I was working as a therapist when the pandemic hit. It had taken a lot to get there - not just years of grad school and a year-long unpaid practicum, but overcoming addiction and working through my own mental health issues as well.

I was pretty well settled into my job. I’d been doing it for about two years. I liked it. I was good at it. I was still new and had a lot to learn, but I believed I would get better and better over time.

I was not prepared for how bad the pandemic would be on people’s mental health. I worked with an especially vulnerable population, and all my clients fell into crisis at the same time.

Clients who’d been sober for months starting using meth again. Clients who’d left abusive relationships went back to their exes. Clients who’d been sleeping well and feeling relatively calm started having night terrors and panic attacks.

Typically, only some clients are in crisis at any given time. For a counsellor, this is manageable. But I was never trained for all my clients to fall into crisis at once, overnight.

My supervisor told me this was an unprecedented situation. She told me it was ok if I was struggling, to do my best. She had been a therapist for 20 years, and she said even she was struggling.

I felt scared. If she was struggling, how was I supposed to manage? I felt unequipped to handle the challenge. But I didn’t think I could just quit. How could I abandon my clients at their most vulnerable moment? No. I wouldn’t leave them.

“You don’t have to be perfect,” my supervisor told me. “You just have to help people as best you can.” So I tried. I did my best. And it was hard but it seemed to be going ok. Then one of my clients took her own life.

I have no words to describe the horror of this experience.

My supervisor and I had just done a suicide assessment on her case. We determined she did not meet the criteria to breach confidentiality. Legally, I was not allowed to alert anyone to my concerns.

We were closely monitoring her situation. I thought we could help her. I thought she was going through a rough patch brought on by the pandemic, that she would adjust to it, that she would get through it. But she didn’t.

When she died I gave my one month notice at work. None of my clients knew what had happened, and they were distressed by the abruptness of my leaving.

“Oh no,” one of my clients said. “Please don’t go. You’re the best therapist I’ve ever had. You’re the only one who’s ever got it. You’re the only person who never made me feel ashamed for doing sex work.”

I told my clients I was moving on to another opportunity. They asked if they could still see me privately. “No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I wanted to say, “I want to help you. I want to help you more than anything. But if you stay with me, you might die.”

I thought about Allie every day. I couldn’t stop picturing her eyes, imagining the sound of her voice. She was with me in the grocery store. She was with me in the shower. She was with me in bed. She was with me when I tried to eat.

I started drinking heavily. I started to daydream about how I could get my hands on some benzos. Just a few. Just five pills maybe. Ten tops. Just to get me through this.

I started to have flashbacks to all the most upsetting moments of my life. The sexual assaults. The scooter accident. Every break-up I’ve ever gone through. The cruelest words my mother ever said to me.

Everything in my life started to seem frightening and unmanageable. Simple, everyday tasks became difficult. I felt like I was reverting to my teenage self, then my child self. I felt helpless, useless, wretchedly vulnerable.

After three months or so, my friends and family started asking me when I would go back to work. “Are you mad?” I wanted to ask. “People die under my care. I am an unsafe person to be around. I need to be locked away.”

Instead, I said “I don’t know yet. I need a bit more time.” And then I started to put more energy into pretending to be fine. Three months had passed and everyone seemed to think I should be better, so I tried to act like I was better. But I wasn’t better. I was getting worse.

I didn’t tell any of my friends or family that I started a blog about how I was feeling. To an audience of hundreds and then thousands of people, I wrote about all my most horrible memories, my worst fears, my deepest insecurities, my wildest longings and dreams and fantasies.

I wanted to solidify my identity as a crazy person. I wanted the whole world to know I was mad.

My blog got picked up on a gossip website. People tweeted about me. I got sent screenshots of mean things people said about me in private chats.

“That girl is mentally unstable,” one person wrote. “Can you believe she ever worked as a counsellor? I don’t believe it. I think she’s lying.”

I felt sick to my stomach reading that comment, but I nodded and thought to myself, “yes, I am unstable. I am very unwell. I can never work as a therapist again.”

Phone in hand, I started to rock back and forth a little bit as I thought, “this is good. I need to be kept away from people. Everyone needs to know I am mad. It’s the only way to keep people safe.”

Some months have passed now. A story came to my mind today while I was out on a walk. I had been thinking about Allie, and then I imagined a character. The character is a surgeon.

The surgeon has just lost her first patient on the operating table. “How could this happen?” she thinks. “I did everything right. I followed every procedure I was supposed to follow. My supervisor was looking over my shoulder the entire time.”

She goes home and rocks herself to sleep. She tries to act like she is fine but she is not fine. She is distraught.

She develops a condition where her hands won’t stop shaking. “I can’t do surgery anymore,” she tells everyone. “I’m sorry. My hands won’t stop shaking.”

Every time she thinks about performing surgery again she feels like she is going to throw up. “No, I can’t do it,” she says. “My patients might die. I can’t risk it.”

Some months pass. She misses being a surgeon. It felt good to help people. Her life had meaning. She liked the job security. She liked the prestige. She was always proud to tell people what her job was. But whenever she thinks about doing surgery again, her hands start to shake.

She is no longer distressed by the shaking. In fact, it brings a sense of relief. “At least I know my hands are still broken,” she thinks. “It would be a disaster to find that out during surgery.”

But there isn’t anything wrong with her hands. Her fear of hurting anyone is so great that her mind has made her hands break. She has created a situation in which it is impossible for her to ever perform surgery again. In her mind, this is the only way to protect people.

She does not keep in touch with any of her surgeon friends. She does not try on any of her surgeon clothes. She never walks by the hospital anymore. She stays at home in her pyjamas instead. She spends her time talking to new friends that she has made on the internet.

It has been about eight months since Allie died. In the grocery store yesterday I saw someone who looked just like her. My heart started to beat a little faster.

Maybe this has all been an elaborate ruse. A misunderstanding. Maybe Allie is still alive. Maybe she is standing right here in front of me trying to pick out the perfect avocado.

I start to think about what I will say to her. I decide I will go up to her and shake her and yell at her. “How could you do this to me?” I will say. “Do you have any idea what I went through? Why didn’t you just tell me you didn’t want to see me anymore?”

But the woman in the store was not Allie. I stared at her until she looked straight at me, and then I was sure. There is no misunderstanding. Allie is dead. I saw the Facebook posts from her sister. I saw the GoFundMe page set up by her friends.

Allie’s death will be with me for the rest of my life. My failure will follow me everywhere I go, infect everything I touch, poison everyone I meet.

My supervisor said, “you did everything right. You did everything I would have done. Sometimes your best isn’t enough. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. I can’t stress this enough: I would have done exactly what you did. We can’t help everyone, no matter how hard we try to.”

But I don’t believe her. I refuse to believe that we couldn’t have done more for Allie. That I couldn’t have done more.

It fills me with rage that I am still here and she is not. That I breathe and she does not. That my heart beats and hers does not. That I sleep and wake and walk and eat and cry and laugh and she does not.

Since her death, a great insecurity has overtaken my life - that I contribute nothing to the world. That my existence is a waste of oxygen. That I don’t deserve to live. That she should be here instead of me.

I have developed an obsessive belief that the only way to honour Allie’s memory is to make my life “worth it.” I don’t know what that means though. Somehow, I need to find a way to prove to her that it’s a good thing I’m still here.

But every day I wake up and feel like I’m failing. I talk to her sometimes. In the shower. In the grocery store. In bed. “You should be here,” I say. “I wish I could trade places with you. I would die to give you your life back.”

The pressure to prove my worthiness to live has become overwhelming. “I really don’t deserve to be here,” I think. “There is no point to my existence.”

Because I am overwhelmed, I am unable to draw on any of my coping skills. The skills I spent years learning and practicing. The skills that would really help me. The skills I used to teach others. And so I stay in that reverted state. That teenage state. That child state.

“I am unwell,” I think.

I think about the surgeon. About how there was nothing wrong with her hands. About how her mind made her hands shake because she was trying to avoid going back to the operating room.

“What if there is nothing actually wrong with me?” I start to wonder. “What if I am doing this to myself? What if I am driving myself insane on purpose? What if I could choose to stop?” Then, “No. You are unwell. Hide away. Stay away. You are a danger to everyone around you.”

In my isolation I have been lonely, so I have tried to pray. I have tried to reconnect to the being I was taught would never leave me, never reject me. A being who doesn’t rely on me. A being who doesn’t require anything from me.

But every time I close my eyes to pray, I see Allie’s face, and I am frightened.

Her lips tremble. Her face looks drawn. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she says. “I’ve lost hope.” I see myself talking to her. I hear myself say, “but you’re still here. That tells me you have hope. What would it be like to explore that part of you that still has hope?”

On my knees praying, I clasp my hands together and start to cry. “I said the wrong thing,” I tell God. “Please let me do it over again. Please, God. Please let me try something else. This can’t be the way it ends. Please, God. I need another chance.”

It is silent in my room except for the fan I turn on at night for white noise. There is a sense of warmth. A sense of light. A sense of being heard, held. But it is not enough. I did not get what I wanted. Even after everything I said, there is no change. No response.

I am too tired to keep begging so I say the Lord’s Prayer instead. The only prayer I know by heart. The only prayer I don’t have to think about. I say it over and over and over again until I feel calm.

Then I get up off my knees and crawl into bed and fall asleep with the light on.

I’m sorry Allie. I will try to make my life mean something.