It was a typical morning. I went through the normal routine: Wake up, shower…starbucks. I will pull on my tight office jacket and my even tighter black skirt, then I will spend two hours in traffic driving to the office in the painfully sluggish stream of idiots in fancy sports cars, who were stuck in the abyss of head-up-your-rear-end that came with corporate workers in high positions. When I arrive at my workplace, I will step out of my Ford Focus and onto my dreadfully high heels, (which are certain to cause joint cancer after a few years) and half-limp, half-drag myself into the office with my double shot peppermint mocha in one hand, and a bulging briefcase in the other, bluetooth headset firmly strapped to my ear, constrictive skirt cutting off all circulation as I mentally prep myself for listening to the whining no-good Bipolar schizophrenics who I ever so proudly called my clients

My name is Annie, and I’m a therapist.

I take my spot at my desk, papers littering the once clear surface. Coffee stains covered most of them, while candy wrappers filled the trash can at my feet. I start up my laptop, and it splutters to life, taking the normal twenty minutes to load every single one of my overcrowded documents, pictures, and videos in every single one of my overcrowded folders. In the meantime, one of my many minions enters the room. I don’t remember her name. All my minions look like little blonde stick figures to me. Rather than bother with names, I have them promptly numbered from 1-22.

“Annie, Mrs. Bella is here to see you.” Says Minion #12, eyes bored and distasteful as she looks upon my overly messy desk. Her perfectly manicured nails bothered me. They were obviously fake, long, and covered in puppy pink….I hated puppy pink.

“Fine, send her in.” I snapped at Minion #12, who’s left eye was twitching with extreme irritation. She clenched her fists, and squeaked as her own perfectly manicured fake nails dug into her palm. I rolled my eyes and snickered at her, shaking my head as she scurried off. I wasn’t sure why I kept Minions around, because they were all exactly like Minion #12: Blonde, snobby, city girls who didn’t know how to work a revolving door let alone file any of my many stacks of paperwork.

After a minute Mrs. Bella walks in, looking flustered. I motion for her to take a seat, and I take out my now fully loaded laptop to start taking notes on the meeting.

Now, my clients have many different stories. All of them are disturbed, and all of them downright stupid. Like Mrs. Bella who is in rehab after crucifying her husband and then proceeding to burn him in some sort of demonic Hades-worshipping ritual often found in her made-up religion of chicken loving bipolar schizophrenics. This I knew to be true because I was at one point, unfortunately, Mrs. Bella’s neighbor. Needless to say I’ve learned to ignore the screaming that tends to happen in the middle of the night. I often spend a lot of my day trying to figure out exactly how she got out of jail. Hence why I now live with my sister in a downtown apartment.

“It happened again.” Mrs. Bella whimpers, crawling her way over to the couch and curling up in a ball. Yup, here we go again. I now get to hear about how her husband’s ghost is haunting her. It takes all of my strength to not snap back and tell her that if she didn’t like being haunted she shouldn’t of killed him in the first place.

“What did he say this time?” I inquired irritably, stabbing my keyboard under my fingertips as I typed up her words.

Mrs. Bella stared at her overgrown, extra-wide feet for a long time, before finally looking up at me with the fakest, most unconvincing look of horror I had ever seen. “He was holding… a cat.”

Okay. Back up. A cat? Alright, so I spent god knows how many years in college with a bunch of professors who were about as qualified to teach as a monkey to listen to a morbidly obese aging widowed lady talk about how her husband (whom she killed in a demonic hell ceremony) was haunting her while holding a cat? What was this modern education system coming to?! All those crappy motivational posters about how your life will be oh-so-much easier after you work your butt off to get into college is a bunch of fully-loaded, worthless, infuriating bull.

I listen to the rest of Mrs. Bella’s story though, more or less. I then proceed to write up a referral to another therapist….or Psych Ward…I can never remember which. Nevertheless, I tell her that I can’t see her again. I can only pray that I am not the next victim of her demonic crucification ceremonies.

I continue to slave over paperwork, clients, and laptop for another nine hours. By the time I’m done, I’ve fired three Minions and now have a painfully large stack of papers and a taunting picture of the “Easy” button that had been taped to my desk as a joke by one of my close friends.

But what sticks out most to me, is a paper taped to my door with a red target painted on it in bright printer ink. Directly in the center of the circle, there are blatantly obvious words in bold font:

“BANG HEAD HERE.”

How tempting.