It comes up early, usually within the first few sessions, and it's phrased almost identically every time— “I just want to get back to who I was before.” Before the affair. Before the deployment, the diagnosis, the year that took the whole thing apart. The sentence is always built around a hinge, with one version of the person on either side of it, and the earlier one is the version being requested.
That earlier person gets described in some detail, though the description is assembled afterward by someone with a reason to assemble it generously. She was lighter. She trusted people, slept through the night, laughed more easily. Some of that is accurate. Some of it is a photograph of one good spring standing in for four years, and nobody is available to dispute it.
Grant the description in full anyway, because the problem isn't accuracy. That person is the one who walked into this. She didn't see it coming, which is not a character flaw, although it does mean she was operating without information you now have. Going back to her means going back to the conditions that produced what you're trying to get out from under.
What's actually being asked for is rarely that earlier self, who was not especially remarkable and who you'd find tedious by the second week. It's the earlier absence of the problem. Those two get requested in the same sentence, while only one of them was ever on the table, and it isn't the one about identity.
You don't get to un-know things. The information arrives and stays, and after it arrives the only live question is what it's worth to you and what gets built out of it. That question sounds larger than it is. It gets answered in ordinary ways over a period of months, mostly through what continues to get tolerated and what quietly stops getting tolerated, which is not a dramatic process and doesn't announce itself while it's happening.
Restoration is the more appealing story, promising a destination you've already visited and a person you've already been, requiring no imagination from anyone. Building something that has not existed before asks considerably more, offering no photograph to work from and no guarantee that you'll like the result. September is loud about returning and fairly quiet about what returning would cost, which is consistent, given that nobody has ever managed it.
What holds gets assembled slowly instead, one decision at a time, each one small enough to look insignificant while you're making it. You tend to notice afterward, when something that used to take you out goes past without taking you out, and the noticing is usually unimpressive. There's no moment. There's a Thursday, and it went differently than it would have.
Nobody comes back. Somebody else shows up, later than anyone wanted, looking nothing like the photograph and carrying everything the photograph didn't know yet.
