Since that horrible morning around the breakfast table, we’ve all been circling around one another like one wrong move will send something shattering. We’ve been polite and courteous and quiet and measured and that’s not the family I know AT ALL. That’s been my job, to make myself smaller so they could all be larger than life. And just when finally, finally I was starting to feel like I belong, like I was going to come back from the AM and understand exactly what it was like to be an Atypical Atkinson, slot in right next to Mom, Dad, and Aaron as one of them, take up space, belong, our entire family dynamic gets shifted off its axis. My entire world gets shifted off its axis.

I haven’t stopped falling since that morning and I don’t know what’s going to happen when I hit the ground. I will do anything to not find out.

NOVEMBER 3RD, 2016

I’ll admit to being pretty skeptical about this whole therapy thing—even though I liked talking to Dr. Loving, I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of making it part of my routine. But I guess I have … stuff I need to talk about. And Dr. Bright, a therapist the AM had referred me to but who didn’t seem to actually work for them, was pretty good at getting me to talk. Even if I don’t always tell her the truth.

Again though: a half-truth. A lie of omission. Same thing as telling Emily that I have narcolepsy when in fact I have a superpower. Not telling Dr. Bright about my dad is just like that. It’s not relevant to what we’re doing anyway. She was assigned to me by the AM; I’m supposed to be continuing the work I did with them. Meditating, talking about the particulars of my ability, all of which I’ve found to be surprisingly easy to do with her. She’s a petite Asian American woman with a hard mouth but warm eyes, like she wants to be soft and vulnerable, but is always watching what she says. I can relate. At least she has the excuse of being a therapist.

Everything she’s told me about dreamdivers—that they can occupy other people’s minds, even when they’re awake, that some of them can build entire dreams, entire worlds, whole cloth, that some don’t even go into others’ dreams at all, but places of their own making—she says like it’s completely normal. And I guess maybe it is for her. She’s probably got dozens of clients like me, has been working with Atypicals for her whole career, maybe she’s even Atypical herself.