Nothing Left to Burn [DISCONTINUED]

Chapter 3 - Accepting Help

"Let's just cut to the chase. Here's what's wrong with me." Aven sat in a cozy, if not too-plush couch that she was sinking into, opposite a woman named Kelly who served as the Kingdom's therapist. It had been Kelly's profession for fifteen years before the apocalypse and she easily slid back into the role after being found and brought to the Kingdom months earlier. Her first appointment with Aven started with exchanging pleasantries, but Aven, who had been through more therapists than she could count while in school, skipped straight to the punch when she was given the floor to speak.

"I was kidnapped before all this. Tortured and held for months in a basement. When I escaped, the world had fucking ended. I went home and my brother was a zombie and my mother had killed herself. They were already really decayed so it must have been weeks. I don't know what the fuck happened to my father but I'm sure he's dead." She said it as though she didn't care, her face remaining passive, but it stung inside to recall her family's fate. "So then I did what I guess everyone else did which was suffer through shitstorm after shitstorm. Fast forward a few years and I'm missing what I'm pretty sure is an important chunk of time in my memory. I woke up with a head wound and got shipped here and dropped in the middle of things and I don't even want to be here."

"Why don't you want to be here?" Kelly asked.

"I didn't have much of a choice to begin with," Aven replied. "I would have just left but I needed help and now I'm stuck."

"Why not leave? You needed help when you first lost your memory but what's keeping you here now?" Aven's first thought was I don't know, but she knew there was something real at the core of her depression, something internal that was keeping her in a place she didn't want to be. Afterall, the thought of going back out in the world on her own filled her with dread when she once preferred it, but she didn't know why. So she thought hard for a moment, trying to come up with the answer she knew Kelly was trying to coax out of her. But nothing came.

"I don't know," she finally relented, frustrated with herself. She used to be more mindful of her problems. Even if she couldn't solve them, she could at least identify them and their causes. She used to know herself very well but now she just didn't understand what was going on in her mind.

For the next half hour, the conversation turned to Aven's mental health history, something she was able to articulate well simply because of how well she once knew herself. She talked about how she had social problems when she was younger because she wasn't as expressive as other people, how she'd been diagnosed with depression in middle school and learned from her mother that all the women in their family dealt with it at some point or another, more than a few unsuccessfully. She also talked about her self-harm, and her little brother's anxiety attacks and how she used to hold him while he calmed down. After talking about that subject, she admitted that she'd never had an anxiety disorder before the apocalypse but that she was sure she did now.

"Well, Aven, that would make sense," Kelly validated immediately. "And on the most basic level, that's what's keeping you here. It sounds like you've dealt with your fair share of depression for...what, almost two decades? It's been tough but it didn't keep you from living your life. Anxiety, on the other hand, is something new, something you haven't dealt with. And I don't mean to immediately put labels on what you're telling me but it would be surprising to me if you aren't dealing with some level of post-traumatic stress."

Aven only nodded at the suggestion, non-verbally confirming that she agreed. She was doing a good job of opening up (it was always easier for her in a doctor/patient setting, as opposed to a personal setting), but she didn't want to talk about her flashbacks and the specifics of the torture she endured, at least not yet. So instead the conversation turned to the fact that this newfound anxiety hadn't affected Aven when she first escaped into the apocalypse.