Dear ten-year old me,
You’re not getting therapy anytime soon, and eventually when you see some in your twenties they will all be meh or suck—one will forget who you are (multiple times!) and then die in a house fire, two will just want the gossip about your past two weeks, and the other two will say you look happy and send you home ignoring the list you gave them of all your fears and the way they wreck your body—so I’m your therapist now. I can’t help you with your introversion, sorry. That’s going to take you years to work on. I also can’t help you with your loneliness. You’re going to feel alone regardless, you little loser, because you love listening to the devil in your head. But I’ll leave you with a little insight to start mulling over: I’m the devil in your head. Boo! The devil is an irrational us who loves to make us panic because he thinks it’s funny and because he genuinely believes the world is ending.
Anyway, here is me putting my therapist hat on, and as your therapist I say you can work on your fears if you break them down into bite-size chunks. Next week we can talk about Chucky, maybe the month after we can attempt to tackle The Passion of Christ, but today let’s talk Mars Attacks! Your mom keeps it in the basement because the movie terrified you when you watched it. As your therapist, I need you to go down there and bring that VHS tape up into the living room. Cry all you want, but do it anyway. Don’t be weak. No, I won’t be gentle with you. You have your mom for that. If she catches you crying, she’ll probably hide the VHS in a different spot in the basement, but I’ll make you go down there and get it again. Rewind the tape. Insert it in the VHS player and watch it with your tears and runny nose and shaky hands. From beginning to end. Over and over. Watch it. Keep watching it. This movie is the least of your worries.
If the therapists I’ve seen were better or, at bare minimum, cared that I wanted help with anxiety, they may have suggested this approach to confront my fears. Do the thing—in your case, watch Mars Attacks!—over and over until the devil in our head can’t haunt us anymore. Exposure therapy, or something like that. Try and try and try until you finally believe that whatever the thing is won’t cause you any harm. And guess what you cry baby, those big headed aliens on screen won’t be hurting you. If aliens have visited Earth, you and I have yet to encounter one, so whatever thoughts are running in your head—aliens bursting out of your gut, aliens skinning you open, aliens decapitating you and screwing your head onto the body of a chihuahua—aren’t going to happen. I promise. And I also promise this: I will find a way to send paper aliens back in time to haunt you until you confront this small, dumb fear. I’ve spent over a hundred hours folding over a thousand aliens, and I’ll spend another hundred hours folding another thousand aliens and keep sending them to you if you don’t watch the damn movie and see there is nothing to be afraid of.
I know you’re afraid. I know you’ve tried asking for help and it hasn’t worked out—and, sadly, you’ll keep seeing more of that. So do what I could have done more of (but was too afraid of) and keep asking for help despite all the rejection and disappointment. Someone will eventually listen. And if they don’t, I promise that you will eventually start listening to yourself. Be your own hero. Until then, expect some aliens in your mail to haunt you unless you do something about it.
From your #1 supporter (and sometimes #1 hater),
Moisés
P.S. You think the pretty blonde woman (who is #spoiler actually an alien) is pretty not because you are attracted to her, but because you are gaaaaay and you want to be her, but we’ll talk about that some other time.
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