Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life

by Christie Tate

I wished passively for death, but I didn’t stockpile pills or join the Hemlock Society’s mailing list. I didn’t research how to get a gun or fashion a noose out of my belts. I didn’t have a plan, a method, or a date. But I felt an unease, constant as a toothache. It didn’t feel normal, passively wishing that death would snatch me up. Something about the way I was living made me want to stop living.

I don’t remember what words I used when I thought about my malaise. I know I felt a longing I couldn’t articulate and didn’t know how to satisfy. Sometimes I told myself I just wanted a boyfriend or that I was scared I would die alone. Those statements were true. They nicked the bone of the longing, but they didn’t reach the marrow of my despair.

But self-disgust about my stuckness—I was far away from other people, aeons away from a romantic relationship—lodged in every cell of my body. There was some reason that I felt so apart and alone, a reason why my heart was so slick. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt it pulsing as I fell asleep and wished to not wake up.

“If you’re serious about getting into intimate relationships—becoming a real person, as you said—you need to feel every feeling you’ve been stifling since you were a kid. The loneliness, the anxiety, the anger, the terror.”

I wept for how lonely I felt and how deeply afraid I was that my life would never truly change or, worse, that true change would ask more of me than I could give.

My voice, expanding into the void, began to shape my life.

Why would I cut that off just because our pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps culture says therapy should get you up and out in thirty sessions or less?