‘Is quitting your job something you had been thinking about, or wanting to do for a while?’ she said.
I should have just told her I’d been contemplating it, like a normal person would before making such a huge decision. That wasn’t the truth, though.
‘I hadn’t thought about it until I did it, and I didn’t mean to do it, anyway,’ I said.
I could tell she didn’t believe me. ‘Why do you think you made that choice in that moment, then?’ she said as if she was trying to make me realise that it was a choice.
For the record, I really find it hard to believe anyone would happily clean up a shit in a change room like it’s a normal thing. I don’t think I opposed the idea of cleaning up human waste because I’m autistic, which is what I think she was getting at. It’s what she is always getting at. I did my best to be honest and direct, even though I still can’t really figure out how I ended up quitting my job.
‘I don’t know, it didn’t feel like a choice. I didn’t want to clean up a shit and then my mind was just jumbled and Great White Molly was saying one thing with her words and something else with her face and I just left. I wanted to get out of there.’
Dr Lim barely listened to my response if her follow-up question was anything to go by. ‘Do you think you might have trouble with someone else telling you what to do?’
Ugh, what! I’m a teenage delinquent rebelling against authority. Give me a break. I’m perfectly happy abiding by authority. I live for it really. Maybe I will end up being a cop, which is what you always called me when I told Mum what I’d seen you get up to. You never told me not to tell her. I didn’t realise my fourteen-year-old brother shouldn’t have been smoking in the mango tree after school. If you’d told me not to tell, I wouldn’t have, by the way. So I told Dr Lim that authority is not something I have trouble with, because it isn’t. Mum and Dad and my teachers and Dee and the bus driver and Mitch and you tell me what to do all the time, and I don’t mind. People love to tell me what to do, and what to think, and how I should be acting. I’m used to it. Dr Lim said I need to think about it anyway. It’s funny to me when people say ‘think about it’ as though I need any reminder to go over things in my mind again and again and again. It would be more valuable to tell me ‘don’t think about it’, but nobody seems to worry about that.
Dr Lim also wanted to talk about Schoolies. She always wants to talk about Schoolies. She wants to talk about it nearly as much as everyone in year twelve does. She wanted to role-play what a day at Schoolies would be like for me, ‘to get me thinking about the reality of it,’ she said. As if I’m not already thinking about it almost as much as I think about my cringe list. But I did the role-play, because I don’t want her thinking I’ve got a problem with authority when I don’t. I just think her suggestions sometimes miss the mark. So, a day at Schoolies—you could help me out with this one. I told her I’d probably get up and have breakfast and read the news, like I do at home, and maybe go to the beach for a morning swim. She said the beach would be very crowded, but I told her I’d just walk along the sand until I found a quiet spot. Then maybe we’d make lunch and go shopping or to one of the planned activities. There are competitions and games and heaps of stuff, I read about it on the website. Dr Lim told me those would be crowded too. Maybe though, maybe we’ll stay in our apartment and play board games and swim in the pool and go in the spa and just enjoy not having to be in class. It’s going to be so good.
That led us back to the job thing. She asked if I’m worried about not having a job. If she knows me at all she knows I’m worried. I’m worried because I need to pay board to Mum and Dad as well as save for Schoolies. I need to find a new job and save at least $100 a week, and that figure goes up by $10 a week for every week I don’t have a job. I’m worried because if I go two weeks without a job I won’t be able to find one that pays enough to cover board and Schoolies, so I’ll have to choose one and Mum needs the board money so I’ll miss Schoolies, and everyone is supposed to do Schoolies when they finish school. As I was explaning all of this, Dr Lim put her hand up to stop me.
‘Stop there, Erin,’ she said. ‘Remember we talked about cycling like this. You are working too many steps ahead and causing yourself unnecessary anxiety. Let’s focus on the next step only. Getting a job. Have you started looking?’
I told her about the job I saw online for an animal trainer at Australia Zoo. She laughed, which I thought was a bit rude. She said my next job doesn’t have to be forever, just good and stable enough to get me to the end of the year. As if I hadn’t already figured that I need to find a job to work for ninety-six more hours. That doesn’t sound like too much does it?
My ideal places to work, if I could choose anywhere at all, would be:
The library
Book shop
Cinema
Museum (preferably in the dinosaur section)
The antique centre.
Dr Lim says I’m struggling because I’m about to finish school, but I don’t even like school so I don’t think she’s right. Sometimes I think she is the best psychologist in the world and I wouldn’t get through my days without the things she has taught me, and other times I think she’s like a psychic at a market stall and I just want to believe what she’s telling me. Psychologists work with people whose minds need help, so of course we’re going to want to do what they say to get better.
I asked if I could keep my cringe list if I also keep writing you letters, and although Dr Lim didn’t seem happy she decided that was okay for now. I didn’t tell her I was planning to keep it up anyway even if she said no, because then she would think I was having trouble with someone telling me what to do. She did say writing to you is especially important for the next couple of months as I finish school and ‘transition to the next phase of my life’. She thinks our sibling relationship needs ‘healing’—that’s what she keeps saying. We need to see each other as fully formed people instead of only through the lens of ‘brother’ and ‘sister’. I don’t think things are that broken, but I guess the whole ‘not being here and not talking to me and not answering my letters’ is probably a sign that things are not great. So I’m going to keep writing, if that’s okay with you. The whole thing was her idea, and Mum thinks it’s great, but I’m pretty sure if Dr Lim told me standing on my head and reciting the alphabet backwards while playing the tambourine would help manage my outbursts, Mum would be down at Billy’s Music Hub buying the whole percussion section at the first opportunity. She trusts everything every person with a professional title tells her. She trusts everything she reads on Google. She trusts too much.
Mum was waiting in the car when I finished up with Dr Lim and she was blasting that Adele song she likes, but she wasn’t singing. Who doesn’t sing to Adele? She asked if I’m still happy with Dr Lim, and I said I am.
Dr Lim and I have a shorthand that makes talking to her easy. It would be exhausting to go back through everything from scratch with someone new. When I started seeing Dr Lim I felt so overwhelmed talking about myself I cried for the first three sessions, with no real reason to be crying. As you know, I didn’t have a traumatic childhood or anything. Our childhood was about as excruciatingly normal as they get. She probably assessed me as emotionally unstable because of all the crying, and she treated me like a sick old lady for a while. Finally, after three visits, I explained I didn’t ever cry when I was upset, only as a reaction to being overwhelmed or frightened, and our sessions have been much better since then.