I live in my therapist’s notebook

 

There, I am slowly unraveled, line by line — she draws me out like a mile of yarn from a tightly wound spool. Tears streak down my puffy cheeks while words fumble out of my trembling lips onto the neat, college-ruled legal pad.

When I step outside the office, I am neatly tucked away on the pages, stowed away in some drawer on the fourth floor.

Calm, with a smile on my face, I offer a man on the street a package of pistachios. He hesitates, and then accepts it, packing them away inside one of the several duffel bags piled beside him.

I hold the door open for a student running with her backpack at 12:07. Perhaps she is late for a 12:00. Perhaps she just wanted to be early for a 12:15.

She gives me a shy nod of gratitude as she hurries off.

In the mornings, I wash my face with 0.1% soap and 99.9% water, splashing so profusely I don’t need to look up at the mirror for residual suds. I apply makeup with the fat from my cheeks completely sucked into my mouth, refusing to see the full roundness of my face at any angle. I always cringe at the sight of a camera — pulling a friend in close, turning just right, holding a half-smile I’ve practiced into looking full.

After work, my friends playfully mock me for being tiny, urging me to get ice cream with them. I join. I smile. I laugh. I get caramel cheesecake, my favorite, against my friends’ protests and their competing flavor samples. As we film an ice cream review, I feign a pensive expression while verbally weighing the sweet sweet cream cheese base against the streaks of caramel, cake chunks, and graham cracker inclusions. I decidedly announce a 10/10 rating as I scoop up the last few bites.

I wash the ice cream down with my nightly cocktail of pills. Every week my mind is carefully measured against milligrams of multiple medications. Every night I pop my medications dry, no water, soda, or liquid of any kind. It’s a testament to my younger self, who couldn’t swallow a pill for the life of her, and would never understand why I need to.

Meanwhile, I travel the world. I go with my family to Japan, and with my friends to Montreal. My Instagram feed is flooded with a calculated document of my life. A popped champagne bottle from a friend’s birthday. A spotlight from an A$AP Rocky concert. Photos of me hugging people I no longer speak to at my high school graduation.

The smiles are genuine, each one assigned to a picture within the curated collage of my life. My body is in each frame, but my mind is back home, in the pages of my therapist’s notebook.

I live here alone. Nobody sees me, and I do my best so that nobody joins me.

Liana Warnakulasoorlya is based in Boston, MA and currently studying Computer Science at Northeastern University. My Therapist’s Notebook is the very first poem she ever wrote for herself, and now the first she’s had published. Her poems reflect her own mental health journey and serve as a tool to work through her thoughts.