“So who are your friends?” Terry asked at our next session, pen poised.

“Well, um . . .” I began, then listed off a couple names, one of which belonged to my boss.

“Mm-hm, mm-hm. Now, those sound more like people you work with. So who do you just hang out with?”

Not a single name came to mind, and felt confronted with the reality that normal people did something called “hanging out,” rather than working and going to class and studying all the time. I tried to sidestep his question, embarrassed and feeling like the most gigantic loser ever, but I knew he knew.

There was this long pause, a tactic I would become familiar with, something he used to get me to realize something or elaborate on what I said just before.

I might have been more cooperative if I hadn’t found my aloneness so humiliating. Talking about how and why I’d managed to remove myself so completely from the world felt like admitting that I was a nerd and that I had no life and that no one wanted to be my friend.

And so I stayed tight-lipped. I didn’t tell Terry that I’d stopped wanting to be around people because being around people sometimes had a way of piercing my heart, and then this numbing sickness would fill my blood, making my arms heavy with its self-loathing. I didn’t tell him, not then, about how one minute I had been the kind of high school junior who aspires to be described as “on fire for God,” and the next I was sleeping half the day and crying a fourth of it. I didn’t tell him that trying to talk to friends about this shift felt like sending messages from space.

And so Terry’s silence continued unbroken. But it was the kind of silence that came over and sat beside me on the couch.