“My family calls me stupid,” my new patient said, her head lifting just enough that she could make eye contact with me. She paused, waiting to see if I would respond. I waited.
“I know I’m not very smart. I know that. But I have feelings too, you know. I have feelings, just like everybody, just like they do.”
My fingers paused, hovering above the keyboard, waiting, waiting just a little longer. It’s the hardest thing in the world in a mental health encounter to simply be present, to wait. We are all so driven to speak, to fill the silent void with fluffy pink verbal insulation, to keep out the cold, dark silences that force us to think and feel and hurt sometimes.
Her head slowly dropped again, chin nearly on chest. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought I saw a single shining tear drop straight down onto her tattered scarf.
“I’m not stupid. I know things. I know things.”
“It must be very painful for you to have your family treat you this way,” I said.
She looked up again, her head moving back to even with mine, eye contact direct and strong. Her movements were sloth-like, painfully slow and methodical. Her facial features were asymmetrical, a millimeter or two here and there, the alignment off in an almost imperceptible way. She looked at me, her response just as slow as her movement, her tongue finding the gap between her lower teeth, flicking in and out, probing the space, an unconscious rhythmic game of hide and seek.
“People think I don’t pay attention. They say things. They don’t think I hear them or that I pay attention.” Again, that unspoken question aimed directly at me, the one in the room with her now, the one listening to her and watching her.
Her thinking was almost as slow as her movement, but if I waited, if I was patient, there was substance there, feeling and emotion there. There was a person there, a person who struggled with life daily, as we all do. In our fast paced world, where attention spans are seconds long and our capacity for sitting with an idea or a problem is minimal, I could see how she would be marginalized, ignored, left out, and forgotten.
In his excellent book Starry Messenger, Neil deGrasse Tyson tells us that the total number of people who have been born is about 100 billion. The variation in our genetic code actually provides the potential for a million-trillion-trillion possible souls. If it was possible to run through them all, we would arrive back at another us, or at least our twin. In actuality, that will never happen. So we are left with the fascinating fact that “each of us, for all practical purposes, is unique in the universe-now and forever.”
The author also muses that “being alive is the time to celebrate being alive-every waking moment.” “Yes, life is better than death. Life is also better than never having been born. We get to bask in divine sunsets and sunrises. We get to live, and ultimately die, in this glorious universe.”
I looked at my patient in all her flawed, asymmetrical, ruined, hurt, struggling perfection. She was one of 100 billion, and she was fabulously unique. She just didn’t understand that yet.
“Tell me your story,” I said.
And, she did.