_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

and I wasn’t panicking any longer. I swallowed hard and tried to
remember what I had to say, and I said it. I told him that for four years
I’d had problems with alcohol, that my drinking had cost me my
marriage and my job, it was costing me my health, obviously, and I
feared it might cost me my sanity, too.
“I don’t remember things,” I said. “I black out and I can’t remember
where I’ve been or what I’ve done. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve done or
said terrible things, and I can’t remember. And if . . . if someone tells me
something I’ve done, it doesn’t even feel like me. It doesn’t feel like it
was me who was doing that thing. And it’s so hard to feel responsible for
something you don’t remember. So I never feel bad enough. I feel bad,
but the thing that I’ve done—it’s removed from me. It’s like it doesn’t
belong to me.”
All this came out, all this truth, I just spilled it in front of him in the
first few minutes of being in his presence. I was so ready to say it, I’d
been waiting to say it to someone. But it shouldn’t have been him. He
listened, his clear amber eyes on mine, his hands folded, motionless. He
didn’t look around the room or make notes. He listened. And eventually
he nodded slightly and said, “You want to take responsibility for what
you have done, and you find it difficult to do that, to feel fully
accountable if you cannot remember it?”
“Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly it.”
“So, how do we take responsibility? You can apologize—and even if
you cannot remember committing your transgression, that doesn’t mean
that your apology, and the sentiment behind your apology, is not
sincere.”
“But I want to feel it. I want to feel . . . worse.”
It’s an odd thing to say, but I think this all the time. I don’t feel bad
enough. I know what I’m responsible for, I know all the terrible things
I’ve done, even if I don’t remember the details—but I feel distanced
from those actions. I feel them at one remove.
“You think that you should feel worse than you do? That you don’t
feel bad enough for your mistakes?”
“Yes.”
Kamal shook his head. “Rachel, you have told me that you lost your
marriage, you lost your job—do you not think this is punishment
enough?”
I shook my head.
He leaned back a little in his chair. “I think perhaps you are being
rather hard on yourself.”