So here’s a fun fact about me: I already “graduated” therapy.
Cue me strutting around like a woman who had officially completed her healing arc and would never again need to pay a copay to talk about her feelings. I had a certificate of completion. Metaphorically. Nobody actually hands you a certificate, which honestly feels like a missed business opportunity for the entire mental health industry.
Life is fucking unhinged and completely uninterested in your five-year plan of staying healed forever. Healing isn’t a subscription you cancel and never think about again. Apparently it’s more like a gym membership. You can stop going, but your body remembers exactly how out of shape you are the second you try to run again.
So a few weeks ago, I logged into MDLive like it was nothing. Like three years hadn’t passed. I typed her name into the search bar, found her profile, and requested an appointment in about ninety seconds flat.
Faster than it takes me to pick a Netflix show. Some decisions you overthink for three weeks. Some decisions your nervous system just makes for you while your brain is still in the other room. No doubts. No notes. Like I hadn’t spent three years pretending I’d locked the door for good.
Here’s the part that actually matters, though.
Deeply, embarrassingly stubborn. I do not like asking for help. I would rather white-knuckle my way through a five-alarm fire while insisting I’m “fine, totally fine, just a little warm” than admit I need backup. It used to be my whole personality. So the fact that I didn’t think twice about making that call says a lot. Not just about the gravity of it all. But about how much healing I’d actually done, and about the woman who helped me do it.
Three years ago, she told me I could stop. Not “should.” Could. Best breakup I ever had. No ghosting, no closure conversation. Just a mutual, respectful parting of ways, followed by me showing back up three years later like a situationship with better boundaries. I was using my tools regularly. I could set a boundary without immediately writing a three-paragraph apology for it. I could feel a hard feeling without turning it into a hard, regrettable decision made at two a.m. She told me she was proud of me, and she meant it the way you mean it when you’ve watched someone build an entire personality out of wreckage using nothing but sheer will and a decent insurance plan.
For a few years, I didn’t need her. Not a humble brag, just the truth. Life handed me the regular amount of chaos, and I handled it, because that’s what the work was for.
Then something happened. With my kids.
I’m not going to tell you what it is, and I want to say that plainly instead of tap dancing around a suspicious hole in the story. There’s a wound in my family right now that isn’t mine to hand out for public consumption. Everyone is safe. Everyone is healthy. Something just broke. In a place that’s staying private. That’s all you get. Not because I’m being coy. Because some doors are mine to open and some are only mine to guard.
What I can tell you is what it felt like.
Not the dramatic-metaphor kind of dying you toss around when you have the flu. The kind where it feels like your ribcage has been cracked open and something essential removed while you’re still expected to stand upright and make dinner and answer fucking emails like a normal, functioning member of society.
Grief has a scent.
So I didn’t sit with it. I didn’t journal my way through it or wait to see if it would pass, the way I might with something smaller. I opened the app. I found her name. I hit schedule. No Google search for “is it normal to,” no three days of pretending a walk and a green juice would fix it. Just straight to the source.
And that’s the part worth stopping to talk about. I barely thought about it, which is wild for a woman who overthinks everything down to the studs, including text messages. But this wasn’t a decision. It was an instinct. I’d worked too hard to get to solid ground to pretend I could tough this one out solo just to protect my ego. I also wasn’t about to start from zero with some new therapist, handing over my whole tragic backstory like I’m reading off a résumé.
When we got on the call, she was thrilled to hear from me. Genuinely, audibly thrilled. But underneath that, I could tell she already knew something was up. She’s basically a smoke detector at this point. Real quiet unless something’s actually on fire. She knows me well enough to know I would NOT come back for nothing. Three years of silence from me means I’m fine. A phone call after three years means I very much am NOT FINE.
We didn’t start with the hard part. We started with the good stuff, because there was a lot of it, and she wanted to hear all of it. She asked about the right people, the way she always does. My friends. My parents. My kids, by name, every single one, like no time had passed at all. It’s the therapeutic equivalent of a mom checking that you ate a vegetable. I’ve always loved her for that.
Then, because it was the whole reason, we got to the heavy part.
She told me she was proud of me for calling. For proving I really had learned enough to stand on my own two feet for as long as I needed to. Then she reminded me that going back to therapy isn’t proof the work failed. It’s proof you know your own limits. It’s the difference between a moment you can carry with the tools you already have, and a moment that needs more hands underneath it than just yours, no matter how strong your grip has gotten. My skills couldn’t carry this one alone. Turns out that’s not weakness. Growth looks a lot less like a TED Talk and a lot more like admitting defeat to a woman you pay $65 a session to tell you that you’re doing great.
I’m so glad I requested that appointment. I felt relief after that first call in a way I hadn’t felt in weeks. Some of that’s her. Some of it’s just not having to build a relationship with a stranger from scratch. No orientation packet required. Just me, showing up mid-sentence in a story she’s been reading for years.
Why am I telling you? Because I’ve wanted to write a series about this forever. About a woman I’ve never met in person, who has talked me through a divorce (or two), a pandemic, a total career reinvention, and losing my grandmother, all over the phone, all without once seeing my face. But most importantly — what she taught me. Some women get flowers delivered when things get hard. I get a standing Monday slot and a woman who remembers my list of ex-boyfriends better than my own mother does.
So for the record:
— Moe
