"You don't understand!" Nina moaned. "I'm seeing things I shouldn't see!" It was the first of her bi-weekly psychotherapy appointments, and Nina was only now alarmed enough by the persistent hallucinations to disclose them to the woman who had been treating her for the past three weeks. Lauren Isles, Ph.D. was a tall, slim woman with a veritable tornado of auburn curls and expressive green eyes, in perhaps her late twenties, clearly just out of school. Nina had been mistrustful of her at first, which, she supposed, was only natural, but after a few weeks she had eventually warmed up to the fiery-haired woman. Not that the work itself was a particularly pleasant process. As it was, Nina had doubled over onto the woman's couch, curling into the fetal position, clutching one of the pillows to her chest like a life-preserver.
"You seem pretty scared," Lauren observed, her voice calm and measured in contrast to Nina's near hysteria.
Nina nodded numbly. "This was supposed to be over once I'd performed. I thought I was done with this," she whispered miserably.
"But you're on stage again in about eighteen weeks, and from what you've told me, rehearsals have been somewhat frustrating for you. Sounds to me like you've been under a lot of pressure." As usual, Lauren had summed up Nina's jumbled emotions more clearly than she herself could.
"The thought of dancing this role again…" Nina's voice trailed off. She couldn't quite vocalize the terror that seemed to suck the very air from her lungs every time she thought of taking the stage as the Swan Queen.
"Tell me the story of Swan Lake," Lauren commanded.
Nina exhaled to calm herself. "It's about a girl named Odette who's turned into a white swan by a sorcerer named Rothbart, and she needs true love to break the spell. She meets a prince named Siegfried. They fall in love." Nina drew in a deep, shuddering breath before continuing the tale of the doomed lovers. "But Rothbart's daughter Odile, the Black Swan, looks exactly like Odette. She seduces and tricks the prince, so the spell can never be broken. She kills herself." Lauren nodded, seeming to consider the tale.
"You've told me that the same ballerina dances the roles of Odette and Odile. It sounds like it's not easy to dance both roles."
"No," Nina responded. "Odette is sweet and innocent. Odile is aggressive and sexual. Seductive, even. It's incredibly difficult to play two characters who are so radically different," Nina said.
"Well, I'll bet that connecting to Odette was easy enough," Lauren said with a smile.
Nina offered a wan smile in return. "It was. Odette's always come very naturally to me. Odile on the other hand…" Nina trailed off.
"Was far more stressful," Lauren vocalized the implicit statement. "From what I've heard, you gave a pretty spectacular performance that night," she said. Nina smiled shyly.
"Thanks," She whispered.
"So you certainly managed to tap into something todance the part as well as you did," Lauren continued.
"I did," Nina said faintly. "I had to access a part of myself that I didn't even know I had. I think that's why the hallucinations started."
"Mmmmmm," Lauren nodded non-committaly. "It wouldn't surprise me. I'm hearing a bit of ambivalence there. I could be wrong about this, but it doesn't sound like you're too terribly comfortable with that part of yourself," she said, rather tentatively, Nina noticed.
"No," she admitted softly. "I'm scared of those tendencies, scared to death. Particularly now. I mean, I've hurt just about everyone around me. My mother….Lily, my alternate. I became pretty paranoid that she was trying to sabotage me. The night of the performance I hallucinated her being in my dressing room after the first act, trying to take my place as the Black Swan. We fought. I stabbed her with a piece of broken glass from the mirror….." Nina's voice trailed off as she related the story. She paused, taking a moment to gather her reserve for what came next. "As it turns out, she was never in my dressing room at all. I stabbed myself, not her. I passed out from the blood loss right after the finale."
"Sounds to me like that little incident didn't do a whole lot to bolster confidence in the Odile part of yourself," Lauren observed.
Nina almost laughed in bitterness. "No, " She concurred.
"So look at your situation now. You're dancing the part again. You've connected to that side of yourself, but you haven't really made peace with it. Is that about right?" Lauren asked.
"Yeah," Nina mumbled miserably, but she had to admit that the woman's words had struck a chord.
"But of course, you need it to dance this part. You're under a huge amount of pressure from your director and from yourself to nail this performance, which, as the lead, falls largely on you. And the last time you did, you hurt yourself and people you care about. That's a huge burden for anyone to carry. Is it any wonder that these hallucinations have started up again, given all that?"
Nina hadn't really considered her situation from that angle, but once again, the woman's words rang true . "I guess not," she quietly confessed.
"Not that it makes them any less frightening," Lauren continued.
"No," Nina whispered.
"The good news is that you've expressed pretty clearly that you don't want to hurt yourself anymore. That's actually really hopeful," Lauren offered.
Nina nodded slowly. "I want to dance this part. More than anything," She said. "But not if it means dying or hurting someone else." It was perhaps the first time since she had learned during her hospitalization that she would be dancing the role again that she had been able to vocalize her jumbled fears and desires with any degree of clarity.
"So how do we help you do that?" Lauren asked quietly.
"I guess…" Nina trailed off, the thought coalescing in her mind into something articulable. "I have to find some way of becoming more comfortable with the Odile part of myself."
"I think so," Lauren agreed. "My take on all of this is that once that happens you'll have a much better idea of how to control it." She quickly glanced at the clock. "Well, we're out of time for today. Same time same place on Thursday?" She asked, and Nina nodded in assent. She quickly scribbled out a check and left the office, the door snapping shut behind her.
Later that night, once she'd finally arrived home from work, Nina lay curled up on the sofa in her living room idlely flipping through the channels on the television and taking in none of them. She felt restless and agitated for reasons she couldn't quite comprehend, and soon switched off the television after yet another fruitless pass through the stations. She picked up the novel she had been inching through for the past several months, hoping that it would help to calm her rattled nerves. It wasn't by any means the most literary of works, but it was engaging enough, and it usually helped her to take her mind off of her problems for a few short hours. Tonight, however, Nina barely read through a paragraph before reluctantly admitting to herself that she'd read over the same sentence several times without taking in a word of it. She put the book aside in frustration, resigned to spending the rest of the night wrestling with her troublesome thoughts.