Dr. S

NOT IN SESSION

Episode 01:

The ones who help everyone else rarely get asked how they’re doing.

Soft taps of rain gently whispered against the window. Flashes of sudden light disappeared somewhere along the horizon in the night sky.

Then suddenly, without warning, a loud, shattering grumble of thunder rolled somewhere over her house, shaking Silence Nyguen out of the beginning of her night’s sleep.

“This is going to be a long one,” she thought to herself while rubbing her eyes and reorganizing her sheets and blankets in the flashes of lightning reflected through her bedroom window. She had had many sleepless nights before, but this one felt different with the storm.

The room was a disorienting pure black except for the burst of light through the curtains like blinding veins, illuminating objects around the room in sharp, unnatural detail. The bedside clock blinked at 9:17 pm repeatedly as if it had forgotten what time came next.

“Perfect,” she thought to herself as she sat up to turn on the light and correct the time.

“9:39 pm.”

The empty glass trembled quietly, rattling against the night table next to the unfinished notes she had written in spur-of-the-moment thoughts that evening for her new manuscript.

Group Session Concept.

Patient Narratives.

Saturday Pilot Group.

The words stared back at her in half-finished bullet points. Trying to keep her mind distracted from the storm and in the absence of sleep, Silence found herself getting out of bed and wandering around her room, passing by all of the past manuscripts that she had written in her career.  

Gazing at her accomplished journey, she stumbled upon her second published book, “Strong Enough to Suffer.” The irony wasn't lost on her. Silence smiled and pulled it off the shelf to admire her work, thinking maybe her words would put her back in a comfortable place to fall asleep despite the storm. She sat on her bed and opened the book to a familiar chapter she remembered agonizing over to get perfectly right, particularly the beginning sentence of the final chapter.

“Being strong became an expectation instead of a choice.”

She remembered the exact moment she chose that opening line and how she felt it would reach the audience. At that point of pride and clarity, all fell silent again. Silence closed the book and walked over to place the book back on the shelf as if it were another lifetime she had once known.  Forgetting the storm that had awakened her, she lay back in her bed, reassuring her peaceful surroundings before turning off the lights once again and trying to fall asleep.

Ten minutes later.

Another crack of thunder detonated so violently that it shook the walls, and the picture frames seemed to shudder around it.

She woke once again with a gasp and pushed herself upright slowly, heart pounding hard enough to hurt. Desperately trying to slow her breathing down and get a grip on her surroundings once again, Silence turned and reached for the end table’s lamp switch to have some light. She lounged out of bed and headed to her bathroom to splash some water on her face. Before turning on the water, Silence stood in the mirror, gazing at her blank, tired stare gripping her cheeks as if that would somehow reverse her sleep-deprived appearance before her actual wake-up time.

Silence could remember a time when she would get at least six hours of sleep, wake up refreshed, and look as though she had aged backward. Now she was somewhat confused by the face that stared back at her. This was the same face on several magazine covers and needed less time in front of the mirror to be ready. She quietly splashed water on her face and then returned to her bed. Grabbing her notepad, she flipped to a new page and calmly began to write subtle memories she saw for a moment in the mirror:

“Navy colors… colors of white,

I often dream of continuing to perfect my image and to continue this fight.

Life hasn’t always been easy, but service and dedication have always been in the right direction.

Focused on outcomes, every detail is carefully placed for insight.

Generations of integrity and honor filled with might,

Obsessed with words that echoed day and night.

I will be, become what I dreamt of, and reach the wall’s great height,

Cheers are now empty, anxiously overcoming my fear.

Relevance disguised in absent tears.

Commit and find myself from the darkness into light,

Awaken in this trance of distress as I no longer can sleep tight.”

Silence rested her pen down on the pad and set it aside on the bed next to her. Her mind was once again calm, and the exhaustion in her body had set in enough to fall back asleep. She turned off the light and resumed a comfortable position in the comforts of her bed and presumed to be falling back asleep.

Thirty-seven minutes later, rain hammered harder on the roof. Wind clawed at the siding and sent the surrounding trees scraping across the structure of the house like fingernails. Somewhere downstairs, rattling footsteps shook and slammed against her dog’s cage. Lightning flashed again. Lingering longer this time, like pulses of a failing heartbeat displayed against the bedroom door as Silence slept.

Another violent thunderclap sounded as if an explosion had happened close enough to feel in her ribs.  

Silence jerked forcefully awake again. This time, seeing the movie that played before the lids of her closed eyes.  She turned on the light once again and sat up to start writing down her memory of her nightmare into words:

“Lateness never faltered its appearance before the sun could rise,

Inevitably, those fallen catastrophically would lie in their demise.

Ruined streets of fears, scattered below the stripes once earned,

An enormous presence of uniforms wailed in war; some yearned.

Lost in panic, unknowing, my place clawed through my chest,

Weapons, orders, and medic sprints, commands that hesitate in unrest.

Usefulness remained frozen, not from duty but from home,

Blood and soot no longer visible, just ghosts that roam.

Images engrave responsibility in its name,

Wearing related quiet heroes, Silence from whence I came.

Suffocating in Silence, I breathe traumatic air,

Irrelevance. Irrelevant. Worst, exacting care.”

She continued to write the nightmare to calm her lively panic.

The air that seeped through the ajar crack in her screened window smelled of a strange perfume. Wet earth. In it, a faint but unmistakable appeal of freshness. Pausing to find the words to continue her reflections, Silence reached for her remote to find comfort in the television’s sounds and glow.

These nights had become a pattern of restless slumber for her. 

The storm was new.

If there was one thing that would always comfort her in times she couldn’t sleep at night, it was reruns of The Golden Girls. The familiarity of the show reassured her that it was okay to laugh and occasionally get lost in a fictional place. A fictional place she relied on in between her naval duties and other stressful times in her life.

As thunder continued to shake her memories of her nightmare apart, Silence figured that she would once again try to fall asleep with the sounds of Sophia Petrillo and Blanche Devereaux to keep her company. Setting aside her notepad in front of her adjacent pillow, she turned off the end table light and watched a familiar episode that allowed her to laugh repeatedly to a comfortable place where she could fall back asleep.

The night continued with a repetitive motion between the thunder, lightning, and silence, racing thoughts from each nightmare and each aggressive jolt into reality before the dawn of a new day could approach.

The television continued talking to itself in the darkness. The storm had drifted farther away, leaving only scattered rain tapping against the glass.

Sleep was no longer an option.

With a sigh, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and walked toward the bookshelf that occupied the far wall of her bedroom again.

Nine books.

Nine pieces of herself.

Nine different versions of healing she had taught the world.

Her fingers moved across the spines until they settled on the oldest one.

The first one.

The book that had changed everything. The book that made people start calling her Dr. S instead of Silence Nguyen. She pulled it free and sat back on the edge of the bed, reading the carefully selected title, “Invisible Bruises: The Wounds No One Sees.” This was the book that showed the world the stigma of emotional trauma versus physical trauma.  The pages opened naturally, worn from years of interviews, conferences, and readers asking her to sign copies.

Not the beginning.

Not the end.

She began to read the rehearsed epilogue of the book; her eyes were drawn to a specific paragraph.

"People rush to treat a broken bone but ignore a broken spirit. Triggers cannot be healed when they remain unidentified. What we refuse to acknowledge will continue to direct our behavior long after we believe the wound has closed."

Silence, read it twice. Her thumb remained pressed against the page. For years, she had taught patients to identify the thoughts, memories, fears, and environments that activated old pain. She could even explain the process in lectures. She had written about it. She could recognize it in strangers within minutes. Yet sometime between the awards, the speaking engagements, the books, and the endless appointments, she had stopped asking herself the same questions.

The nightmares.

The television.

The need for noise.

The rigid routines.

The exhaustion.

The fear of becoming irrelevant.

The need to keep producing.

To keep writing.

To keep helping.

To keep moving.

“When was the last time I identified my triggers beneath any of it? When did I stop seeing things as symptoms and start calling them discipline?” Silence thought carefully to herself before she closed the book.

For the first time that night, no revelation arrived. Only a question, and somehow that felt worse because the woman who taught thousands of people how to identify their triggers could no longer remember the last time she had identified one of her own.

The alarm clock read 3:42 a.m.

In six hours, her patients would start to arrive looking for answers, and she would begin selecting participants for the first group session of her career. The foundation of what she hoped would become her next book. A book about healing and transformation.

Silence stared at the cover of the book resting in her lap, then set it aside on the bed as she lay back again to capture the remaining hours of sleep she could get.

Out of sheer exhaustion, Silence once again started to dream, hoping to peacefully sleep past the nightmares.

“She stood alone in a long, dark, mirrored way,

Her reflection wore a different face, like night from day.

The steps she took changed her sight,

A Navy uniform, a therapist's white coat, an award-winning author standing before thousands in a fight.

A survivor’s fight with each version; she smiled, successful and complete.

Closer to the mirrors, the faces were gone, and masks remained in defeat.

Perfectly crafted masks stood rigid and wise,

The fearless masks looked fearless before their demise.

Healed at first, then one by one, they began to crack.

Tiny fractures spread to larger ones, falling to the floor,

Reaching toward the nearest reflection, the masks shattered more.

Behind it was another mask.

Another mask, layer after layer, the pieces collected around her feet,

Covered with fragments on the floor’s sheet.

A voice echoed somewhere beyond the mirrors, under what could be seen

"How many masks have you worn so long that you mistake them for your skin’s natural sheen?"

Silence opened her mouth to answer. Nothing came. The mirrors dissolved. The masks vanished. And suddenly the alarm clock exploded into the room.

5:15 A.M.

Silence jerked awake and sat upright in bed. Her breathing slowed, but the dream lingered. She reached for the notebook on her nightstand before the title could disappear. Without hesitation, she wrote four words across a blank page.

The Masks We Keep.

The title felt familiar. She wasn't sure why.