Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

The intuitive parts of themselves are always highly aggravated when they are together. Intuition only tells them what they want, not how to achieve it, and this is intolerable.

To David, love meant declaration. Wasn’t that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn’t that the whole point?

In high school, Karen and Sarah had done everything to their hair they could think of except take care of it. They had bleached it, shaved it, permed it, dyed it, as girls do when vandalizing themselves seems the best way of proving their bodies are theirs.

it. All of us, I think it’s fair to say, fixate on things from our past, maybe wanting them back the way they were, maybe wanting to go back and change them. Either way, this fixation on parts of the past seems pretty common. David took the tendency to an extreme. The whole of his past obsessed him. The past was like the country he was exiled from, and any vestige of it, even me, was fascinating to him.

Therapy can seem like revision of memory. It can seem like you’re saving your life by destroying your story and writing a new one. It can seem like therapy won’t get its goddamn grubby mitts off you. At best therapy demands uncomfortable humility from the person with total recall, and at worst it can remind me of my mother—the difference being that therapy wants the emotional truth, while my mother runs screaming from any emotion or truth that’s not hers.