Part VI: Shredded

It wasn’t until almost a year after I had received that text from Dr. Whitlock, that I became obsessed with her words, “10 years…no contact”.

I spent hours researching the Michigan laws surrounding when a psychologist has the right to shred their client’s notes.

I didn’t find anything saying what she did in Michigan was illegal. In fact, you can dispose of files after seven years of no contact. California’s law says psychologists are required to do the following, “retain a minor patient’s health care service record for a minimum of seven (7) years from the date the minor patient reaches eighteen (18) years of age.”

These laws are bullshit. I didn’t even get notice that my notes were going to be shredded. No one ever told me I would never be able to access them again. If only I lived in motherfucking California. 

I don’t know why I became obsessed with trying to find out what she did was legal, because I wasn’t about to sue her. I think that I wanted to feel like it was her fault. I wanted to feel like she was in the wrong. I didn’t want to feel like: if I had just contacted her four years earlier, I would have had my notes or if my growth progressed faster, I would have been ready to read them sooner.

It’s not just that I don’t remember my childhood. I don’t remember anything from high school either. My therapist will bring up things to me like: “remember when you went to homecoming with Evan and –.”

“No, Ronnie, I don’t”, I’ll say on the verge of tears. “I don’t even recall going to homecoming with Evan.”

I used to think my memory was great. I remember being able to recall things others couldn’t—and it was just the traumatic stuff that I couldn’t remember. Recently, that hasn’t been the case. I’m forgetting events that occurred just months ago. I’ll tell my best friend something I thought I had never told her before, and she’ll get a puzzled look on her face before stopping me to politely tell me I already told her. Or someone will tell me something, and when I act like I have no recollection of it, they’ll look a tad concerned before saying “Alyssa, I told you that yesterday.” My family will bring up our trip to Elk Rapids this summer at the dinner table, and how we had dinner at Pearls, and I just nod and pretend that I remember that we went out to dinner on that trip because the fact that I have forgotten embarrasses me far more than it concerns me in that moment.

The day I found out my notes had been shredded, I journaled. I wrote in a word document on my computer about how I felt when I found out they were gone. A year ago, I spent six hours straight trying to find that word document. I didn’t eat, drink, go to the bathroom, or move from the criss-crossed position hunched over my laptop for six hours. I searched all the keywords I could remember in “Spotlight,” checked my downloads folder, looked up countless YouTube videos on how to find a document that disappeared. I searched every single backup on my Time Machine hard drive—even the backups that were before October 29th, which they couldn’t possibly have been on. I searched and I didn’t feel time passing because I still had hope that, maybe, they would pop up in the next folder I clicked on. So, I searched, and I cried, and I searched, and I cried. I thought, you already took my childhood OCD notes away from me—why did you have to take this too? I gave up at 4 am, and continued the next day for another two hours. And to my embarrassment, I still haven’t given up.

I started to tell myself that maybe I never wrote about how I felt—that the document never existed.