If I was a therapist, I’d fix you in one session. You’d never need a second appointment. Don’t worry about charging it to insurance. I’ll do all my work pro bono. Sit you down in a comfy recliner. One of those nice leather ones with the tufted leather that bubbles out and pinches in like craters along its taut yet plush surface. Lay you back and open up that noggin, leaving phrenology to the phrenologists I’ll get straight to the source instead.
Using a can opener, I’ll spherically segment your cranium cross-sectioned along its edges, removing the top hemisphere, laden with hair. Poke around inside. First to find the spots that aren’t pink and squishy anymore, then to remove them in part or in whole. The places where your mind has firmed up malignantly, growing dark and deleterious. Ladle out the spurious notions about your failures and the rejections you’ve faced. Like that ex-boyfriend, Henry, with the nose and the wealthy parents. Pluck out the ludicrous notions from Wernicke’s Area there on the sides recalling his words telling you you’d never do better than him.
Spelunking through the canyons of your temporal lobe, I’ll find associations in your short-term memory of disappointments and frustrations to scrape free from the walls. You and Kate always did your “boo baskets” for Halloween and Christmas gifts for Christmas, but hers were always months late and half-baked. The long nights when she and her husband would be locked in heated conflicts, your inbox would be filled to the brim, and you’d be there for her. You always show up. But when it was her turn to shoulder your burdens, she’d be nowhere to be found. Cauterizing the open wounds, I’ll make your short-term memory snapchat-esque, a flash to remember in an instant and then gone forever the next, never left to fester on thoughts about how no one else puts back into their friendships with you as much as you put in with them.
Swinging up to the frontal lobe, I’ll rearrange the circuitry of concentration, planning and emotional expression. There’s wiring chewed through and fuses blown in rows. Your dad never calling you sweetheart or beautiful or stopping what he was doing for even a second to twirl you around the living room, while your princess dresses trailed behind you, taught you never to prioritize yourself. Trace your fingers along the wiring diagram and read it aloud to me. These malfunctions are common and a system reboot will be required. Before I do that, I’ll isolate the cerebral cortex behind it to prod through zones that control emotional processing and your “fight or flight” responses. Pinching back the gyrus to reveal a sulcus long neglected, I’ll plug in a USB and reprogram it quickly to put it back in sync with reality. There’s no reason to be triggered by silly things like vaguely worded emails from your boss or the hyperarousal of being stuck in traffic, let alone the physical dread of misophonia from clicking pens or strange looks by passersby in the park. From now on, you’ll be able to see the world rationally and with a stoicism that makes every reaction well-intentioned and measured.
This last part will be most tedious. The rear of your brain is filled with shrapnel where I’ll remove the folie à deux inherited from your mother. We can’t fix her occipital lobe to make her see you as you actually are. But there’s no reason you must continue to see yourself through her eyes. I’ll break out the tweezers from the Operation boardgame and set out to remove these shards of glass long ago implanted and grown over with thickets of neurological overgrowth, careful not to touch the ferromagnetic edges of your neurons. Piece by jagged piece I’ll slide free the ways she’d turned up her nose at what you ate and the manner in which she tailored your outfits inside of her mind, shrinking your body to fit inside the pinhead of a worm hole. When I’m done, you’ll recognize yourself for what you actually are, no longer perceived through the funhouse mirrors induced long ago, affixed in concrete by her insurgency.
Afterwards, patched up and sutured, you’ll wander out onto the street and view the world as if through corrective lenses for the first time in your life. The colors, the sights, the sounds, each one a symphony of delight. Wouldn’t it be nice to see the world without carrying around all this baggage? To feel fixed for the first time in forever? Without the need for follow-up appointment after follow-up appointment? I wish I could do all this and more for you.
But I’m not a therapist and none of this is real.