Page 13 of Slanting Towards the Sea

TWELVE

I DID brIEFLY GO to therapy. Twice.

The first time, I was sixteen. My father came home early from work one day and told me to peel the potatoes for lunch.

I was watching TV in the living room and saw only his shadow in the hallway behind the glass door where he was taking his shoes off.

It irritated me that he had barely entered the house and was already barking orders.

I don’t quite remember what I said to him, but there must have been some sass in my voice, because the next thing I knew, he’d kicked my boot, full force, through that glass door.

I will never forget the shock of it, my yellow Lumberjack lying in front of me in a pile of broken glass.

My voice caught deep in the back of my throat, unable to form a gasp.

The waiting. For him to walk in. To see what he would do to me.

He had never hit me, but I didn’t know if he would do it this time, if my rudeness had crossed some sort of imaginary line.

So I just stood there, eyes on the yellow boot.

He told me to piss off to my room, and I did so without making eye contact. The rest of the day, I waited, suspended in horror, for my mother to come home from work and find the glass scattered there, because my father hadn’t bothered to vacuum it.

When she came home, I waited for her to come for me, my voice still caught deep in my throat, now forming a lump, glued with panic.

She took her time, each second its own punishment.

Standing behind the door of my room, I could hear the swooshes of glass being swept into a dustpan, the conversation between them that wasn’t elevated the way it would be if they were fighting, and that is what made me sink completely.

Later that evening, Mom sat me down, and before she even got a chance to say anything, I launched into an apology.

I was rude, I said, and that was only because I was having a hard time at school; it was hard for me with the other kids shunning me, and sometimes, it was hard for me to control my emotions, so I was rude, and I was so sorry that I disrespected Dad, I should have peeled the potatoes when he asked, I should have put my boots away after coming home from school to begin with, and I knew the two of them worked very hard, and that life wasn’t easy on them, I had made a big mistake, and I would never do it again.

Worry streaked Mom’s forehead. “What are you really saying, Ivona? Are you depressed?”

I nodded.

My mother was a natural worrier, and some issues scared her more than others, depression and mental illness topping the list. Admitting to being depressed would make her compassionate, and maybe more attentive, and hopefully a lot less angry that I’d made Dad smash the door down.

But she put her hands on her face, like she couldn’t deal with one more thing that day. And then she said, “I’ll get you to see someone.” And suddenly, I wished she had yelled at me or punished me, anything but this. How easy it came to her to wash her hands of me.

A week later, I sat in the psychiatrist’s office. I had sneaked into the building like a burglar, dread crawling up my spine for fear of someone recognizing me, someone who might tell my former friends at school that I was crazy on top of everything else they already disliked about me.

Most of all, I was afraid that I really was crazy.

That the psychiatrist would see whatever it was that was wrong with me as soon as I opened my mouth, and she’d have me locked up.

I was sixteen, and this was what I thought happened to crazy people once a psychiatrist determined them certifiable.

This was what everyone in Croatia thought back then, that’s why no one went to psychiatrists no matter what they were dealing with.

The psychiatrist was a nice woman in her mid-forties.

She asked me question after question, and I answered with panicked honesty.

She had a flicker of a smile as I told her about my friends shunning me, as I spoke in detail about what happened that day when Dad had launched my boot through the living room door.

As the session came to an end, I couldn’t stand the anticipation anymore. “So, am I crazy?” I asked.

She lifted her head from her scribbles and said no.

“Am I depressed?”

She said no again.

“So what is wrong with me?” And by this I meant, Why was it so hard for people to love me? Why had I been born with all these feelings inside me when they had nowhere to go, when there was no one else who wanted them?

She said, “Nothing is wrong with you.”

“But those girls in my class hate me,” I said. I wanted to add, my family hates me too , but I knew that technically wasn’t true, so in my panicked honesty, I refrained.

And she leaned in and said, “Well, maybe there’s something wrong with them.”

I took those words and deposited them inside me.

They got me through many a storm later on, a proof that my internal compass wasn’t completely defective, that I wasn’t inherently faulty for being the way I was.

They gave me hope that one day I might find someone who’d shuck me like an oyster and find all the pearls I was hiding within, and this hope became my bread, my water, and my air.

It wasn’t until years later that I saw her words for what they really meant. If people want to love you, they do, no matter how flawed you are. But if they aren’t inclined to love you, nothing you say or do, no amount of your own goodness, can make them change their mind.