Sleeping Snakes and the Lake

‍It was a warm June afternoon. I was in my new therapist’s carefully curated, sunlit room. It was our first session. After I had given her an outline of my cancer story, and she asked me when it was, I had started to feel well.

I groped for an answer I knew wasn’t there. I stared at the window, as if the answers to this question were hidden somewhere in the white venetian blinds. They were not. The truth, I quietly realized, is that I had not been feeling well, had not been living well. When I went back to work full time two years ago, I gave everything I had—and more that I didn’t, to my work, grateful to be alive. Ignoring my body. I had recovered enough to function. But four months ago, I started having debilitating panic attacks at work.