10. The B story is about the character’s secondary goal, and it provides more opportunities to expand on the story’s themes

My first therapist, Judith, who I met when I was 25, did not have an organic brain disorder for the first fourteen years of our relationship. Then she developed rapid onset dementia. By the time I stopped seeing her three years later, she was unrecognizable.

Judith was four foot ten and wiry, with a lean, leathered face. She wore stacks of beaded turquoise bracelets and moccasin-style shoes, though she was fully Jewish. Her office was lined with bookshelves and crammed with artifacts: an Indonesian puppet, a bonsai tree, geode bookends, Central American blankets and pottery. A set designer’s idea of a boho shrink’s office.

I walked in there exhausted from years of resisting suicide, frightened by the growing severity of my habitual self-harm. I’d hated myself for years; now that I knew I was too weak to commit, I hated myself even more. To add to my shame, I had been sucking my thumb since birth, I was a deeply addicted pothead, and I was subject to uncontrollable rages and panic attacks.

Judith (sympathetically): So, how can I help you?

Me: [a forty-minute monologue explaining the above, plus my family history, plus my current history, which was a spectacular show of self-sabotaging shit]

Judith (after shaking her head side-to-side in silent disbelief, as though to say, “How are you even ambulatory?” for the entire 40 minutes): Okay. Well. I think we should meet twice a week, starting Monday at 8am. I’ll see you then.

Me (internally): Well, but, okay…I’m not even sure if I like her…she seems bossy and judgmental…but I’m already afraid to say no to her…

Me (aloud): Great, thank you.

I was correct. Judith was bossy and judgmental. She explicitly told me what she thought I should do, which shrinks are not supposed to do. Within four sessions, my life had radically improved:

1. I dumped the cruel, avoidant boyfriend who’d been torturing me all year.
2. I called out the manipulative, mindfucking “best friend” who’d been torturing me even longer.
3. I got a full-time job at New York Press, the first place that published me when I was twenty. (The job was already in the works, but it became official during this magical two weeks.)
4. I made an appointment for hypnotherapy to quit my lifelong habit of sucking my thumb.
5. I told my mother I needed to cut down our lunches from every weekend to every other weekend, something I previously would have told you was impossible.

Judith: Having lunch with your mom makes you feel terrible. You can’t do it every week.

Me (internally): Okay, then you tell her. See how that goes.

Judith didn’t get it. If I told my mother I didn’t want to meet for lunch every week, she would get angry at me, and I couldn’t stand to have her angry at me, even if I was furious at her.

But Judith scared me more than my mother did. Judith scared me more than my father did, and I was petrified of him. Already, I needed Judith more than I needed the both of them put together. So I blamed my new job, and my ongoing writing and performing, and I told my mother that I was only able to come for lunch twice a month.

And yeah, she gave me a guilt trip about my kid brother, now twelve and popular and good at sports, and how sad he would be not to see me every single weekend in the stands of the ice rink where his hockey games were played. But her mood quickly changed.

“You know, Jan, I think it’s great that you’re working so hard and focusing on your writing. I want you to have your own life. Remember how your grandma used to call me and nag me all the time, ‘When are you going to come see me?’ And I hated seeing her, she was such a burden. I never want you to feel that way about me.”

I was relieved that she let me off so easy, and a little let-down that she didn’t fight harder to keep me under her thumb.

So while I knew it wasn’t strictly kosher for my shrink to out-and-out tell me what to do, or to scowl and raise her volume when I resisted, Judith was proving to be right about everything. Also, Judith gave me a hug at the end of every session, and that wasn’t kosher either, but I lived for it. My mother was not physically affectionate with me as a child. She wore a lot of makeup and hairspray, and she didn’t want me to wreck them.

A typical argument with Judith:

Judith: Look, it’s your mother, or you. You can’t have both. You can keep trying to take care of your mother, or you can take care of yourself. But taking care of her is killing you.

I didn’t want to take care of my mother. I had to. She didn’t look sick, because of the steroids she took, but my mom had Multiple Sclerosis. Her nervous system was impaired, not to mention her nerves. She needed my support. If I was there to help her, she might even become stable again, and I could adore her the way I did when I was five.

I was my mother’s only friend. I couldn’t abandon her.

Judith: But she abandoned you.

No no no no no. I abandoned her. I was the one who left. This was a point of pride for me – I left home at fifteen. She didn’t throw me out; I wasn’t a throwaway. I wasn’t like the other girls at the group home where I’d lived. Most of them were remanded there by their parents. I was there by choice.

Judith: But why did you choose to leave? Because you were forced to. Because you had no other choice. You told her, if she took your stepfather back, you were leaving. Seems like the choice was hers, not yours.

Judith would lob these bombs at me, and then I’d have to sob quickly in the bathroom and run eight blocks to work. I went Monday mornings and Thursdays at lunch. This is crucial to note: I had a decent job with health benefits, but I would not have been able to afford therapy without money from my father.

Again: without financial support, I would not have been able to afford therapy. And every time I sobbed in Judith’s bathroom, with the framed expressionist art, and the blue jellied air freshener desiccating in its plastic cone on the back of the toilet, I knew I was lucky to be there.