Early 2020 through early 2021.

Andrea told me she was retiring.

I don't remember the exact session. I remember the information arriving and understanding what it meant — not just that our work together was ending, but that the container that had made the work possible was ending. Those are different losses. The loss of a therapist is manageable. The loss of the specific relational context in which you first learned to say the true things out loud is something larger.

We had been working together for nearly two years. The EMDR had processed material I had been carrying for decades — specific events that had been stored in the body rather than in language, images and sensations that returned during sessions with the particular vividness of things that have been held under pressure for a long time and finally released. I was not healed. I want to be precise about that because the temptation, when describing a therapeutic relationship that mattered, is to imply that the relationship resolved what was unresolved. It did not. But it had changed something. It had made me capable of saying the true things in a room where someone was paying attention, and of watching that person not recoil. That capability — the ability to speak without first calculating whether the room would punish me for speaking — was new. It was fragile. It was worth protecting.

And then the container that had helped me build it was gone.

What I did not expect was what came next.

After the hospital stay in December, a structure of support had been put in place around me that I had not had before. I was connected to HomeLink, which invited me to events at the NC Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health. There were groups, connections, people whose professional purpose was to help with exactly the kind of transition I was facing — from acute crisis back into ordinary life, whatever ordinary life was going to mean now.

An occupational therapist came to my home. This was before masks, before the particular texture of pandemic caution had changed every interaction — early 2020, when the world still moved the way it had always moved, though not for much longer. She worked with me on how I occupied my time. That phrase — how you occupy your time — sounds modest, almost bureaucratic. What it meant in practice was: how do you structure a day when the structures that once organized your life have been removed? How do you inhabit the hours? What gives shape to the morning, the afternoon, the evening, when the work you were trained for is not available to you and the relationships that once anchored your days are gone?

I had a case manager helping with other connections. I also had an intern — a graduate student completing her clinical hours, assigned to work with me for a few months after Andrea's retirement left the therapeutic space empty. She was young and earnest and genuinely present, and she gave me something that has stayed with me longer than most of what I received in that period.

She offered an analogy.

She said that holding difficult things down for a long time is like holding a beach ball beneath the surface of water. You can do it. You can hold it there for years, if you are determined enough and if the alternative feels more dangerous than the effort of holding. But the beach ball does not disappear. It does not dissolve or diminish or become less buoyant with time. It simply waits, pressing upward against your hands, and the moment you release it or the moment your strength gives out, it comes up.

I had already been thinking, in those final sessions with Andrea, about my family. About how long I had been trying to reach them. About the years of calling and explaining and reconfiguring the explanation in hopes that some version of it would finally find an opening. Andrea had helped me see that the opening was not there, had never been there, and that the reaching had been costing me something I could not keep spending. I had been considering, with a clarity that felt both obvious and devastating, that I could not imagine continuing to maintain contact with them much longer. Not from anger. From exhaustion. From the recognition that a relationship which produces only the repeated confirmation of one's own dispensability is not a relationship but a wound you keep reopening.

I don't remember the exact date when contact finally ended. It did not happen in a single dramatic moment. It happened the way some things happen — gradually, and then completely.

What I remember is the beach ball analogy arriving at the same time as all of this, and what it unlocked.

I had been holding things down for twenty years. Not one beach ball. Dozens. Every crisis, every loss, every moment of reaching for my family and finding nothing there, every courtroom, every extradition, every job application that ended with the background check surfacing the record — each one was a beach ball I had pressed beneath the surface and held there while I tried to keep functioning, keep moving, keep building something from whatever remained.

The intern's analogy was intended, I think, as a gentle explanation of why the work was hard, why things kept coming up even after years of managing. She meant it clinically, carefully.

What it produced in me was something more like a vision.

I saw myself standing at the edge of the ocean. Not in a frightening way — just standing there, present. And from the water, beach balls were rising. Not one or two. Dozens and dozens, bursting up out of the waves — each one a moment from the twenty years since Lynn got sick, each one representing something I had held down rather than let surface, because surfacing had never felt safe and because I had not had anyone to surface it with. They were everywhere. They were rising in every direction. They were erupting from the water with the pent-up force of everything that had been held under pressure for too long.

Each ball was something specific. The night in the transport vehicle in chains. The street sheet in the police officer's hands. The courthouse where my lawyer told me what to say. The phone calls to my family from jail when I was terrified. The flat responses. The dining room table they had bought while I was asking for help. The teeth that had been extracted and never replaced. Lynn in the hospital in Chapel Hill, the IV in her arm, and me standing beside her without any idea that this was the beginning of the end of everything I had built. The evaluators who had never asked what had happened in those months. The licensing board. The assessment. The sentence that appeared on my record.

Beach balls. Dozens of them. Rising out of the water all at once, explosively, with a force that was not anger exactly but was adjacent to it — something older and more physical, the accumulated force of twenty years of holding.

I stood at the edge of the water in that image and watched them rise, and I understood something I had been trying to understand for a long time: the weight I had been carrying was not a character defect. It was not evidence that something was wrong with me. It was the physical, measurable, specific weight of what had actually happened — event by event, year by year — and the fact that I had been carrying it alone.

When COVID arrived in March 2020, the world went inside.

For those of us who were already isolated, the pandemic did not introduce aloneness so much as it formalized it. The quiet that had always been present in my apartment became the quiet of a world that had also gone quiet. The groups I had been connected to through HomeLink moved online. I found other groups online — communities of people navigating mental health and recovery and the specific difficulty of being alive in a body that remembered things it wished it could forget.

The occupational therapist's visits ended as the precautions changed. The inperson structure of early 2020 was replaced by the digital structure of late 2020. It was not the same. But it was something.

I kept going. That is the only honest thing to say about it. I kept going because I had always kept going, because the capacity for forward motion was one of the few things that had never entirely deserted me, because I had survived worse and knew, from the inside, that surviving worse was possible.

I also began, somewhere in that period, to understand what a Certified Peer Support Specialist was. The role had a name now, a credential, a recognized professional identity. It was not clinical social work — the conviction had closed that door. But it was something real, something that used what I had survived and what I knew, something that allowed the particular knowledge that comes from having been inside the worst of it to become useful to others who were finding themselves inside their own version of it.

I contacted the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services. They agreed to fund the training.

The training would run into early July 2021.

I had survived the leap into therapy with Andrea. I had survived her retirement. I had survived the pandemic's particular form of isolation. I had survived, again, the thing that had brought me into the hospital in December 2019 — and had come out the other side not healed, not resolved, but something more modest and more durable than either of those: still here. Still capable of deciding, one day at a time, to remain.

The beach balls had risen. I had watched them surface. I had not drowned in them.

That was not nothing.

That was, in fact, the very specific thing that makes a Peer Support Specialist: the knowledge that you can watch the beach balls rise, and survive it, and eventually — carefully, honestly, without pretending the water is anything other than what it is — help someone else do the same.