By Annie Przypyszny

Sometimes, when we have spare time at the end of the session, we beg Dr. Miller to let us ask questions about what it’s like to wield the PhD. Do patients ever fall in love with their therapists? She says it probably happens. Do therapists ever fall in love with their patients? She says it probably happens but is highly unethical. How do shrinks in LA manage to keep cool around celebrity clients? Perspective, she says. They’re aware that everyone’s just a person. Sometimes I don’t feel like a person. Or at least I don’t feel like an adult. This is a group for adults who aren’t adults yet, each of us dangling in the unsure space between clinging to our past safeties and wanting to let go of them, slip straight off the curve of the world we love too much, cannonball into a rip current to see if there’s really such a thing as drowning. Within this unsure space we validate each other. I complain that my mother has a martyr complex, and Devin agrees, knowing only my version of her. Lee says he feels pressured to reconcile with a friend who treated him like shit and I say, you don’t owe him anything. It’s that ‘us against the world’ mentality that sometimes leads to the formation of cults, but we keep our boundaries, even if we joke about breaking them. We’re gonna start a Podcast, we tell Dr. Miller, call it ‘HIPAA Violation.’ Speaking of which, here’s my latest aphorism: the people whose failures you relate to the most are the people whose last names you aren’t allowed to know.

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Annie Przypyszny is a poet from Washington, DC, pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Maryland. She is an intern at the DC Writers Room and a reader for Bicoastal Review and Barely South Review. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Bear Review, The Emerson Review, Grist, Sugar House Review, Tampa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Shore Poetry, Soundings East, Poor Yorick, Hellbender Magazine, and various other journals.