I started therapy in a small room off Baggot Street after a breakup that left me unable to pass certain places in Dublin without feeling like the city had turned witness against me. Camden Street meant our first pint. The Grand Canal meant the evening he told me he needed “space,” as if space was not already everywhere around me. Even the Luas bell near St Stephen’s Green could make my stomach drop.
My therapist, whom I’ll call Maeve, was calm in a way that felt almost rude at first. I would arrive with my heart in my throat, drenched from rain, full of dramatic declarations about how I had ruined my life, and she would ask me where I felt that in my body. I used to think that was nonsense. I wanted answers, instructions, maybe a spell. Instead, she gave me silence, tissues, and questions that somehow followed me home.
The first piece of advice I fell in love with was this: “You don’t have to make a home out of everyone who makes you feel less alone.” She said it on a Thursday in November, when the windows were fogged and the buses outside made the room hum. I had been describing my ex as if he were both a person and a country I had been exiled from. Maeve listened, then said that sentence gently, like she was placing a coat over my shoulders.
I wrote it down on the back of a receipt from a café in Rathmines. I read it on the bus. I read it in bed. I read it when I wanted to text him at midnight. For the first time in months, I did not. I started to think Maeve was the reason I was getting better. Not the work, not the crying, not the ugly honesty of admitting I had confused being chosen with being loved. Maeve herself.
It embarrassed me, how much I looked forward to Tuesdays. I chose nicer jumpers. I rehearsed small funny stories from my week, hoping she might laugh. If she remembered something I had said, I carried it around all day like proof that I mattered. Once, after a session, I walked through St Stephen’s Green in a daze, convinced I had never been understood like that by anyone. The ducks were making a racket, teenagers were sharing chips by the Fusiliers’ Arch, and I thought, with the wild certainty of a lonely person, I love her.
I didn’t say it immediately. I let it grow in secret. I mistook the relief of being heard for romance. I mistook consistency for chemistry. In fairness to myself, I had never known love that was calm. Love, in my house growing up, was loud doors and apologies cooked into dinners. Love, in my twenties, was waiting for someone to decide if I was enough. Maeve’s attention felt revolutionary because it came without me performing for it.
The incident that changed everything happened in January. I had bought her a book from Hodges Figgis, a collection of poems I thought she would like. I told myself it was a thank-you gift, but on the bus over I knew it was more than that. It was a small, paper-wrapped confession. My hands shook so much I nearly got off at the wrong stop.
At the end of the session, I took it out of my bag. Maeve looked at the parcel, then at me, and her face softened in a way that made me want to disappear.
“Can we talk about what this means?” she asked.
I burst into tears before I answered. Not pretty tears either. Full, humiliating, snotty ones. I told her I thought I had feelings for her. I told her I knew it was inappropriate. I told her I was sorry, again and again, as if I had broken a window.
She did not flinch. She did not shame me. She said feelings that appear in therapy are often trying to show us something important. She said I wasn’t bad or strange. Then she said
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