Page 57 of Hello Stranger

“I’m saying you’re in an adjustment period.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Go easy on poor Joe. And go easy on yourself. You can’t entirely trust yourself right now. Your senses are out of whack. Your brain has a lot going on.”

“No argument there.”

“You’re going to make mistakes for a while until you adjust.”

“What kinds of mistakes?”

“Things like not recognizing your sister—”

“Stepsister,” I corrected.

“And not knowing familiar voices. And falling in love at first sight with your veterinarian.”

“I don’t think we can call meeting the love of my life a mistake, but okay.”

But I wondered.

Was Dr. Nicole right? Could I not trust myself?

It was a strange thought. Who on earth could you trust if not yourself?

“Be patient with yourself,” she kept saying.

What did that even mean?

Everybody kept telling me to wait, let the edema resolve, get some rest, see what happened. But I didn’t have that kind of time. I had to get my portrait painted for the show. I couldn’t just watch my whole life fall apart and not try to do something about it.

Then she glanced at her watch, so I glanced at my phone. We hadtwo minutes left in the session. Time to wrap it up. “The point is,” Dr. Nicole said, “you’re still adjusting. You have to allow for confirmation bias.”

“What’s confirmation bias?”

Dr. Nicole paused for a good definition. “It means that we tend to think what we think we’re going to think.”

I added all those words up. “So… if you expect to think a thing is true, you’re more likely to think it’s true?”

“Exactly,” she said, looking pleased. “Basically we tend to decide on what the world is and who people are and how things are—and then we look for evidence that supports what we’ve already decided. And we ignore everything that doesn’t fit.”

“That doesn’t sound like me,” I said.

“Everybody does it,” Dr. Nicole said with a shrug. “It’s a normal human foible. But you’re doing it a little extra right now.”

“I am?”

She nodded. “Because your senses are off. It’s harder for you to collect solid information about the world around you. And because you’ve experienced trauma, you’re on high alert for danger.”

No argument there.

“So,” I said. “If I think everything is terrible, then everything will be terrible?”

She nodded, like,Bingo.

“But I do think everything is terrible.”

“In the wake of a difficult time,” Dr. Nicole said then, sounding more than ever like the calm voice of reason, “as you try to readjust to a new normal—”

---