I don’t tell Elise these earlier stories. They are not her fault and they are not useful information for her to carry. But I tell you because the dress cannot be fully understood without them. The dress was not an aberration. It was the accumulation.
## What I Told My Therapist
I have been in therapy on and off for several years, currently on, every two weeks. I told my therapist about the dress situation across probably three sessions, starting with the discovery and ending, months later, with the wedding and the reception and the moment my mother said she had been trying to understand what she did.
My therapist, who is the kind of person who asks the question that reorganizes everything, said at one point: ‘What do you think you were really protecting when you insisted on getting the dress back?’
I gave the answer I had been giving: the labor, the embroidery, the ownership, the consent.
She waited.
‘And?’ she said.
I thought about it. ‘The evidence,’ I said finally.
‘Evidence of what?’
‘That I made it. That the work was mine. That the time was mine. That there’s something I built that can’t be given to someone else without taking something from me.’
She nodded, not confirming or denying, just tracking.
‘I think I’ve spent a long time in my family being the easy one,’ I said. ‘The one who is fine. Who doesn’t need the extra attention. Who will come around. And I think the dress was the thing where I needed there to be a record that I’m a person with things of my own, not just a person who can absorb being overlooked.’