My Therapist

I have four more sessions with my psychotherapist.

Four more blocks of fifty minutes where I can say anything, anything at all and know that I'm not being judged. Four more times when I can be nudged gently towards the deepest, darkest parts of myself and get the catharsis that is the wretched, painful sobs of realising just how acutely I feel the pain that I do. Four more times that I can see the face of my therapist who is not just a therapist but a friend and know that she will never, ever think badly of me. That she will tell me when I am exaggerating and not, when I am reading things wrong, when it's okay to say good things about myself and that it's important to be able to say the bad.

She can see through the loud and energetic persona that I put on to hide the other me, the shy and soft-spoken and terrified little mouse, and she can bring out the real me which is a combination of all those other things that I am. She will never push me to do things that I cannot do or do not want to, but will help me to push myself towards the life that I dearly and truly want. There is no person more understanding or trustworthy in the world than this woman.

And in four weeks she's being taken away from me because the NHS will only give a year of one-to-one psychotherapy to people like me, regardless of whether I need more time to heal or not. This woman is one of the single most important people in my entire life and she is being taken away from me. She is so important and yet I know hardly anything about her at all, while she knows absolutely everything that I am and never ever speaks badly of me.

I love her. I love her so acutely and painfully that while writing this I have sobbed hopelessly and with abandon, not tempering my tears like I usually would. And the thing that makes me cry the most is that I cannot express in words the immense gratitude and veritable awe that I have for her, for this woman who has stood besides me as I lay in the pits of despair and said 'It's alright. It hurts, but together we can build you a ladder, and you can start to see the sky'.

No one that I have loved, no one in my family whilst I have lived, has died - but I think I am beginning to know what it is like to be bereaved.