Chapter Text
Violet sat quietly in the waiting room, tapping her foot on and off. The jittery feeling never went away, but the motion of tapping her foot was physically too straining to maintain uninterrupted. The waiting room was pleasantly empty, and Violet was, as usual, about five minutes early. She liked to compensate for her slow transitions by being early.
She was trying not to cave in and reach for her phone. She had confessed something to her best friend that she would rather have kept private, and hadn’t had the guts to check her response.
“Hi!” Ronnie greeted her cheerfully, breaking her out of her head. “How are you doing today?”
“I feel like I’m going crazy,” Violet moaned, slipping into her forearm crutches and slowly standing up. Her therapist filled up a cup of water as she waited for Violet to process the spike in heart rate and drop in blood pressure. They walked back together. Violet could feel her phone burning in her pocket.
“So, what’s going on?” Ronnie asked, stepping out of her shoes immediately and crossing her legs in her chair. She was the only therapist Violet had ever known who actually acted like a person in the office. It was one of the reasons she was willing to try talking with her.
Setting her crutches upright against the couch, Violet wished she could dramatically flop onto the couch instead of slowly lowering herself down. She longed for her body to be as dramatic as her brain. “I told Macey I have a crush on someone.” Violet covered her eyes with her hands. Since she wasn’t in an upright position, she felt like she could get away with raising her arms up. “Why did I do that?”
“Violet, you’re seventeen. I don’t think it’s a crime to like a girl.”
“It’s Jane.” Violet said it quickly, keeping her hands over her eyes in shame.
“Your physical therapist?” Ronnie asked, sounding much more calm than she was expecting. Surely the onslaught of disgust would register soon. “Is that new?”
She stole a glance at her main therapist, trying to catch her acting anything less than professional. “Um. I don’t know.”
“Did you want Macey’s approval or Macey’s judgment? What does she think?”
“I haven’t checked my phone. And I’m not looking for judgment or approval,” Violet scoffed, crossing her arms. “I just told her in a moment of weakness.”
She cringed after saying that, waiting for Ronnie to jump on her word choice of ‘weakness’.
“How do you feel about yourself?”
She exhaled, mulling it over. “Gross. Perverted. Embarrassed.”
“What have you been working on with her?”
“Like, um, upper body stuff. The crutches definitely help, but my shoulders dislocate or sublux all the time, and my wrists are pretty weak. Not to mention my core and posture.”
“I’m guessing you have a lot of physical contact with her,” Ronnie mused. “I know we’ve gone into your struggles with connecting with your peers, and your history of involuntary isolation from others, all due to your disabilities. I wonder how it feels to have someone see you in such a vulnerable state, taking care of you and encouraging you, someone who has become very familiar with your chronic illnesses. I imagine it feels incredibly intimate.”
Suddenly, the squirmy feeling doubled in size.
“Is that something you feel like you’re not getting from girls your own age?”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Violet said. The conversation was going somewhere Violet wasn’t ready to walk into.
“Okay, we don’t have to keep talking about this. But I think this is something important we should come back to when you feel ready. Do you agree?”
She dug her nails into the meat of her palm. Well, dug is an overstatement. Her Ehlers–Danlos made her scar so easily that she wouldn’t dare break skin. She thought about Jane so much, but hadn’t taken too much time to think about why. It almost scared her that Ronnie could dissect her so easily. “Yeah, I guess so. Just… not now.”
“How has it been switching mobility aids?”
“Physically, you know, helps some, hurts some. But people stare at me so much more now. I thought using a cane was bad. At least people are familiar with what canes are. I feel like I grew a second head on my back.”
Ronnie shifted around, probably trying to find a nicer position for her own joints. “How are you handling the staring?”
“When Macey’s with me, she just talks and talks so I can focus on her. But I’m always so aware of the staring. When I’m on my own, I just wish I could shrivel away.”
“How are you coping with your body?”
Violet bit the inside of her cheek, which was chronically bitten open from the Ehlers-Danlos. “Fine.”
“Obviously. Why would it bother you?” Ronnie asked, playing along.
“It’s nothing.”
“Nothing at all,” her therapist agreed.
They sat in silence, something Violet absolutely hated. It always made her break, which was the most annoying part. “I want to punish my stupid body and starve until I’m nothing. I have to do a million pieces of maintenance just to work not even half as well as everyone else. I feel like everyone is judging me, judging how I walk, if I’m limping, if my limbs look out of control. I feel like everyone thinks I’m a healthy person pretending to be disabled. I can’t carry things when I walk. Seriously, I think everyone is evaluating me and they’re all going to agree that I’m faking it. Same old stupid fucking stuff I’m always saying.”
Her therapist let the words hang in the air, giving them space before covering them up with her response. “Some people will be looking at you. But I genuinely think most of them aren’t. The average person just doesn’t know enough about disability to even question anything.”
“Yeah, any words of wisdom for loving a body that needs to be manually operated?” Violet said sarcastically.
“Prepare yourself for the absolutely insufferable lack of satisfaction that comes from acceptance.” Ronnie locked eyes with her.
“What?”
“All you can do is accept it, Violet. It’s the worst possible answer. There’s no satisfaction that comes from it. You can’t change who you are. You just have to find a way to live through it.”
There wasn’t much more time, and the rest of the session ended as usual, with them going over her meal plan. It really had been a miracle to find a therapist who specialized in disability and nutrition. All the other nutritionists she had been to either tried to treat her body like a normal body, or were decent nutritionists but struggled to partner with a therapist in the way she needed. Ronnie told her once that she was told her specialty would be too niche. Clearly they were wrong, given Ronnie works through her own practice.
Violet was about to add a last complaint—she can’t ever look at her phone while walking because she uses crutches—when Ronnie beat her to it. “I’m trying out something new and I think you would like it. It’s a group therapy session for my eating disorder patients with disabilities. Right now it’s just going to be held in the waiting room, Tuesday 7-8. I think you should come. Meet some people.”
“7-8? You work that late?”
“Not usually. But I really think this is going to help people.”
“I don’t know, Ronnie, group therapy? Not my thing.”
“It’s one hour. Just keep it in mind. Let your world get bigger.”