Paging Planet Earth

I don’t remember what we were arguing about. Terry wanted me to ask someone to do something for me or with me, I think, to reach out to someone, and I didn’t want to. “Why?” he was asking me, and I answered with something vague.

“And why is that?” he pressed, annoyingly, gently.

“Because,” I drew the word large in the air between us. “Because I don’t trust anyone to care about me.”

Terry nodded deeply and smiled a little.

He would return to this idea throughout the rest of our time together, in sessions and in books he told me to read—this idea of reaching outside my walls and asking strangers to know me. He would assign me to think up three ways to draw attention to myself, for example, and he would try to get me to date. And soon something became blindingly obvious: The task before me was to come back to the world, slowly, one step at a time. It was the only way my own world was going to get any warmer.

I fully, resolutely intended to avoid this task. I didn’t realize that soon, out of nowhere, these people would show up and start turning on all the lights in my head. They would push me forward, not realizing that they were saving me.