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

the functioning one. We’ll make a coalition and together we’ll force that terrible Jasmine B to become obedient. Now it’s clear why I can’t do it. When was the last time that there was an actual coalition in Israel? Unlike my shrink, my other therapist suggested a national unity government. “Let’s address all of the parts, even the unbearable ones,” she said. I was playing a card game with my six-year-old nephew. He already knows that he has to play the cards he’s dealt without whining, but Netanyahu and Gantz keep asking for new cards, over and over again. Maybe the solution is to appoint a medical nursery school teacher, kind of like a medical clown but without the cannabis. As it is, they’re already on the kind of high you only get before you crash.

“Netanyahu, his son, a blonde female academic, and Benny Gantz are on a plane together. The pilot comes on the speaker and says, ‘Sorry, guys, we’re about to crash. We only have three parachutes. You decide who gets them. Good luck. Bye!’ And then he jumps out of the plane.

“Gantz says, ‘All right, guys, for the good of the country and all of that. I’m one of a kind, no one else says well-known phrases wrongly the way that I do. Good luck to you all. Bye.” And he takes a parachute and jumps.

“The blonde says, ‘Sorry, I’m the blonde with the highest IQ in the whole world. I’m one of a kind. Bye.’ She takes the second parachute and jumps off.

“‘Dad, what do we do?’ Netanyahu’s son stomps his feet, sweating, his head held between his hands. ‘I can’t believe it. This is the first time that I’m being screwed by a blonde girl and not the other way around. She took the second parachute.’

“‘Don’t worry, kiddo,’ Netanyahu tells him. ‘Your genius blonde grabbed a sleeping bag.’

“I made a bet with my shrink that if I manage to make you laugh, he’ll give me a prescription for medical cannabis. So long, and thanks for the prescription.”

Jasmine breathed a sigh of relief. That’s it. She did it, the scariest thing in the world. I felt as proud as a bar mitzva mother. She managed to stand on a stage in front of an audience and make everyone laugh. Now, everything is possible.

Writing Instead of Cutting:

Twelfth Meeting

Snoopy started to bark. Dani was at the door. I could no longer hear her knocks. If it weren’t for Snoopy, she’d stay outside for a few minutes until I’d check the door, or even send me a message. “I’m here.”

What’s left of her is here. She’s getting weaker with every meeting that goes by. She has no strength left to talk about what’s eating her up, so there’s nothing to stop it. We have to find a way to solve this mess, I thought to myself.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“How was your week?”

“Fine.”

“What was good about it?” I insisted. The truth is that nothing’s good. I just can’t handle it, so I asked her. Dani remained silent. She walked in, her face expressionless.

“Where are you?” I asked quietly.

“Nowhere. I want to die.”

“What are you feeling?”

“I feel really bad and I just want to disappear. Or injure and hurt myself so that I can’t feel it.”

I waited for a minute. “Can’t feel what?”

“That thing sitting on my soul, suffocating. So heavy that I can’t describe it.”

“Try and find words for it anyway,” I asked.

“It’s very thick, dark, and heavy.”

“Where is it?”

“Over my chest.”

“When do you encounter it?”

“All the time.”

“Are there times when you feel it more strongly?”

“Yes, at night. But the last few days I’ve also woken up with it in the morning. When it starts first thing like that, I just open my eyes and I already know that everything’s bad. I’m scared that it’ll never leave me. That this feeling will never disappear.” Dani recoiled again. Silent.

“What feeling won’t disappear?”

“That I’m damaged, that something’s wrong with me, that I don’t deserve to feel good. And then I try to make myself disappear, thinking that it’s the only way, that I’ll always be haunted if I don’t find a way to end this life already.”

“That’s how you know how to do things, Dani. That’s the way you know to cope with it. As long as we don’t find another way, as long as you’re escaping, it’ll just get stronger. Its force only comes from the fact that you don’t dare confront it. Once you look straight at it, it’ll slowly fade away, because it doesn’t have its own actual existence. The truth is that no one can ever take over you again. That belongs to the past, even though it still feels very real and active right now.”

“That’s right. It happened ages ago, so why am I still not functioning? How come I dream about it every night and walk around with it every day? I have no strength left for anything else. I’m ‘as-if’ living.”

“It may have happened a long time ago, but it still lives within you. The soul hasn’t yet processed the trauma because it never got a chance to do so. You kept putting it off in order to survive and up until now you weren’t able to handle the horror of it’s having happened. Now you want to let it out, and it’s incredibly scary. I’m not sending you off to deal with it on your own. We’ll confront it together.”

“But I can’t manage to talk about it here either. It scares me too much, threatens, as though it’s happening right now.”

“You can write about Adi, and in doing that, distance yourself a little bit from the flood of emotions. Let’s write about it together.”

“What will you get out of it? Who writes with their patients?”

“It doesn’t really happen often. Dr. Irvin Yalom wrote a book with his patient Ginny, ‘Every Day Gets a Little Closer’. Come to think of it, they really are the only example that I’m familiar with. Ginny also