A Room of Their Own by Rakefet Yarden (best summer reads of all time .TXT) 📕

True, I’d already spent a few months of my life, even a few years, in a number of hospital departments, but still, I couldn’t think of myself as sick. Maybe crazy or stupid, but not sick.

Tenth Meeting

Four p.m. on Tuesday had arrived, bringing with it the little knock on the door, which was becoming fainter with each passing week. It was almost inaudible. I stood close to the door, opened it, and she walked in, almost collapsing, her legs unable to carry her anymore. She sat down on the chair in the waiting room.

“I’ll join you in a second,” she said.

I took hold of her arm and helped her to the armchair in the therapy room.

I began to feel choked. Our time was running out. Dani’s body was nearing the red line, and the helplessness accompanying her every step was stalking us, waiting just around the corner.

Dani’s senses were alert. The senses of a sensitive child, sharpened by encounters with wolves, prepared to flee and re-assemble back in her cave if I’d dare ask anything too directly, or, on the contrary, ignore something. I pushed my worries aside for a moment, slowly directing the session, allowing her to bring everything in.

“What helps you, Dani?”

“Nothing helps me. I can’t eat anything. Ever since I started talking about things, everything’s gotten worse. I can’t stop losing weight, and you’re not giving me any tools to calm myself down.”

“What helped you in the past in these types of situations?”

“I know that the only thing that got me out of it was hospitalization,” she said and sat up straight, “but I won’t agree to it, Rotem. I’m never going back there. All those horrible months in the unit, and the long months I spent rebuilding myself afterwards were enough for me. My Dad can’t force me into hospitalization this time. I’m not a minor anymore, and I’m not psychotic, so there’s no way.”

“Yes, you know the material well,” I exhaled heavily. I couldn’t allow myself to become infected by her despair. With all due respect to my affection for Dani, and perhaps specifically because of it, I needed some distance in order to help her.

“We keep trying and trying, and I’m letting you down,” she continued. “You’ll kick me out soon to make room for easier patients who aren’t trying to kill themselves every other day, ones who don’t have a father who’ll sue you if they manage it.”

“I’m insured,” I smiled at her.

Dani resisted a smile. “But you’ll feel guilty.”

“I’ll be very sorry if that’s how it’ll end, Dani, but I can’t take responsibility for your life. We can only get through it together. You feel that I’m letting you down, too, and everything feels like one giant knot. I’m no savior, Dani. No person can save another person for any length of time. Let’s take a step back from the situation and try to look at it from the side, together.”

“How?” Dani asked.

“Let’s write a new character and treat her together.”

“Who are we fooling?”

“Your life. What’s there to lose? Isn’t it worth a try? Come on, suggest something, let’s think about it together.”

“But how will it help?” she tried to understand.

“Writing has the power to create new worlds, bringing us back home within ourselves. You’re trying to reclaim a sense of control over your life, which had been taken from you, but you lost control over the anorexia long ago, and you know very well that soon you’ll have no choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dani, you’ll eventually faint and be hospitalized, willing or not. The body can’t live without fuel, and the lack of control that you’re so scared of encountering will reappear in full force. You say that ever since I enticed you to speak about your trauma you’ve been feeling worse, and you’re right. It often happens that before we feel better, we have to feel a lot worse. Like the mess that occurs when we try to organize a closet. You also say that ever since we started meeting, you can’t stop losing weight, and from that I gather that you don’t feel sufficiently protected by me. So we need to find a way to change the course together. We can’t always write about ourselves. It can be overwhelming in certain situations. But with writing, we can be whoever we want to be, and see everything happening to people from a distance.”

Dani listened silently, her facial muscles slowly relaxing. “Okay. So what do we do?” she asked.

Maybe something’s touched her, I thought to myself.

“Say a name,” I asked.

“What name?”

“What did you want to have when you were younger?”

“Adi.”

“That’s a beautiful name,” I said.

“I called my Barbie dolls by that name. It always seemed like the name of a girl who has an easy life − not like Dani, which is really a boy’s name.”

“How old is Adi?”

“Fifteen.”

“What happens to her?”

“She finds out that her parents are separating, and then she gets hospitalized for the first time.”

“Write down everything that you want to know about her. What music she likes, what kind of relationship she has with her sister, what she keeps in her wallet that she doesn’t want anyone to know about, what mantra she hears in her mind before going to sleep in order to stop the bad thoughts, and how she’s managed to get this far.”

Dani

Rotem was talking away. I liked her enthusiasm. It made me feel that she was letting me get to know her, and it also made me think that my situation wasn’t that terrible, considering that we could talk about other things, even laugh a bit. She continued sailing away with her ideas about writing, and I went back 15 years in my mind.

We were on a family trip to one of the streams in northern Israel. It was known as a beautiful stream, set in the middle of a narrow canyon. Even though it was a seasonal stream and had no water when we were there, the walk