The therapist asked me what I don’t like about myself.

I laughed, and replied: “You’re kidding, right?”

He smiled and cocked his head to the left. “No, I’m not. I’m serious. Try to think of what you don’t like. What would you change if you could?”

I rolled my eyes and stared past him through the window behind his head. “It’s not that I can’t think of anything. It’s that there are too many things I want to change. So many,” I said.

“Here,” he said, handing me his yellow tablet and the blue pen that he always kept clipped to it. “Try writing them down, then.”

I picked up the blue pen and clicked it in my fingers. “You’re serious?”

He smiled widely and leaned back in his therapeutic red chair. “Completely.”

“Okay,” I said, nervous to begin. “I don’t know where to start, but I’m really anal. I hate that about myself. It is almost like a form of OCD.”

“Then write that down,” he said.

I did. Ink spilled out onto the dyed paper and I wrote: 1- I have weird OCD problems. Then I wrote the number two underneath that. “Uh, I’m really paranoid.”

“Good,” he said. It was unusual to see him without his tablet- he didn’t scribble anything down, he didn’t nod and then retreat to his pen while he judged me in his mind.

After writing the second thing down, I continued. “Oh, I got another one. I’m always afraid people are judging me.”

“Mhm. And what does that make you?”

“What?”

He leaned forward and clasped his hands together. “If you always assume people are judging you, what are you doing to them?”

I thought for a moment and clicked the pen in my hand. “Oh. Judging them.”

“Yes,” he said. “Good. If you judge someone because you think they are judging you, you become the judging. It’s a common law in physics. The observer affects the observed.”

I twiddled the pen in my hands. “Really? The observer affects the observed? Hm.” I picked up piece of fake fruit from the coffee table between us. “So then you are saying that by looking at this pear, it changes from what it was?”

“When you weren’t looking at it, yes. But, we can’t prove that. This kind of stuff is more on an atomic level.”

“Oh, atoms?” I said, placing the pear back in its bowl with the plastic bananas and grapes.