End of the Hour: A Therapist's Memoir

by Meghan Riordan Jarvis

I felt the inside of my tiny chest cavity detonate into a thousand bees. I did not yet understand I would become both the hive and the keeper of those bees for the rest of my life. It would be years before I grasped the true legacy of the next few minutes—my first “before and after,” although I do remember the feeling of safety breaking away from me. From that moment on, I would exist in a different world, where anxiety and fear were my new constants.