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

he wanted to be sure I understood how secrets work. “When you agree to keep someone’s secret, you hold their shame.”

“What do you want?” he asked.
The word want echoed in my head. Want, want, want. I groped for a way to speak my longing in the affirmative, not just blurt out how I didn’t want to die alone.
“I want—” I stalled.
“I would like—” More stopping.
“I want to be real. With other people. I want to be a real person.”
He stared at me like what else? Other strands of desire floated through my mind: I wanted a boyfriend who smelled like clean cotton and went to work every day. I wanted to spend less than 50 percent of my waking hours thinking about the size of my body. I wanted to eat all of my meals with other people. I wanted to enjoy and seek out sex as much as the women on Sex and the City. I wanted to return to ballet class, a passion I dumped when I grew breasts and fleshy thighs. I wanted to have friends to travel the world with after I took the bar exam in two years. I wanted to reconnect with my college roommate who lived in Houston. I wanted to hug high school friends when I ran into them at the mall. But I didn’t say any of that because it seemed too specific. Corny. I didn’t yet know that therapy, like writing, relied on detail and specificity.

I wanted therapy to be linear. I wanted to point to measurable improvements with every year I put in.