PATIENT & THERAPIST: PATIENT #726

Every now and then I write something that I intend to be part of a bigger story and sometimes its starts with writing it from the middle, rather than a conventional beginning. So instead the story is built around this middle. This story is one of such instances. It's a middle with a beginning or end that I never got to writing:-

PATIENT:           I don’t know. I associate it with my mother. I see it more as her religion than mine. It’s not like I had a choice.

THERAPIST:      But you do have a choice and it’s not exclusively her religion. It doesn’t belong to her. It is the faith of a billion people. And neither does your choice belong to her.

PATIENT:            Yeah… I know that.

THERAPIST:      Is there anything that she does that makes you see it as her religion and not yours?

PATIENT:           Well for one, she uses it to win arguments, but it can never be used to win an argument against her.

THERAPIST:      And you don’t want to be associated with that… and by extension the religion which she uses for that.

PATIENT:           I don’t want to be associated with anything she’s associated with, period! I’d disassociate myself if I could. And then there’s her belief in superstitions, which just goes against the doctrines of what she claims she believes in. I remember coming back home one time from school with one of these traditional wrist-beads I had bought. MY GOD, did she freak out! I think she thought someone gave it to me as a charm.

THERAPIST:      Did you tell her it wasn’t?

PATIENT:           (Silent) I find it amusing that you think telling this woman otherwise would’ve changed her mind. You had to be passive in the presence of an aggressive woman like that. She had to get my father to tell me to take it off, because I refused.