I will never admit that I needed a therapist.  I was perfectly fine sleeping till 4pm and watching five seasons of tv a week. I’d get up every morning after about eight attempts of reminding myself why being unconscious in bed was much better than facing the day, and would finally leave my room counting down the hours until I could return to the safety of my covers.
So it was in the fall of my grade eight year that my mom decided I needed a therapist. She didn’t decide I was depressed, that was more my doctor. Apparently you can tell a lot from multiple choice tests. Funnily enough it was a lot like school tests. Not sure why that’s funny actually, maybe more ironic? Nah not ironic… Anyway in the summer before school I wasn’t much better. I was probably worse really.  I’d sleep past 4. So, my mom walked me to my doctor’s on a hot day in August and I sat in the same waiting room I’d been in for all my childhood doctor visits. Only this time I wasn’t sick. Or maybe I was. We were going to find out how “sick” I was.

****
I sit down in a room and the doctor, not my doctor, a random doctor I didn’t recognize, asks me the question. This is one that everyone probably knows. It goes like this: “So, howya doin?” Four years of medical school right there. “I’m fine,” I say. Four months of answering that question, right there. She hands me a test and leaves the room. The questions really didn’t beat around the bush at all. “Do you think you are depressed? How depressed are you?” Then it got into the other stuff. “How many hours do you sleep a day?” fourteen. “Do you have trouble eating?” No, I gorge myself. “Do you have trouble making decisions?” I dunno. “Do you find it hard to do small tasks? Are you afraid of change?” And finally, “Do you have suicidal thoughts?” For this one there were four possible answers: a)Never b) Sometimes, but I’d never carry them out c) Often, but I’d never carry them out d) All the time, and I have a plan I would carry out.  I circle b.

After what could have been five minutes or an hour in the confined clock-less room, the doctor comes in and takes my test. She then proceeds to sit down and mark it. A very brief few minutes pass. She announces, “According to this standard test, you are in fact a bit depressed.” I find it funny that the test’s accuracy consisted of “a bit” to “a lot”.

****

It wasn’t hard to get a therapist, it just took a long time considering I talked my mom out of it every day. But when your parents go through a messy divorce, your father’s a stranger and you have to move in with your grandmother who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s, the shrinks tend to throw themselves at you.

  So after school, instead of going to my world of peanut butter and 80s movies safely under the covers of my bed, my mom, brother and I got in the car and went to Delial Youth Services. The whole ride there my mom goes on and on about how close the building is to the subway and how nice it will be for me that I could get there so easily straight from school. I decide silence is the best response.

It’s cold and already getting dark. My mom pays for parking and takes my brother and I into a strange office building with strange lighting and strange smells, that is somehow attached to the public library.  She guides us into a rickety elevator and to a blue doorway with trees painted around it, then through a hallway with a crudely painted wall mural of  a blue night sky and city lights. The waiting room is painted green with more trees, and there’s children’s artwork on the walls and hand-made pillows on itchy sofas. My mom talks to the very bored lady at the desk then sits down next to us. She goes on and on about something but I’m more focused on the young adult girl who’s just walked in with her boyfriend. She’s talking to the lady at the desk about having donated a painting to the office a few years ago, and needs it back. She’d driven down to pick it up. There was a long discussion on who’s property the painting now was and the disappointed girl and her tall boyfriend leave empty handed. I imagined this happening often: the secret underground art hoarding agency of Delial Youth Centers. I don’t like this place.

A young dark-skinned woman with big hair enters the room. She wears heels and a big smile. She introduces herself as Irene or Eileen or something, and asks which of us should go first. My brother, whom my mom had decided was also depressed, goes first. I sit and wait as my mom checks her emails. Eventually he comes back with the same look on his face he always has when he spills his guts to someone, usually when he tattles on me. His face is twisted into a calm but unsettled expression. I’m summoned next.

I drag my feet as I walk down a hall of more paintings; one of a girl crying and looking into a mirror, another with a black ugly side and a pink flowery side battling each other. I get to the smiling shrink’s office.
“Close the door,” she politely orders through her grinning teeth.
“Am I supposed to lie down on the couch for this type of thing?” I ask
She laughs, “You can do whatever you want!”
I want to leave. I sit in the chair.  There isn’t silence for even a moment.
“Howya doin?”
“Fine.”
“Good,” she beams. Her smile is so large and bright I feel the need to cringe in its glare.
“So, what’s going on in your life?”
Stupid question. She knows everything. Whatever she didn’t know in advance my brother had already spilled to her. I don’t want to spill.
“Okay, we’re going to try an exercise,” she says through her bleach-white smile. I picture some sort of drama workshop, like an improv exercise. I imagine what that would look like; “Alright for this scene you’re going to act happy!”
“Come to the table,” she directs.
I slowly lift myself out of the surprisingly-uncomfortable-for-a-therapist’s-office chair and move over to the smooth round table in the center of the room. She sits with her clipboard across from me. On the table is a thin stack of white paper and a pack of scented markers. I don’t like where this is going.
“Take a look at the colours,” she says too nicely, her clipboard and pen poised at the ready to document who-knows-what.
I open the box and spill the markers onto the table; they roll in every direction. She catches them with her hand.
“Now,” she holds up a blue marker, “look at this colour. How do you feel?”
Are you serious?
“How does the colour make you feel?”
I want to take the marker from her and say, “I feel un-depressed! I’m cured!! It’s a miracle!!!”
“Calm” I say. That was the right answer.
“What about this one?”

We go on like this for a while. I try to use the time to extend my vocabulary so as to get something out of this. I use words like “ecstatic”  and “delirious”  to humour her, but she just says, “do you mean happy? Do you mean confused?” and I nod and she nods, then she picks the next colour.

Eventually I start running out of ideas. I can’t reuse the same emotion twice.  If yellow is happy what’s purple? If violet is energetic what’s green? Who knows? Endless exciting possibilities.

“Alright, excellent.” She says, “now I want you to draw something for me, can you do that?”
Well I guess I’m four again.
“Can you please draw me a heart?”
Oh god.
“Use any colour you want”
I think about using the depression black and despair brown I’d labeled moments before just to spite her. Or maybe if I use “Love” pink and “Happiness” yellow she would finally let me go. I choose a mix of the two, slowly picking up the strongly scented pink and brown markers and scribble randomly.

“Excellent!” she smiles, “Now I want you to tell me why you chose the brown.”
Because this is stupid.
“Because I like chocolate” I went with.
“Oh, but I mean, how does it make you FEEL?”
I sigh dejectedly.

“Happy,” I say. I cross my arms and lean back, trying to find some comfortable position in the rigid chair.

“Good!” Her smile grows even more, stretching her cheeks beyond what nature deemed possible. In her mind she was probably the miracle worker - breaking through children’s pain and showing them the beauty of the world. The room smells like lemons and burned marshmallows and every marker scent you could come up with. After a decade and a half I’m finally released from my confinement, stumbling out of the patient chair and blinking in the harsh light of the waiting room.

“How did it go?” my mom asks eagerly, her finger poised mid-text above her blue rhinestone-covered iPhone.
I consider the epitome of self-realization she expects me to have had in the past hour.

“It was fine.”

We walk out the green, tree covered waiting room, down the hallway with the poorly-painted mural, and out into the darkened parking lot. And leaving behind the world of scented markers and “How do you feel”s , I promptly return home to the bed I had been counting down the hours to see again. Because sometimes, an hour of therapy just can’t give the same happy as peanut butter Oreos and a Patrick Swayzee film.