Chapter 18: Catastrophizing

September 19, 2013

I'm never getting better. I feel like I spent the last six months climbing my way out of a deep, dark hole, and I just lost my grip and fell all the way back down to the bottom again. It's hopeless. I don't know if I even want to try anymore.

Tessa squeezed her eyes shut to block out the words she'd just written in her thought journal. Hopeless. What was the point of writing it down? What was the point of any of her therapy exercises? It only seemed to make her feel worse.

She had to try though, right? Just keep going. Keep writing. It didn't even matter what it said. Just fill up one page, so she had something to show for herself at the next therapy session. Then she could go back to sleep.

Tessa put her pen back to the paper:

I could've dealt with losing one or the other, but both of them? In the space of four days? How am I supposed to deal with that? There's nothing left. I have no other coping mechanisms. None. All I want to do is sleep.

What would Dr. Regan say when she read this, Tessa wondered. She closed her eyes again and tried to imagine her therapist's voice.

"I hear you saying you feel hopeless. Do you think it's possible that you're catastrophizing?"

Catastrophizing. Tessa remembered when Dr. Regan first explained the concept: a form of distorted thinking that made problems seem far more insurmountable than they truly were.

"Try to take a step back and look at the problem critically," she could hear Dr. Regan say. "Is there anything in what you wrote that might be an exaggeration?"

Tessa shook her head. She remembered how she'd argued back at the time, her voice rising in agitation.

"It's not catastrophizing if it's actually a catastrophe! A real catastrophe. Sometimes horrible things actually happened. You can't just pretend like they didn't!"

"No," her therapist had answered calmly. "I'm not asking you to pretend that something didn't happen. But I want you to look for something in what you're saying to me that might be a negative distortion. Even something minor - some detail. Try to look for the distorted thinking and build on that . . . ."

Tessa took a deep breath to settle her nerves. OK. Catastrophizing. Maybe she was catastrophizing. "Look for distorted thinking," she murmured under her breath, as she reread her journal entry once again.

"There's nothing left," she'd written. "I have no other coping mechanisms. None."

That wasn't completely true, she supposed. Writing in her journal was supposed to help her cope, right? Although it didn't seem to be helping much at the moment. What else? There was music. At least she still had that. Even if it turned out she didn't have a single person in the world who actually cared about her, at least she still had Eric Thorn. She could close her eyes and listen to his voice, and try to imagine him singing just to her.

She could do it for hours, if she let herself. Just let reality fade into the background and daydream about Eric and his songs. So what if it was just projection - all her little fantasies about some celebrity's innermost thoughts? At least it made her feel better. It took her mind off her own problems. For a little while.

"Projection can be quite useful," she recalled Dr. Regan saying to her once. "As long as you recognize what you're doing."

Tessa flipped her journal closed and plugged her earbuds into her phone. She pulled up her Eric Thorn playlist and set it to random shuffle. "Talk to me, Eric," she whispered, closing her eyes. "Tell me a secret. Tell me what's going on with you."

As if in answer to her request, she heard his soft, smooth tenor singing the opening verse of his latest single: Aloe Vera.

We lingered on your terrace.

I drank up all your wine.

You said, baby take your clothes off.

Get rid of those tan lines.

I fell asleep to the sound of your voice

Whispering to me. . . .

Tessa let out a sigh as her mind drifted. What was this song really about, she wondered. She had a pretty good idea.

The other fans all went crazy for the part about taking his clothes off, of course. She'd seen the videos on Instagram when he performed it live. He used the same stage move every time, and the rest of the lyrics tended to get lost in the screaming. He always started his set wearing a loose-fitting hoodie sweatshirt, and when he got to "baby take your clothes off," he would peel off the top layer to expose the undershirt beneath - the sleeveless kind, that showed off his biceps and clung to his pecs.

Tessa felt her face heat up now, just picturing it. She could say one thing for Eric. The boy definitely knew how to work a crowd. Still, she felt like it was a distraction - that whole striptease act of his. The song was about more than just getting naked. Maybe she was projecting, but she felt certain there was more to it than that. It was about exposing yourself - trusting someone enough to let down your guard and fall asleep beneath their watchful gaze.

The image sent a shudder down the full length of Tessa's spine. She squeezed her eyes shut to block out the memory that had just popped into her mind, unbidden. It was another trigger of hers. Maybe the biggest trigger of all, that one. It was the reason she made a point of locking her bedroom door every night before she switched off her light - and why she sometimes felt compelled to double check the lock two or three times before she felt safe enough to let sleep overtake her.

But she'd forgotten to check the lock four days ago. She hadn't intended to fall asleep like that, in the middle of the afternoon. But she'd been feeling sorry for herself. Depressed. She'd still been reeling from the last conversation with Taylor.

Why is a guy tweeting about Eric Thorn?

She hadn't seen it coming. That was the worst part. She'd thought that she'd finally made a friend - another girl just like her. Someone who shared the same interests and hopes and fears. Someone she could let her guard down with and trust. She'd even entertained the idea of telling Taylor about what happened at college last spring.

But it had all been an illusion. Tessa saw that now. She'd seen in Taylor what she wanted to see, not what was really there.

A guy.

That was the reality. Just another guy, trying to hit on her. How could she have missed it? It seemed so obvious now, when she went back to look at their conversations. He'd been flirting with her non-stop for weeks.

All guys like girls with size 7 ½ feet. . . .

Take it all off, baby. . . .

That selfie was pretty smokin' hot. . . .

He hadn't been particularly subtle, had he? And yet she hadn't seen it coming. She'd been totally blind-sided by the words that still made her cringe even now, just thinking of them:

Wait... Tessa, you do know I'm a guy right?

She'd wanted to feel angry afterward. She should have been furious, right? He'd tricked her. He'd pretended to obsess over Eric just as much as she did. Whenever she quoted a song lyric at him, he never failed to respond with the next line. So of course she'd assumed he was a girl. She knew the types that made up the Eric Thorn fandom, and they didn't include any heterosexual males. Was it all just an elaborate pick up line then? He'd studied up on his Eric Thorn trivia, and then he used it to weasel his way into conversation with unsuspecting female fans?

Well, if that was his MO, she had to to give him credit. She'd fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

And the worst part was, she couldn't even really feel mad afterward. Only sorry for herself. Abandoned. Alone. Locked away once again in solitary confinement. How pathetic was that? She actually missed him. Not that she missed the sketchy guy hitting on her, but she missed the friend she thought she had.

After she unfollowed him, she'd sunk down into the bed with the covers over her head, so depressed that she'd fallen asleep in the middle of the day. So depressed that, for once, she hadn't bothered with her usual precautions.

Which was why her phone had been sitting on her pillow that day, face up, when Scott finally turned up for a visit.

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{Congratulations to thunderflash1, the lucky winner of my giveaway from the Wattpad Block Party Summer II edition. This chapter is dedicated to you!}