I knew it was over the second she closed her notebook and looked at me like I was a leaking tap she had already tried to fix twice. The room smelled of cheap lavender oil and the kind of silence that only happens when someone has decided they are done pretending. I was still mid-sentence about a pitch that had gone nowhere and a thread that had blown up at half two in the morning. She waited until I ran out of breath. Then she said, very quietly, that she did not think she could keep taking my money if I was going to keep treating the fifty minutes like an extra editorial meeting.
I laughed. It came out too loud for the little room. I told her I was paying her to listen, not to parent me. She did not laugh back. She just asked if I had slept more than four hours any night that week. I had not. I had not even pretended I had. The cherry vape was still in my coat pocket and I could feel the outline of it against my thigh like a guilty secret. I wanted to light it right there. Instead I stared at the box of tissues on the low table and wondered how many other women had sat in this exact chair and promised they would try harder next week.
That was eight months ago. I have not booked another one.
It started because my GP got fed up of me turning up with the same complaint. Heart racing, hands shaking, the kind of tired that sleep does not touch. She wrote the referral like she was signing a death certificate for my excuses. I remember sitting in the waiting room the first time with my oat-milk flat white going cold in the cardboard holder and my blue nails picking at the rim. The place was all pale wood and motivational posters that made me want to set fire to them. I had worn the same slouchy grey hoodie I live in. My hair was in the messy bun that never stays messy on purpose. I told myself I was only doing this so I could write a piece about how even feminists need help sometimes. That was the lie I sold myself to walk through the door.
The first session I talked for forty-two minutes without stopping. I told her about the Coven group chat pinging at midnight, about the way a single rejection email can sit in my stomach like cold chips. I described the exact feeling of watching the likes climb on someone else’s thread while mine sat there looking sorry for itself. She nodded and wrote things down. I thought I was doing well. I thought I was being honest. What I was actually doing was auditioning for the role of Most Interesting Patient. I left feeling lighter, like I had offloaded a rucksack I had been carrying since Basildon. I even bought myself another coffee on the way home and told the Coven I had nailed it.
By the third session the pattern was set. I would arrive ten minutes late because I had been finishing a paragraph in the car. I would sit down still buzzing from whatever I had just posted. I would start with whatever outrage was hottest that morning and then circle back to the fact that I had eaten a banana and two Red Bulls for dinner the night before. She would try to steer me toward sleep or boundaries or the radical idea of turning my phone off. I would nod and then immediately tell her why that was impossible this week. There was always a deadline. There was always a source who might reply at 11 p.m. There was always the quiet terror that if I stopped moving the whole thing would collapse and I would be just another girl from the estate who almost made it.
One Tuesday I turned up after a piece had gone properly viral. Seventeen thousand likes before breakfast. I was still in the clothes I had slept in. I talked about the comments, the quote tweets, the man who had called me a hysterical witch in my DMs. I was grinning while I said it. She asked me how my body felt. I told her it felt like I had won something. She asked again, slower. I looked down at my bare feet on her rug and realised my left leg was bouncing hard enough to shake the table. I had not noticed. That was the first time I saw the look on her face that said she was already tired of me.
Another week I came straight from mum’s. The roast had been perfect, the gravy thick, the Yorkshires crisp. I had sat at the table and let her fuss and for two hours I had not checked my phone once. Then I got in the car and the Coven had seventeen unread messages and a tip about a minister that could not wait. By the time I reached her office I was already drafting the thread in my head. I told her the roast had been nice. Then I spent the rest of the hour explaining why I could not stay longer than Sunday lunch because Monday mornings do not care about family. She wrote something down and underlined it twice. I pretended not to see.
The sessions started to feel like a performance I was failing. I would catch myself mid-rant and try to remember what she had asked me last time. Sleep. Food. One evening without a screen. I would promise. Then I would leave, light the vape on the pavement, and open the notes app before I had even reached the corner. The promises lasted as long as the walk to the station. I began to dread the calendar reminder. Not because the talking was hard, but because I knew I was going to sit there and prove her right again.
The last one happened on a Thursday. I had been awake since 4 a.m. finishing something that needed to go out before the morning news cycle ate it. My eyes felt like they had sand in them. I spilled the flat white on my hoodie in the waiting room and spent the first five minutes dabbing at it with a tissue while apologising. She waited. I launched into the usual. A commissioning editor who had gone quiet. A rival whose numbers I had checked three times before I left the flat. The way the Coven had spent an hour last night arguing about whether a certain columnist was cancelled or just boring. I was laughing at my own story when she put the pen down.
She said she had noticed I never mentioned anything that was not work. Not once in eight months. Not a film I had watched, not a walk I had taken, not a single thing I had done just because it felt good. I opened my mouth to argue and realised she was right. The roast at mum’s counted, but even that I had turned into content in my head on the drive home. I told her that was just how my brain worked. She said that was the problem. Then she told me she thought I needed someone who specialised in burnout, not general talking. She said it kindly. That made it worse.
I sat there with the tissue still in my hand and felt the heat rise in my face. Part of me wanted to tell her she was being dramatic. Another part of me wanted to cry and I hated that part. I asked if this was her way of sacking me. She said no. She said it was her way of being honest. I paid for the session on the little card machine by the door and left without booking the next one. Outside it was raining the kind of thin Hackney rain that soaks you without you noticing. I lit the vape and walked to the overground with my hood up. The cherry smoke mixed with the wet air and I told myself I would find someone better. Someone who understood that some of us are built like this.
I never did.
The weeks after felt strange. I kept expecting the reminder to pop up on my phone. When it did not I felt both lighter and slightly abandoned. I told the Coven I had fired my therapist. They sent laughing emojis and a voice note calling me a chaos goblin. It was easier than admitting she had fired me first. I tried the usual tricks. I ran a bath with candles and lasted twenty minutes before I reached for the phone to check if anyone had replied. I went to mum’s and stayed an extra hour. Then I sat in the car park answering emails with the engine off and the vape fogging up the windows. The imbalance did not go away. It just stopped having an official witness.
Some nights I still catch myself drafting the conversation I would have if I went back. I would tell her about the time I fell asleep on the sofa with the laptop open and woke up to a half-written paragraph that made no sense. I would tell her about the Sunday I spent colour-coding the Notion instead of watching a film. I would tell her I know it is not sustainable and then I would explain, again, why stopping feels like disappearing. I never send the email. I know what she would say. She would ask me what I am so afraid of missing. I still do not have an answer that is not another deadline.
The work has not slowed down. If anything it has sped up. The threads still go out. The pitches still get written at stupid hours. The Coven still pings and I still answer. I eat standing up more often than I sit down. I tell myself this is just a busy patch. The patch has lasted years. Sometimes I think about the look on her face when she closed the notebook. It was not anger. It was the look you give a plant you have watered every week that still refuses to grow the way you hoped. I used to think that look meant I had failed therapy. Now I think it meant I had shown her exactly who I am and she decided she could not change it.
I do not miss the lavender smell or the posters. I miss the fifty minutes where someone else was paid to notice the bouncing leg and the unbrushed hair and the fact that I had not eaten a proper meal since Tuesday. Without that, the only person keeping score is me, and I am a terrible referee. I let myself off every time. I tell myself one more late night will not hurt. Then it is Thursday again and I am staring at the same hoodie and the same cold coffee and wondering how I got here.
Last week I almost booked someone new. I got as far as the website and the little calendar with the green slots. I looked at a Tuesday afternoon that was theoretically free and felt my chest tighten. I closed the tab. I told myself I would do it after the next piece landed. The piece landed. I did not book. Instead I went to Tesco at eleven at night for wine and a meal deal and stood in the aisle under the harsh lights thinking about how the therapist would have asked me why I was shopping at that hour. I already knew the answer. Because the work was finished and the quiet in the flat felt louder than the fluorescent buzz.
I am not proud of it. I am also not sorry enough to change it. That is the part I never said out loud in the room. The rush of a thread taking off still beats the feeling of a full night’s sleep. The identity of the girl who always delivers still beats the version of me who clocks off at six and watches television like a normal person. I know that sounds like an excuse. It is. It is also the truth I kept circling and never quite landing on while she waited with her pen.
So here I am, eight months later, still caffeinated, still ranting, still convinced the next story is the one that will finally let me rest. I have not found a replacement. I talk to the Coven instead. They do not charge sixty quid an hour and they do not ask me how many hours I slept. They just send memes and tell me I am a disaster and then we all get back to work. It is not therapy. It is just what I have.
I used to think ending those sessions meant I had failed at looking after myself. Now I think it meant I finally stopped pretending I was going to become someone else. The work-life thing was never going to balance because I never wanted it to. I wanted the chaos. I still do. I just wish it did not cost quite so much. That is as close as I have got to an ending. The notebook stays closed. The vape still lives in my pocket. And Monday morning still arrives whether I am ready or not.