Chapter Text
Am I so different? Have I changed?
I do not recognize my face. The scar fades but pulls inside,
tugging at me all the time.
Chewing on a feeling
and spitting it out…
I do not find worthiness a virtue
I no longer try to be good
It didn’t keep me safe
Like you told me that it would.
. . .
Listen, this was hardly Trinity’s first time in a therapist’s chair. Just try having a childhood like hers and not going to therapy – no, she would have killed herself before she got out of undergrad. Even her mother, notorious believer in Jesus to heal all wounds mental and physical, had insisted on it when Trinity had begun returning home late at night (early in the morning, if at all) stumbling drunk or high on whatever she could get her hands on, getting in fights at school, and skipping classes – all signs, Trinity later learned, of the abuse she had been undergoing. She’s pretty sure her mother attributed it to Trinity lacking in faith, or demonic possession, or something.
Maria Cristina had sent her to Pastor Michael with a stern “Be nice, mija, and be good.” Always more concerned with what people thought of her daughter than of what her daughter thought. Obviously, prayer was not the answer to Trinity’s problems.
It wasn’t until her second year of undergrad that her roommate at the time had suggested she see the on-campus counselor. She was only there by grace of her gymnastics scholarship – since her grades had fallen so sharply towards the end of high school, there was little else the university wanted out of her than what her body could do. Even knowing that, she was finding it harder and harder to keep up with practices. Her grades were barely hanging on to passing, and she’d find herself thrust sharply back into her body at random times with no awareness of how long she’d been out of it. Just going through the motions, at best.
Sandra was nice enough. Overworked, with a caseload incongruous with what Trinity imagined she was paid by the school – made obvious by how they quickly ran through the standard list of questions at the beginning of each (short) session. How has your sleep been? Eating? Any drug or alcohol use you’re concerned about? How are your classes? Practices?
Fine (lie). Good enough (true...relatively). No (lie). Fine (some of her professors would disagree, but that’s neither here nor there). Good (comparatively).
At least the university coach wasn’t a pervert like the other one. She could get changed in the locker room without looking over her shoulder, undressing and redressing as quickly as possible. But habits are hard to break, and Trinity didn’t know how to stop feeling so watched.
In the years since, she’d tried numerous other methodologies - DBT, CBT, biofeedback, EMDR, hypnotherapy, mindfulness, you name it. It’s not like she wanted to live like this. The thing that lived in the pit of her stomach made her snappish, angry, alternatingly hot and cold with the people in her life. She swung wildly between building walls, snapping at those who got too close, and begging for someone to see her, blindly and pathetically reaching out to anyone who might want her.
But between getting her shit together in time for med school applications, med school itself, and now interning at PTMC, she hadn’t really had the time to devote to solving the thing that was bad inside her. For a while, it was enough to put her head down and work, made her feel almost normal as long as she had a task at hand and something to excel at. (Even if she had wanted to continue on with gymnastics after school – she could have, she was objectively very good – a rolled ankle her senior year had prevented her from performing in the qualifying meets. Thus, a dream dies. Boo fucking hoo.)
“Trinity?”
Her head snaps up to see her newest therapist, Leah, tilting her head and frowning at her. “Where were you just now?”
Trinity shakes her head, short and fast as if to clear it. She’d been seeing Leah just a few weeks now, at the recommendation (heavily implied to not be a suggestion) of Robby to deal with her shit and stop bringing it into the ED. She still doesn’t know if she really trusts her, but then, does she really trust anyone?
“I – I don’t know. I was just...thinking, I guess.”
“What were you thinking about?” Leah sits up a little straighter, readjusts her grip on the pen in her hand. Her face carefully clear of judgment.
“Just...like, I’ve done this before, right? I’ve done the talking, and the journaling, and the deep breathing, and I’ve forgiven and moved on, but when does it end? How long do I have to do this before I’m like, cured?” Until I stop seeing her face in every patient that comes through the ED, until I stop flinching when men brush too close by me, until Robby trusts me to do my fucking job, until, until, until.
“Well, that’s a tough question, Trinity. I don’t know that it really has such an easy answer. Healing isn’t linear, and it doesn’t have an expiration date.”
Trinity sighs, filling the small room with carbon dioxide and the old, aching tiredness that she feels every time she fills her lungs and Julia doesn’t. “Yeah, I’ve heard that before. I just want to get back to my life. I’m fucking good at my job, I get along fine with my coworkers, and my patient satisfaction scores aren’t total shit. I don’t know why I still need to be here.”
Leah assesses her silently for a moment, that same look of intentional blankness (unconditional positive regard, Trinity internally rolls her eyes) on her face, eyebrows just slightly raised. A long moment, it feels like. Trinity fidgets with her fingers, tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, does it again when it immediately falls back into her eyes. Was the chair this hard when she sat down this morning? Now that she thinks of it, is it even legal to sell wall clocks that tick that loudly? It’s the only thing she can hear as she sits on this hard (god, it’s like fucking concrete) therapist’s chair and watches Leah watch her.
Finally, Leah speaks. “Trinity, I want to help you. And I think you want to be helped, or you wouldn’t have come here. But in order for this to work, I need you to be honest. With me, and with yourself. No one is forcing you to be here - “
“Robby would kick my ass if I stopped coming, hypocritical old fuck,” Trinity mutters, arms folded tightly over each other across her chest.
“Regardless of whatever conversations you’ve had with Dr. Robinavitch,” Leah continues as though Trinity had not interrupted, “You are an adult. No one can make you do anything, barring an involuntary hold or arrest. You are capable of making your own decisions, you are clearly very smart,” (at this, Trinity snorts), “and from what I’ve seen of you, you seem to have a good head on your shoulders. So you tell me: why are you still here?”
Trinity blinks, caught slightly off-guard. Okay, Leah’s got shooters! She didn’t see that coming. She draws her lower lip into her mouth, unconsciously chewing on it as she contemplates what to say. Finally, she lands on,
“I don’t feel real, a lot of the time. It’s...better, than it used to be, like I’m more grounded or whatever...but sometimes I catch myself and I’m just...not there.”
Leah nods in understanding, scribbling notes as Trinity talks. “Dissociation is a very common response to trauma. Can you tell me more about what it feels like, when you’re not there?”
“I guess it’s like...I’m outside of my body. Or I’m too much in my body. I can’t focus on what’s going on around me.” Trinity’s eyes are firmly locked on her knees now, feet tucked up under her on the chair. “Time is moving but I’m not moving with it. I feel – frozen. Not in control of my body.” Her voice has started to shake, god that’s embarrassing, but now that she’s talking about it, the words keep pouring out of her.
“I almost fought a patient the other week. Like, physically fought, I nearly hit the dude. He was – he was unkind,” she spits this out like a curse, “to Dr. Mohan, talking down to her, like she was stupid. He requested another doctor. We were slammed; no one else was available. I happened to walk by when he called her – well, he was an asshole.
“And we get a lot of assholes in the Pitt, you know, everyone’s frustrated, and in pain, and no one likes to wait six hours to be seen – but something about this guy and this situation just...flipped something in me. I wasn’t there, and then I was, and my hands were shaking,” here Trinity holds out her hands in demonstration for Leah to see, “and I just start – like, yelling at him, right, telling him he can’t talk to her like that, how would he like it if no one treated him and we just let him fucking die, how would he like that, and I could feel – I could feel my heart beating so fast, and my hands were still shaking, and he looked like…” He looked like Coach, he looked like the father who was molesting his daughter, he looked like the boyfriend Trinity had in high school who liked to choke her while they were fucking.
Man, Leah has a good poker face. She could probably get away with not taking insurance, even.
“And the worst part wasn’t even when Robby chewed me out for half an hour after that, it wasn’t thinking I might lose my job. It was – Samira, Dr. Mohan – she looked so...scared of me, or for me. She had tears in her eyes. I don’t – I don’t know what to do with that.”
“Someone caring about you?” Leah asked quietly.
Trinity sniffed. Her own eyes felt embarrassingly wet. “I don’t…” She trailed off, not really sure what else to say.
“Sometimes, it’s not any one person or situation that causes us to break down, or to lash out. It can be the accumulation of years of feeling unseen, or unheard, or any other need that goes unaddressed. ‘The straw that broke the camel’s back’, to speak metaphorically. It sounds like you’ve had something building for a long time, Trinity. I know you know this, but repressing your feelings only works in the short term,” Leah laughs a little, dryly, as though she’s making a joke. Really fucking funny, Leah. “I’m sorry to hear that you were so upset by this patient, and by how he spoke to your friend.”
“Coworker,” Trinity corrects quickly. She wishes she were closer to Mohan, but she’s pretty notoriously terrible at making friends. It’s like people can see how desperate she is, how awkwardly and viciously she wields her desire for connection.
“Okay, coworker,” Leah amends. “From how you describe it, anyone would have been upset by what happened. Maybe to varying degrees,” she tilts her head side to side, waves her hand loosely. “What I’m curious about is your body’s reaction to it. Can you feel where in your body this response lives, now? What happens when you lean into it?”
Trinity closes her eyes. It doesn’t feel good, to have her eyes closed in front of someone (what is this, a fucking prey drive?), someone she doesn’t fully know or trust not to take advantage of her guard being down, even by one sense. But she feels like if she has to look at Leah while she does this, see whatever is on Leah’s face while Trinity is so fucking vulnerable, fuck, this sucks!!, she might just throw up. So she closes her eyes and focuses on her body.
. . .
Her body. The thing everyone praised her for as she grew up, the thing that moved so confidently and exquisitely, the heady feeling of pride and warm, loose limbs that came after pulling off a tricky move. (The swoop in her stomach of teetering on the edge of the beam, only to right herself and stand up straighter than before – the feeling of falling, almost.) The thing that attracted older eyes, older hands. The thing that stopped belonging to her, hasn’t belonged to her in a long time. The thing she tries, most of the time, not to feel at all.
But she’s a doctor. A whole ass practitioner of medicine. She eats just enough to function, drinks water at regular intervals when time avails, takes medication when she’s in pain, sleeps when she can. It’s not like she doesn’t take care of herself. But something in her, even all this time later, recoils to see herself in the mirror, to recognize that the thing that thinks and dreams and practices medicine is also a thing that exists, that other people can see and wonder about and project onto – that her body, the thing that houses her brain, her wonderful smart brain, also holds memories and feelings and aches. The kind of ache that lives in her blood, in her breath, in the way her hair grows and the way her hands shake and the twitch at the corner of her mouth when Dr. Mohan – Samira – looks over at her from the next bay and smiles so softly, so sincerely.
“Are you aware you have an aggressive energy, Trinity?”
Trinity’s stomach roils, just slightly, at the memory of her first conversation with Dr. Mohan – of Samira’s first perception of Trinity. Yeah, she knows she comes off aggressive. Better than weak. Better than someone to prey upon.
It’s hard – it’s so fucking hard – to let her walls down around Samira. Tear them down with her hands, knuckles bleeding and cracking, more like. But that look on her face in South 20, when Trinity came to her defense (stupid, she can take care of herself, she doesn’t need me to fight her battles for her), hasn’t left Trinity’s mind since she saw it. Not the look she gave Mr. Roberts, presenting with hypoglycemia and a bad case of racial bias, but the look she gave Trinity in the moments after. The one Trinity still hasn’t been able to parse, so soft as to be nearly unreadable, her mouth downturned and her eyes wide and glistening, long dark lashes framing them like a fucking sweet baby cow. Trinity wants to cry thinking about it. She doesn’t want to be tough for Samira. She wants...oh god, does she want.
. . .
“I feel like...there’s a weight on my chest. On my shoulders. My hands are – restless, they can’t stop moving.” Even now, her hands are wringing the hem of her shirt, over and over, wrinkling the fabric, crushing it. Maybe I can get Huckleberry to iron it for me. That’s like, farm shit, right? “I have all this energy, without any place to put it, and at the same time I feel so, so heavy. Like I could lay down and the whole sky could just fall on top of me and I’d never have to get up, and I’d never have to open my eyes.”
“Will you open your eyes, Trinity?”
She scrunches them closed even harder, screws up her mouth. She can feel a wayward tear making its way out of the corner of her eye, traveling down her face past her nose. She wipes it away quickly, irritatedly, eyes still shut tight.
Leah sighs. It doesn’t sound judgmental, or annoyed. It’s just a sigh, if a sigh can be just that.
“Trinity, I don’t want to leave our session at this. We are nearly at time, but I want to make sure you’re okay before we end.” Trinity can hear Leah’s pen tapping lightly on her notepad, where she’s sure Leah has written something along the lines of get this girl to a hospital, stat!
Trinity’s not so sure she is okay. She’s thinking about Julia, who killed herself, and she’s thinking about Max, who wanted to kill himself, and she’s thinking about Samira and her big wet eyes, and she’s thinking about Robby and the look of disappointment and disgust he wore when he talked to her, and she’s thinking about taking the bus back to her apartment that’s too big for her when Whitaker’s on shift, and she wants to crawl into bed and pull the covers up over her head and she never wants anyone to look at her ever again. Man, a lot can change in fifty minutes, huh?
But she opens her eyes, and she looks back at Leah, who’s looking at her like she’s actually really worried about her, even though she’s paid to, and she sniffs once and says, “Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks.”