“I do not have a fragile psyche.”
Alice stands up and opens her office door for me. “You’re shutting me out. You’re too afraid.”
I don’t budge. “Afraid of what?”
“You want a counselor, Natalie? Is that what you need? Fine. I should’ve cut my schooling in half if all I was going to do was psychoanalyze teenagers, but if that’s what you need, I’ll be your child psychologist for sixty seconds. Here’s my diagnosis: You are suffering a typical, run-of-the-mill, naval-gazing, who-am-I existential crisis. You were separated from your biological family at a young age, and you’ve had abandonment issues ever since. Though your adoptive parents are incredibly supportive and loving, and yes, as you said, nice, you didn’t see yourself reflected in either of them as a small child. Thus you learned to look into yourself, overthink and imagine and fantasize, about your identity. Most likely you would have this natural disposition and these feelings of isolation regardless of whether you were raised by your birth parents or adoptive parents, but your obsession with self-knowledge is compacted by the assumption that your biological parents gave you up for the same reason that you don’t recognize yourself in your adoptive parents: because you are missing something. So while most children form their identities out of their likes and dislikes, their interests and relationships, you spent all your time trying to develop an identity from scratch. And what foundation do you build it on? Emotions. Now the problem for highly emotional people is that feelings are unstable and unreliable. They come and go. They change swiftly. Sometimes, in certain seasons of life, they seem to be absent entirely. Not much to build on, is it? Shall I go on?”
“Alice, I—”
“The more negative interactions with others you had as a child, the more you reinforced the belief that you were missing something, and thus the more isolated and alone you felt. The more you convinced yourself you weren’t like your peers. And in one essential way, you’re not like them. Most of your classmates never worried about who they were when they were ten years old. Don’t get me wrong, eventually they will—probably in six months when they’re on their own for the first time. But right now most of them are just living their lives. So why aren’t you? Because you have conditioned yourself to spend the vast majority of your time trying to know yourself. You are incapable of letting any feeling go unnamed. Your quest for self-awareness has resulted in crippling self-consciousness. You aren’t able to describe your mother to me in any word other than nice because you are at once desperate to be seen and afraid of being seen. You are afraid of unveiling any piece of yourself you don’t like or you find shameful. I can tell you, even if I had cut my schooling in half, I’d still be confident enough to bet money that that piece is made up of resentment and jealousy. You disdain yourself for feelings you believe to be unique to you, which only further encourages the thought pattern that whispers in your brain at night: I am not good enough. I am not good, period. Maybe even, I’m bad. There is something in me that cannot be fixed.”
Something’s searing though me, and it’s hard to breathe or even see straight. I want to tell Alice to stop, but my throat feels closed and my chest too heavy to get in the breath I need to make words. She goes on.
“No matter how many times your mother and father encourage you to feel comfortable asking questions about your origins, you still feel guilty for wanting to know, and thus refuse to search anywhere but within yourself. You seek out relationships with people you hope will reflect yourself back to you and validate the person you think you are, the person you don’t believe your parents accurately see. When you realize that no one can fully see your soul, you become disillusioned. You become hopeless and despairing and you retreat further into yourself, believing you cannot go on living until you have a firm picture of who you are.
“It doesn’t help that, for years, you had Grandmother, an entity that seemed to know everything about you, only to have her abandon you when you most needed confidence in your identity. And the worst part, for me personally, as I watch this incredibly slow-moving train wreck, is that I—a scientist—am more aware of the quintessential and unnamable thing that makes Natalie Cleary Natalie Cleary than you are. What’s tragic is you’re self-destructing purely by inaction even though you are a smart, strong, emotionally resilient, competent, and capable young woman who should be out conquering the world and falling wildly in love and saying yes to every opportunity while, might I add, helping me dismantle the patriarchy controlling the world of scholarly scientific journals by uncovering the truth about Grandmother.”