It’s all part of the process. You’re doing great work.”

And that was all she could tell you for a long time. You were doing the work. It was hard work. You were working hard. Etc etc etc.

You couldn’t see any better ways out, so you did what she said. The work. The work felt tedious, often childish, even more often uncomfortable and painful, and you didn’t notice anything different—in fact it all got pretty much worse for a while, the panic attacks and the dread and the negative thoughts and the overall, general feeling that you were a piece of shit—until one day you did.

One day you saw them, and your body tightened, and your brain said, They’re thinking about ________ and they think you’re a terrible person and nobody will ever think you’re anything but terrible, and you smiled and said hello, and they said hello back and smiled, and when you were alone again you said to yourself, wow, you’re really anxious right now, it’s okay to be anxious, it makes sense, but let’s remember to breathe, and when you heard these new intervening thoughts you still felt ridiculous, but your body also relaxed, and you laughed.

Later you drove for an hour, parked, and walked another thirty minutes into the woods. You walked until the trees towered around you and you could not hear the din and rush of the highway nearby, and you stopped when you found a patch of sunlight streaming on a mossy rock off the side of the trail. Your feet crunched down on old leaves and moist soil and wispy ferns and chunks of rotting log, and you dropped your possessions around you, bag and sweater and then even your shirt, until you stood, illuminated and half-naked, baring yourself to the sun above and the hidden life all around you. 

You lifted your chin to the sky and you thought about ________. You replayed it in your head in full detail, taking your time, not skipping over it like you usually did, not shying away from the hard parts, not blocking yourself from the well of hurt and shame and humiliation. You let yourself feel every microscopic piece of it, ________ itself but also everything after, the many days and weeks and months of reliving and repressing and collapsing. You replayed it, ache pulsing through you, until you were no longer afraid.

Then the forest came alive. Birds chirped and sang and flitted high in the canopy, a breeze wafted scents of pine and decay and damp wood all around, the trees creaked and groaned, the unseeable insects scurried and chattered, and you were there, part of it all.

You opened your eyes and your mouth and your arms, drinking in the half-dead, half-alive convergence of forest air, filling yourself up until you could hold no more, and when you released a long, guttural scream from the depths of your throat, when it echoed and reverberated and absorbed into everything else, you continued.

---

Monica Anderson (she/her) is a writer, runner, educator, and Oregonian who currently lives in the Upper Peninsula, where she is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University. Her work has appeared in Terrain.org’s “Climate Stories in Action” series, Buckman Journal, Panorama Journal, and elsewhere. She is sometimes on Instagram @magicallmonica