"Come in, Len," the long pink-haired woman smiled pleasantly at the blonde youth as he strode up to the door of her office, hands in his pockets. Nodding amiably, he sat down on the too-soft couch and glanced up with clear, light blue eyes and a friendly smile firmly on his face.
"How are you feeling today?" The woman asked, and Len's smile grew into a bright, cheerful grin that showed off all of his straight, healthy white teeth.
"Oh, you know. I'm doing," The blonde male replied in an offhand manner and shrugged his shoulders slightly as he rested his palms on his knees.
"What does that mean? You're 'doing'?" The woman inquired politely, adjusting her notepad on her lap and writing something down with her pen. Len's static grin remained fixed widely in place as he replied.
"I think I'm having a breakdown," he admitted in a cheerful voice. The woman glanced up and scribbled a note.
"What do you mean, you think you're having a breakdown?" She asked.
"It's not a big deal. It happens. It's just... it's been a while since I cried like this," the blonde male shrugged again, and his smile faded slightly for a moment.
"Can you tell me a little about that?" The woman asked softly and continued to write in her notepad.
"I just... I don't want to go through any more trauma. I don't want any more stress, any more anxiety. I just want to have things be peaceful, but... everything's too much. Things can't be peaceful.
"It's going to happen again, over and over, and I can't stop it from happening. I just... you know..? ...I was thinking... there's not a single person in this world who actually loves me. Singing is all I have left. And when I do a bad job, it's devastating. I feel like it was a bad idea for me to go back on my medication," Len spoke quietly and calmly, tucking a stray bit of his unruly blonde bangs behind his ear as he bounced from topic to topic, seemingly at random.
The woman frowned over her clipboard at him. "You know that you need to take your medication. If you stop taking it again, you could go into multiple organ failure, Len. And what about your friends? Do you think they don't love you? You have a lot of friends, don't you?"
The blonde male closed his eyes briefly and smiled again. "Yeah, I guess so. I think they'd probably miss me, if I were gone. But I'm really more of a fun distraction for them than anything else. Like going to see a new movie. It's fun to do, but if you don't go, it's not like you're going to die or be devastated forever. Eventually they'll all move on with their lives, whether I'm around to see it or not. We won't stay together forever. They don't love me that way."
"You were saying that you were upset about your singing. Did something happen with that?" The pink-haired woman asked, changing the topic.
"I'm thinking it might be time for me to stop. Like, maybe take a hiatus? Or something. The last few songs I've done... well, I can tell that when I don't get any kind of response, that I did a bad job. Maybe that means I shouldn't be doing this anymore. I mean, it's not like I do this for me. At least, not for the kind of reason people would probably think, anyways," Len replied a little more slowly as he thought about it.
The woman glanced down at her notepad and made a few more scribbles. Len closed his eyes briefly and sighed as quietly as he could manage.
"Do you think the lack of response about your songs is the reason why you're feeling like you're having a 'break down'?" The woman asked in her polite tone, and Len could practically hear the quotation marks in her intonation. He glanced away from her, unimpressed with her verbal inflection.
The woman waited for several long moments and didn't hear a response, so she bent her head once again and made a few more notations on her notepad.
"Why do you think you've been doing a bad job on your singing?" She tried again to re-engage the conversation after another long moment had passed. Len glanced back over at her, his earlier smile gone and his light blue eyes serious.
"I don't know. I've been trying my best. Maybe I'm just not any good at it, anymore," He admitted quietly, as if the words caused some pain to say out loud.
"Has anything changed recently?" The woman asked.
"I don't know. I've been feeling discouraged more and more about it lately. I don't just want to put out new songs for the sake of putting out more stuff, and cluttering up the music listings. I guess when I started doing this, I thought that it'd help me connect with more people... people who felt like me. You know? Maybe I should just keep trying, but... if everything I do is a bad job, there's no point.
"And I'm tired. I'm so tired from trying too hard at everything I do, all the time. I just want it all to stop. I just wish everything would stop," Len's voice was small by the time he finished his last sentence, and he wouldn't lift his eyes to look at his therapist.
"Is it time to give up?" The pink-haired woman asked softly as she watched the younger blonde male carefully. His blue eyes widened and he glanced up at her as if the measured words were a shock to his system. His eyes closed slightly after a moment and he let his head drop slightly as he returned his gaze downwards, silent.
Jotting down a few more things onto the notepad, the woman looked back up after a short while. "Do you think we need to try to increase your antidepressant medication again?"
"There's no point. It doesn't work," The blonde replied simply.
"It takes a while to build back up in your system," The woman explained, as if he didn't already know that. As if it had been working before, when he had been taking it regularly. Any of its incarnations. As if the side effects which did work were as effective as the intended main effects, which didn't, which never did, and even when they did, never lasted long, if at all. "If you feel like you need a medication change, you should discuss it with your doctor at your next appointment."
Len didn't bother trying to argue again. It's not like any of the things he'd been prescribed helped him. It's not as if he held out hope any more that there was one medicine among the dozens that had been tried, failed, and switched up, again and again, that was still out there somewhere, that would actually fix anything, or help him even a little.
"Do you feel unsafe? Do you think you need to go into the hospital?" The question came like clockwork, as it did every time his therapist thought he might be suicidal again.
"No. I don't. I don't want to go into the hospital," The blonde replied flatly, leaving no room for doubt. He hated being in the locked ward. The pink-haired female regarded him for a moment, making one more annotation on her notepad before setting it down.
"I'd like you to start coming in for sessions more often," The woman continued speaking as she stood up, their time almost over, to make room for the next patient. "How about twice a week?" It wasn't a question.
"I really don't want to," Len answered with blatant truthfulness. "In fact, I don't really want to keep coming even as often as I am now."
"I'm concerned that I think you're getting worse. If you won't come in to see me more often, I'm going to have to tell the doctor. We might not be able to continue treating you if you don't continue your sessions, Len," The woman spoke in a lightly veiled threat. Len looked unhappy at the strong-arming. "Sometimes you have to do things, seek out doing things, that are uncomfortable in order to help you get better. If you're having a hard time with this, that means you need more treatment, not less."
"That's like telling me that if I hate getting punched in the face, it's a good idea to go out and get punched in the face a bunch of times, because the discomfort of being punched in the face over and over again will help me somehow.
"It doesn't help, it's just distracting and more stressful, not to mention that not wanting to get punched in the face doesn't mean that I don't want to not feel this way," Len tried not to sound frustrated with the fact that once again, nothing was solved, and he was leaving therapy feeling even more upset and depressed than when he had arrived there. His cheerful mask would again require yet more exhausting patching before he would be able to approach looking like a normal person in front of other people again, and he hated that fact.
He hated the empty, hurting sensation of rising stress in his chest, the tightness, the desperation, and the bubbling feeling of being overwhelmed with the ever-increasing sessions of more and more stress with the useless therapist that were promised... or threatened, take your pick.
"Would Tuesday at 8:15 a.m. work for you?" The woman asked as she picked up a business card to scribble the date and time of the net appointment on. Hating the agreement she obviously expected from him, Len bitterly nodded. A few pen strokes later, and the blonde male was looking distastefully, unhappily down at the card in his hand.
"I'll see you on Tuesday," The woman walked him to the door, and watched as he left, still clutching the flimsy card in one unhappy hand. He didn't say thanks as he passed her on his way out. His back grew smaller as he rounded the corner, moving quickly, unable to get out of the building fast enough.
...
A reply to reviews: Normally, I would do this in PM, rather than here, but when there's no account to PM to, I hope you'll not mind my responding in a post-note here. First off, thanks, Master S, I was pretty moved that you felt strongly enough to leave such an exhaustive review. Self-centered stuff like this fic is literally as blatantly Mary Sue as I get, and I wanted to explain something to you that might not have been clear from the style of the story and the lack of background. You absolutely cannot actually die of multiple organ failure from stopping an antidepressant medication. Don't get me wrong, every single type of that crap will give you one (or more kinds) of varying degrees of nasty side effect or another, and some have pretty horrible withdrawal symptoms, even when their main, intended use has failure, but the reason for that bit of the fic is that I imbued Len with my own (non-mental) illness, in addition to his depression. The medication I mentioned that can cause MOF if stopped is 100% unrelated to the depression he's being "treated" here for, and I just wanted to clear that up. I agree that it's definitely not as simple as emotional health=body health, because that would be pure bullshit. Like a favourite quote of mine I'll paraphrase from manga Tokyo Babylon, "I know health isn't everything. But without it, there's nothing." We live in a society with a lot of sick people. It's just the types and levels of sickness that differ. Mental, or physical, it's all health or injury, recovery, or trauma, in varying degrees. Being sick doesn't make a person "less than," it just means their life sucks balls, and with it sucking balls, dealing with it sucking balls becomes even more difficult and hard. That's how I look at it, in any case.
And yes, therapists suck.
But thank you for telling me you liked this; I did not expect a single response from a fic like this, to be terribly honest. And, it makes me happy to have a fan, haha :3 Thanks. :)