“What do you want to talk to me about?” she asked forcefully. “Because there isn’t anything I want to talk about.”
“Then let’s find something you do want to talk about,” she said.
Melissa stared at her nonplussed. “I don’t know what that would be.”
“Any hobbies?”
“Not anymore,” she said. “Not for a long time.”
“Why did you join the navy?”
“Because I didn’t have a family or a home, only one friend, and I was looking for a way to identify to the world around me.”
“Interesting. Why navy? Why not army? Why not air force?”
“I love water,” she said with a shrug. “I knew a couple people who were going in, and I thought it was a good idea at the time.”
“Any regrets?”
“Nope,” she said. “It’s just now I feel I’m at a crossroads again, and I don’t really have anywhere to go. I have nothing pointing me in a specific direction.”
“You’re talking about your future?”
“Yes,” she said. “It just seems like I’ve hit the end of the road, and I don’t know what’s next.”
“Do you have to have the answer to that right now?”
“I hope not,” she said, “because then it will feel as if I’m already going to fail.”
“I don’t think failure is really an option here,” Dr. Sullivan said a nod. “We’re much easier to get along with than that.”
“You are. I’m not sure if I am though,” Melissa admitted. “It seems like I always expect more out of myself than others do.”
“I think that’s a common human problem too,” she said. “We’re always much more critical and harder on ourselves than we are of others. And then we take what other people say and twist it around so it makes it look worse for us. When really the comment was just that, a comment.”
“I don’t think I have so much that problem,” she said, “but I’ve always had trouble fitting in. Part of the reason why I went into the navy, I think I was looking for that brotherhood we hear so much about. I was looking for a family.”
“Did you find it?”
Melissa sat back, wondering at the answer. “I’ll say no,” she said. “I found a friend group, but they weren’t a family.”
“And you got along with each other?”
“I think we did fine, but it didn’t become that same closeness that I had hoped for.”
“Did you see others forming those kinds of groups?”
Melissa nodded emphatically. “That I did,” she said. “And again, that left me feeling left out, as if I’d done something wrong, or I wasn’t quite enough, or I hadn’t quite enough skills or the right personality or something.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“How it makes anybody feel?” she said. “Inadequate.”
“Isn’t it great how we always judge ourselves by our relationships with others?”
“Is that what we do?” she asked.
“Some of us, yes,” Dr. Sullivan said. “If you think about it, if you had formed that friend group, you would have seen yourself as a success. But because you, in your mind, had something very specific that you could see as being a triumph, yet didn’t achieve it, then you felt like you were a failure. And it may not have even been you who was at fault. It may have entirely been that nobody there clicked with you. So it wasn’t that you did anything wrong but that the whole scenario wouldn’t work, no matter what.”
Melissa sat back, wondering. “I guess,” she said. “I never thought of it that way.”
“And that’s all we’re doing here,” she said. “We’re opening up your mind to thinking about things in a different way.”
She nodded but didn’t say anything, still wondering about her words.
“Do you have any friends who are close?”
“No,” she said, “and none from the navy stayed with me. After my accident, it really did feel like I was all alone.”
“And you’re not the first to say that either because really, when it comes down to it, we’re born alone, then we usually die alone. In between, we hit various milestones, and hopefully we will have somebody walk beside us. And sometimes we have to hit those milestones alone. Everybody has trials and tribulations and troubles that they have to deal with, and sometimes just nobody can help you get through it.
“Some people seem to have more of those in a lifetime than is fair, and others seem to have very little. There always seems to be somebody who has a charmed life, and it seems like they always get the best jobs, the best partners, the best of everything, and they didn’t do anything to deserve it. Whereas others seem to work and work and work and never get anywhere, even though they try so hard. It’s like there is no justice. And sometimes it’s got nothing to do with any of it. It’s just luck. It’s not even fate as much as it’s a throw of a card or a roll of the dice.”
“It’s hard to think that my life became a card toss.”
“Nobody wants to think of that. You always want to think that there’s a reason for everything, and maybe we just don’t know what it is yet,” she said with a smile. “How are the pain levels since you arrived?”
“A little rough,” she said, “but I’m dealing.”
“But that’s what you’re used to doing, isn’t it?” Dr. Sullivan said with a gentle smile.
Melissa nodded slowly. “I guess I am.”
“So,” Dr. Sullivan said, “when are you going to live, not just deal?”
Shane stopped in Melissa’s room later that afternoon to see how she was doing after their first session. She lay on the bed, facing away from him, still in that same awkward position. He frowned at that. He knocked gently on the door and said, “It’s Shane. How are you doing?”
She let her head roll toward him as the rest of her body remained stiff and immobile.
He
