Chapter 21
A First Step
“I always said I'd never waste a single second of this, but sometimes I find myself slipping through the cracks, How could I be such a hypocrite? I think about it all so far; what we've been through, who we were, who we are, These days the weight of the world is on my shoulders, I never thought it would be this hard.” ~ Losing Sight – Memphis May Fire
With realizations comes the heavy weight of promises.
Caden and I had pushed aside the curtains we had been hiding behind for so long and made way for the future that was to come. We were now stepping into what he called an “easy transition” but what I called “a small step forward at a time.” I was nowhere near ready to commit to something I still couldn’t have a full amount of trust in.
Although he wasn’t happy about my lack of trust in this relationship we were starting to form, he completely understood why. He specifically used another girl to gain my attention and as a tool to get over me. I couldn’t exactly jump right into a strong relationship when I still hadn’t overcome my own demons.
But we were taking it slow, at best.
The kissing, touching and endearing heart to hearts about our feelings were still allowed to happen. I was visiting him everyday in the hospital whilst he recovered, bringing him his favorite foods, against his doctor’s better wishes. We’d watch crap television in his room and cuddle for what seemed like hours. I’d tell him how I was coming along as far as mental progress and he would reassure me that his feelings still hadn’t changed in the past month.
He was the one who actually discussed this therapy session that I was now sitting in, agreeing with Mason and the rest of my family that something needed to be done about the voices and my self-hatred. Now that Caden was alive and breathing, I made a pinky promise to him that I would go through with this with tight lips. If I was going to get better, than I needed to find help and take in everything I could as a way to cope with what I couldn’t understand.
“So Sadie,” Dr. Griffin began slowly. He was a burly man with a reddish brown beard covering his chin and cheeks. There were glasses perched on his bent nose and he wore a button down with pressed slacks. “What brings you here today?”
I cautiously calculated my words in my head before spilling them out. After all, he was recording my every tick, my every word, on his bright yellow legal pad in his lap. The pen was sitting in the slot between his second and first finger, itching to study me.
Taking in a heavy breath and crossing my arms over my chest, I began unsteadily. “My family thinks I need help.”
I knew it was a bad decision, automatically putting the blame on my family for being here. I did agree that I needed help. I knew I wasn’t the definition of ‘normal’ and wasn’t about to reach that until someone helped me control whatever was going on in my mind.
“And why do they think you need help?” he asked, peering at me above his glasses after scribbling something on his pad that he made sure I couldn’t see. It only made me want to hop out of the seat and sneak a peek over his lap to see what he was saying about me.
What did he know just by first glance? He was no better than the kids at school who pinned as the depressed girl with no friends. You couldn’t define a person just by a simple look at their broken wrists or sad expressions. We shouldn’t have to be defined by our bad days, no matter how long or short they reoccurred.
“I…” I stuttered, playing with the ends of my jacket sleeves. It suddenly seemed too cold in this tiny office, my legs feelings like they were sweating against the leather of the couch I was on. Instead of actually saying it aloud, I lifted up my sleeves slowly.
His reaction was nothing I was expecting. I was used to people taking in gasps and showcasing wide eyes in surprise and shock. Sometimes I imagined them being disgusted and have to look away at the mess I made on my skin. It was so easy for someone to think one thing when they hadn’t known the whole story behind why it was happening.
Dr. Griffin just watched me carefully, looking down at my cuts with concern. The crinkles next to his deep blue eyes shifted as he moved to write down on his pad again. He was so unreadable, so stone faced and disengaged from the room. Wasn’t he supposed to be feeding me some bullshit line on how it wasn’t good for me to do this to myself? Tell me things weren’t going to get better by me doing so?
He coughed gruffly. “Now Sadie…” he trailed off, pushing up his shirt sleeves and crossing his legs. “Before I ask why, can you tell me what it is that you’re doing to yourself?”
I raised an eyebrow at him and gave him a look that suggested his degrees on the wall behind him were given to him by mistake. “Isn’t it obvious?” I asked, my voice coming out icier than I wanted it to.
He nodded in agreement. “It is. But I would like you to say it out loud,” he ushered me with a simple move of his hand.
Still looking at him quizzically, I said, “Okay…I’m not sure what the hell this would do…” I trailed off, biting my lip as the words were about to leave my mouth.
I had planned to say it. It seemed so easy. I cut myself. Three words, small syllables. How hard could it be to tell the doctor what was so simply put on display for him just a moment ago? It’s not like he didn’t know. He could clearly see the scabbed and old scars on my pale wrist.
So why couldn’t I just say it?
“I…” I swallowed roughly and looked down at the blood red carpet. How ironic.
“I cut myself...” I whispered quickly, still not meeting his eyes and pulling my jacket sleeves back down so my secrets were covered from the world once again. I felt so embarrassed, suddenly so ashamed of what I’d been doing to myself for all these years.
Dr. Griffin nodded again, his trademark I’d pinned him with as soon as I sat down twenty minutes earlier. “That’s good, Sadie.”
“How was that good?” I questioned, the ice returning in my voice and frosting him with my bitterness. He just made me admit something that I could barely tell my own parents. I was now red-faced and feeling stupid for doing such a thing to myself.
How was this supposed to help me?
“You just admitted the problem. You faced the issue at hand out loud and to someone else. That’s the first step,” he stated, giving me the smallest line of a smile on his hairy face.
I just shook my head at him, disagreeing. “But I’ve already told someone else. That’s already been done.”
He stopped writing on his pad for a moment, peering at me from above his glasses and wrote down probably what I had just told him. But he didn’t acknowledge my words at first. Instead, he asked another, far more important question.
“Sadie, have you tried to kill yourself?”
The way he said it was so easily slipping from his tongue, so simply worded and without emotion. His eyes were kind, inviting even, but his expression said otherwise. To him, I was just another patient with a stupid problem they couldn’t control on their own. I didn’t mean a thing to him.
My eyes widened at his words and my heart started to beat at a scary rate. Dropping my eyes to the carpet once again, I finally admitted to the problem revolving around everyone I loved. I was coming to terms with what I had been preparing myself to do for almost a year. Flashing back to the suicide note, the way Mason cried in my room and Caden’s face when he told me how scared he was to lose me, my mind was in a frenzy.
“Yes,” I whispered, knotting my fingers beneath the stitching of my jacket sleeve and playing with a strand of frizzy hair at my waistline.
Scribbles on his pad, it’s all I could hear in the cold silence of his office. I couldn’t hear the wind picking up outside or the birds chirping in the trees. It must have been built this way, dead quiet and tight to keep people focused on the issues at hands.
No distractions.
“Why do you want to kill yourself, Sadie?”
The largest, most emotional question I’d ever been faced with in my entire life. The answers were clearly right there, just waiting to be brought into this office and finally laid out on the table for Dr. Griffin to dissect and make better. I faced them every single day. I had hidden from them, talked back to them, drowned them out and sometimes faced them for what they were.
But I couldn’t say it. Voices. I hear voices.
The silence just echoed around us, no one saying the first word and making the first move. I didn’t know how long it carried on around us, wrapped us in its arms. But Dr. Griffin broke it with his rocky voice with a second question.
“Who did you tell about your cutting, Sadie?” he asked, placing a hand under his chin like I was a lab rat and he was studying me, taking notes to make me better on the yellow sheets in his lap. His pen was just barely touching the skin of his furry cheek, waiting to drop down to the paper and brand me with a name, a disease, a word to label me as a fuck up.
I cleared my throat at this question. This one was far easier to answer than the one before it. This was the subject that was safe, the boy I loved and the one who helped me. Dr. Griffin would be proud to hear that a kind boy like Caden Grange had helped me survive and was the sole reason I still stuck around long enough to even be in this room. He’d probably commend him; commend me even for talking to at least one person about what was happening to me and seeking some sort of help, even if it wasn’t medicinal.
“My best friend,” I stated, folding my legs underneath me into a pretzel so I could tie myself in more. “Caden.”
Dr. Griffin nodded once again, pursing his lips and writing down Caden’s name on the sheet dotted and lined with different adjectives to describe my behavior and mimic the words I’d let go of in his room.
“And you told him how you cut yourself?” he asked, just double checking that the answer I said was what he was understood.
“Yes,” I said clearly and crossing my arms once again, not sure what he was getting at.
He sighed lightly, almost so short I would have missed it if I hadn’t been watching this man’s every move and burning every word he said into my brain. “And this is the first time you’ve come to seek help? How long has this been going on for, Sadie?”
I shrugged, feeling my cheeks heat at the question. He was embarrassing me again. “I don’t know…two years…maybe more.”
“Has your…best friend,” he gestured towards me as he used my words against me. “Has he ever tried to…get you help? Maybe tell a professional what was going on with you?”
I searched my brain for a time when Caden begged me to seek help. Racking my memories for something to give this all-knowing doctor a taste of his own medicine, I found myself stopping short. I couldn’t remember a time when Caden tried to get me help. Sure, he told Mason one time. He talked to me and tried to help me himself. He saved me when I needed it most and cared about me when the days were the worst.
But he never pushed me to see someone for what was going on with me, until now.
Reluctantly, I shook my head, wishing I was giving a different answer. I could have lied, vigorously nodded and told him a hundred different made up stories about how Caden always pushed me to go see a doctor and tell him what I was doing to myself. I could have painted him as the heroine in this story and pinned a superhero’s cape to his back by describing all these times he’d talked to me about doctors and medicines that would help.
But I wasn’t going to get better that way.
“Not until now, actually,” I muttered, watching the doctor as he kept his eyes on me while writing down more facts he had just found out.
“I see,” he mumbled, scrunching his brow as he finished his sentence or blurb he was scrawling across the legal pad. Taking off his glasses slowly and taking a breath, he finally watched me closely. He placed his factual yellow sheets aside and never once took his eyes off of mine. “Sadie, your friend…your friend is what we call an enabler.”
My eyes widened at the horrible label they had stamped on Caden’s name. I had heard the term before, in drug use classes and on commercials about rehab centers. But they always surrounded drug dealers and users, people who helped them by offering more drugs or not pushing them to go into rehab and become clean once again.
Caden was not an enabler.
I even hated the way the word sounded as it rang out in my head. It was such a dirty word, used for people who supported dirty actions and deadly scenarios. How dare he call my best friend, the boy I loved, the one who helped me get to this point today, an enabler?
“How did you come up with that?” I spat, my eyes shriveling into slits as I watched him threateningly. At this moment, I was finished with this session and just wanted to run as far away from this place as I could and never come back. It wasn’t doing me any good. The doctor was only chastising the one person in my life who was responsible for my small act of recovery. “He’s not…” I went to say the word, but couldn’t even let it slip from my tongue. It was such a dirty word to me. Such a negative connotation to pin on my best friend. I just shook my head.
“It’s a term we use mostly in drug cases and cases of abuse,” Dr. Griffin continued, giving me a lesson on the definition on the term that I surely didn’t need. “But sometimes…” he trailed off, shrugging. “Sometimes we use it as a way to describe the loved ones in patient’s lives who allow them to do such things to themselves that aren’t making them any better.”
“I don’t know what you may think you know about my best friend, Dr. Griffin, but it’s one hundred percent wrong. If anything, he’s helped me more than anyone in my life has. He’s not some sick, twisted human being who just wants to see me fall,” I spat, getting ready to get up from the couch and end this stupid session for the night.
“I’m not branding him as a villain, Sadie,” he said cautiously and coolly. “Before you decide to leave, just do one thing for me before our next session, okay?” he asked slowly as he watched me carefully, like he was afraid I’d rip a razor out of my pocket right then and there and take my own life in his office.
Taking a deep breath to calm myself down, I opened my eyes to nod my head at him to continue. After all, I agreed to do this for the better of my life. Without this, I didn’t know how far I could get on my own with these voices swimming around my head as they were. I wanted to get better. I needed to get better.
“For the next few days, at least until Monday, I want you to take a step back from Caden. I want you to try and reconnect with your family and other friends. I want you to start to thrive on a mindset of your own and not rely so much on him. I’m not saying you should push him out of your life for good, but just…step back for a few days. Okay?” he asked gently, a small smile coming onto his lips, almost hidden from the beard.
I didn’t think I would be able to do it. Caden Grange had become an everyday occurrence in my life, one that I counted on solely to make me happy and feel alive. He was the reason I was waking up every morning and moving on with my days. He was the reason I smiled and laughed at the smallest moments in the day. Moments like those on the fire escape were the only things I looked forward to.
Would I be able to take a step back from him, at least for a little while, to take a shot at becoming better once again?