Taming the Street Racer ✔️

51 | all is fair

Week by week, the storms in my soul clear. I see Dr. Bahkta twice a week and she creates a space where I can free myself, however much crying, yelling, and ranting that takes. She never hugs me, but the gentle words she offers to me are soothing enough. Slowly, she helps me to pull a brush through the knots of my life.

It hurts like hell oftentimes, and there are days when I feel like I'm not making any progress at all. Therapy isn't a miracle-worker and Rome wasn't built in a day. But I know I'm healing, nursing painful wounds that I'd ignored for years.

Dr. Bahkta knows everything about mine and Gray's relationship. No matter how often I ask, she never tells me what I should or shouldn't do. All she does is ask me clarifying questions about us, nudging me toward the answer she assures I'm capable of figuring out. She trusts me to make the right decisions in my life, whatever those decisions may be.

After being reminded of the faith she has in me, day by day, I begin to build trust in myself. It's a powerful thing--believing in the strength you possess and the choices you make. It's a powerful thing that I didn't realize I'd been missing all these years.

Dr. Bahkta tells me that my brain is like a forest of trees. Most of the trees are healthy; others are rotted, reaching outward and stealing sunlight from the healthy trees. The trunks of the bad trees are my big issues, and their branches are the thoughts that those issues have given way to.

She emphasized that, in the beginning, it may be hard to decipher whether a branch of thought is connected to a good tree or a bad tree. Everything just looks tangled, and it's impossible to tackle each branches individually. But once we take out the bad trees at the roots—by sorting out my main issues—the bad branches of thought will hopefully go away on their own.

The goal is to gradually remove the rotted trees and eventually replace them with healthy trees. I'm not there yet, but I'm closer than I was a month ago.

I can only hope that Gray is making the same progress as I am. Thinking about the selflessness of what he said to me at graduation, I'm confident that he's changing too. We both owe this to ourselves.

Dr. Bahkta also says that I should pay attention to what thoughts linger as we remove the bad trees. Those thoughts are either healthy ones—now able to thrive now that the bad trees are gone—or very deeply-rooted bad trees that will take a lot of time to get rid of.

At this point, I'm capable of sorting through my remaining branches of thought, deciding whether they're worth holding onto.

Of course, the one thought that still occupies my mind every day is the one thought that I can't bring myself to assess with a clear mind.

But something tells me that no matter how much effort I put into purifying my way of thinking, Gray will forever have a home in my thoughts. If anything, as my therapy sessions go by, our memories together occupy my mind more frequently than before.

When the bad is gone, the good will flourish.

And I think that's answer enough.

I tell Violet and Peyton all this on the soccer field one afternoon. We're laying on the grass, sweaty and exhausted from practicing together, and they're all ears. Laying back, I realize that this is the first time in a while that the three of us have just hung out on the field. The sky is a deep blue, cloudless as I stare up at it. The world feels so clear around me.

Vi takes a swig of my water bottle. "So are you over him or not?" She asks.

"Vi, did you not hear a word that she just said? Gray is a good tree, so she's still thinking about him even as she's un-fucking her shit," Pey explains, throwing a soccer ball up in the air and catching it over and over.