That Nancy

How I Found My Way Back to the Woman Who First Saw Me

There are many kinds of love: a mother’s love for her child, a husband’s love for his wife, a friend’s love for a friend. The list is endless. I have more love in my life than seems reasonable. But this story is about a different kind of love, the kind that began in an office when one person finally allowed herself to be seen, the kind that refuses to fit neatly into any category.

I met Nancy as a teenager, after anorexia had overtaken my life. I was a tiny wisp of a thing, fueled by hurt and anger instead of food. She was just barely fifty then, though I had no sense of her age. She was simply an adult and, to me, a threat. That was all I knew.

She was my therapist, the one I was forced to see twice a week after my parents sent me to an outpatient treatment center. At first I tried to stonewall her, but I was also desperate for her help. I attached quickly, though I rarely let it show. I tried to hide from her the way I hid from the world. She saw right through my armor to the frightened girl beneath it and waited until I was ready. She showed me the shape of unconditional care before I could speak its language.

When I did attach, I attached hard. I was ashamed of how much she meant to me. I would sit outside her office waiting for my sacred fifty minutes, trembling. I wasn’t afraid to go in; I was afraid of having to leave.

During that fragile time, I poured my feelings into poetry. Most of it was cringey, teenage-intense, and far too revealing to share. One poem was about her, written in the throes of attachment and anxiety. I never showed it to her, but even now, when I look back on it, I can feel the ache behind the words, the longing to be seen, the fear of being left, and the confusion of feeling so much for someone I barely understood.

I never showed her that poem. It felt too risky, too shameful. I never knew how she truly felt about me. Did she care the way she seemed to, or was I just another name on her caseload? The risk of finding out felt too great, so I stayed quiet.

We stopped working together after a year and a half, when I left for college. Before I moved away, she gave me a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit. That book became a guiding light through each of my relapses. Even after our sessions ended, she stayed with me, not just through the story of the rabbit who was desperate to become real, but through what she had given me: her presence, her steady witness, and what I now know was love. It was powerful enough that I shaped my life around it. Long before I left for college, I already knew that one day I would be a therapist. My calling was to help others the way she had helped me.

I went through the next thirty years without her. I thought of her occasionally, but mostly I lived my life. Still, she always occupied a tender place in my heart, even though she was not part of my every day. I graduated from college. I went back to therapy with someone new. I got married. I relapsed. I had two babies. I earned my Ph.D. I started a practice. I relapsed again. I went back to therapy again. I went through loss, had another baby, sent my firstborn to residential treatment, relapsed again, and finally began a slow climb toward health. I wrote a memoir about all of it. It was a busy thirty years.

When I wrote my story, everything felt raw. It was the first time I told myself the truth about me, all of me. One of the most tender parts of the book was the chapter I wrote about Nancy. After all those years, I could still feel the love I carried for her. She had been the first to see me, to know me, and to stay steady. I wanted to find her, to tell her what she had meant.

I didn’t intend to attach to her again, but when I found her, the connection stirred back to life. I reached out, told her who I was, told her about my memoir, and offered to share the chapter she was in. She asked for the whole book. Then she asked if we could talk.

When we finally spoke, my heart knew her voice instantly. I could have been seventeen again, sitting on her office couch, but instead I was in my backyard, forty-seven years old, hearing the same warmth across time and space. She remembered me. Our conversation was easy. I don’t remember the details, only the feeling of being known.

A few weeks later, when I visited my parents, we met for lunch. Thirty years had passed, yet we fell into conversation as if no time had gone by. She remembered details from stories that never made it into my book. I understood that I was important enough to her to remember. We talked for hours, and I left thinking that was it, a beautiful reunion, complete.

But it wasn’t.

Back home, I began publishing my writing online. Nancy became a loyal reader. She didn’t want to join another platform, so I sent my essays to her directly by email. From the beginning, she took her role seriously. I sent her something almost every morning, and our emails became a lifeline between us.

One afternoon, when she called to talk about an essay, I heard her voice again and felt how much it still grounded me. The connection kept deepening. When we saw each other again recently, during another visit with my parents, the hours disappeared. Each time we speak, whether in person, on the phone, or through words on a screen, we peel back another layer of knowing.

On paper, we are different. We are not of the same generation. Our biographies diverge in all sorts of ways. Yet we share a sensibility, a sensitivity, a certain way of moving through the world. Even without words for it, my body knew that long ago. I think that is why she could see beneath my armor back then. She knew where to look.

The intimacy we share now carries its own ache. There is the grief of lost years and the quieter grief of the little girl who didn’t know she could be held like this. There is also the ache of distance, the simple longing to sit across from her, to hear her laugh, to ask one more question and then one more. Loving someone you cannot see often is a practice in grief and a practice in trust.

If there is a lesson in all of this, it is simple: what is woven with love does not unravel. It may thin, it may fade, it may wait in silence for years. But when the thread finds the needle again, the fabric holds. I feel that in my chest every time I think of her.

I do not have a simple name for what she is to me. She is not my therapist. She is not my parent. She is not exactly a friend. She is simply That Nancy, the one who burrowed into my heart decades ago and, against all odds, found her way back.