Chapter Text
“I got an interview.”
“Hm?” Krista couldn’t keep herself from sounding surprised.
“I was just looking, like you said, and I saw some things I could apply for. It’s with a non-profit. I’d be writing code to track back revenge porn and try to remove it.”
“You’d be helping people who were sexually victimized.”
“I wasn’t thinking of it like that. Just that it’s not government and not corporate.”
Krista folded her hands. It seemed too soon for Elliot to resume work, but then most of her patients lacked the financial freedom to go without income for several months, so full employment was not incompatible with his symptoms. And work had benefits beyond money. It caused stress, but it gave people something to do, something to work toward, something to accomplish. It was a social outlet, a reason to maintain a schedule, a source of identity. A job would be good for Elliot, especially the one he described. Despite his blasé response, she was sure that empathy for victims of sexual misconduct played a role in his decision to apply. If he couldn’t go back in time and save himself, at least he could save others.
“How do you feel about the possibility of returning to work?” asked Krista.
Elliot shrugged. “I think they have a dress code,” he said, with only a hint of grumbling.
“Have you thought about how your mental health problems might interact with this job?”
“You mean Mr. Robot? I’ve turned it over and over, and I don’t see how he can do much damage. And he doesn’t come out so much. Or, he doesn’t take over. He’s just sort of…another way for me to be. But it’s still me.”
“I’m glad to hear that. But I actually wasn’t talking about Mr. Robot. I was talking about anxiety you might experience hearing about or seeing evidence of sexual harm.”
“I thought about that, too,” said Elliot. “How do people handle…I can’t flip out at work.”
“Ideally, no, at least not in front of people, but if this is an organization that tackles revenge porn, I would be very surprised if you were the only worker with a history of sexual victimization. If one day you were overcome and had a panic attack, I suspect the people who chose to work there would be the type of people who would understand.”
“I don’t want them to understand,” snapped Elliot. He ran his hand over his face. “I mean, they can, they can understand what they want, but I’m not going to tell them about,” he gestured vaguely in his own direction, “about this.”
“I’m glad you recognize that in yourself. You’re setting a limit. You don’t want to tell co-workers or bosses, even caring ones, about your personal abuse history. But do you think you could explain getting upset without revealing personal details?”
Elliot’s head tilted to the left, brow furrowed skeptically.
“What if you said, ‘Sometimes things like that really get to me’?”
“That doesn’t explain anything.”
“It explains that you had a reaction to seeing or hearing something that is especially upsetting to you, which is really all they need to know.” It was one of those sentences she had honed over years of use to an exact phrasing which could conceivably encompass both a PTSD flashback and a non-trauma-related personal preference.
“What if I get freaked out all the time? I don’t think that excuse would work over and over.”
“I don’t think you’ll get freaked out all the time.”
“Because of desensitization,” said Elliot.
“That’s right,” said Krista. “But the answer is more complicated. If you have a strong reaction every once in a while, a good employer will let you work around it. You can take a long lunch and pull yourself together, or take a sick day. But if you have strong reactions very often, or if you find you’re tense and irritable all the time, that workplace probably isn’t right for you.”
Elliot nodded, but he said, “I don’t even have the job yet. It’s just an interview.”
After a pause, Krista asked, “Have you started hacking your prospective employers?”
“Do you want to know that stuff?”
“Maybe not the details, but I think the topic in general is worth talking about.” She opened her file folder and pulled out the checklist of common issues faced by adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse that Elliot had completed. “I noticed that you didn’t mark off ‘violating others’ privacy’. You don’t think that’s something you do?”
“I thought it meant, like, spying on the women’s locker room. I don’t do that. And besides, the hacking isn’t related to what my dad did. It’s just practical.”
“Any problem that can be caused by a history of abuse can be caused by something else. But the problems on the list are more common in people who have been sexually abused. In this case, it’s about trust and control. You hack people because you don’t trust them. Because you have to know everything about them and you can’t wait for them to willingly reveal it. You worry they have a dark secret or you’ll need to manipulate or blackmail them. Hacking people puts you in control.”
Elliot scoffed. “Half the time they do have a dark secret.”
“Maybe. But maybe most of those secrets are just embarrassing. Do you really need to proactively catch people having affairs, using drugs, stealing small amounts of money, and so on?”
“There are very bad people in the world.” Elliot leaned forward, chin up, so he was looking down, a posture suggestive of Mr. Robot.
“And I’m not suggesting that you ignore them if you find them. But once you told me you ‘hack everyone’. You want that power, that control of knowing more about others than they do about you. That’s not about catching truly bad people.”
“I’m not stealing from them or blackmailing them.”
“How do you think most people would feel if they knew?”
Elliot sighed, his head tipping back and forth resignedly. They both knew the answer to that question. But there was also a stubborn set to his chin.
“How would you feel if your prospective employer got ahold of my therapy notes and found out about your childhood experiences before meeting you?” Vera certainly exemplified invasion of privacy, but he had obviously evil motives, so she had to use a hypothetical to prompt Elliot.
“Why are you asking me this shit?”
“I’m trying to establish that there are downsides to your actions,” said Krista. “How would your life be different if you gave up hacking everyone you know?”
“I wouldn’t have information about them.” Elliot looked uncomfortable. “Well, I’d still have some. Whatever they told me.”
“And how would that make you feel?”
“I don’t…it would be…I don’t know how people talk to each other without knowing that stuff.”
That was interesting. She knew that Elliot used his hacking to protect himself and others from material harm – to identify threats and to prepare a counterattack or pre-emptive strike. But she also knew that he had a lot of difficulty with social interaction. He didn’t seem to be lacking in an underlying capacity for social skills – he could read body language, attend to others’ feelings, express himself in literal and nonliteral ways – but he had a significant lack of experience because he had isolated himself. “Most people don’t have that kind of information about each other. Conversation works anyway.”
“Not for me.” He shook his head. “I can’t reveal what I know, but it gives me parameters. Where are the sore subjects? If I ask about their weekend, am I going to get an unbearable twelve-minute rant about a bad call in a pointless athletic competition?”
“How do you think normal people handle those problems?”
“Normal people care about the same sports nonsense.”
“Not necessarily. Have you ever seen someone abruptly change the subject, or make an excuse to leave because they’re bored?”
Elliot looked as though he were currently considering those options, or possibly setting a distraction fire and running out of the room. Finally, he said, “It’s how I do things.”
“You’re here because the way you believe you can change the way you do things.”
There is no ending to this. There could be a conclusion to Elliot’s therapy with Krista, though that would be many months in the future, but that wouldn’t be the end. There would still be symptoms and problems that Elliot would have to solve on his own or with help. I don’t know if he got the job. He might have. He might not have. He might have been hired, only to quit a few weeks later when he found he was too overwhelmed. I don’t know if he moved in Darlene and if he did, I don’t know if he stayed. I know he had to put a lot of effort into practicing human interaction, which meant a lot of discomfort and failure. I know he tried to go to a support group but he couldn’t bring himself to speak and he didn’t go back for a long time. Maybe he did much later. I know he hacked more people – innocent people – because he wanted to feel powerful. But he felt bad about it and he did it less often than before. He’ll have a girlfriend, but things won’t work out. Of course, that’s how every relationship goes until it’s not. He’s doing better. There’s no way to know what happens next.