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  "description": "by Shannon Dale  |  ... that she probably won’t answer.",
  "path": "/questions-i-want-to-ask-my-psychiatric-nurse-practitioner/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-25T12:15:41.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.short-reads.org",
  "tags": [
    "Mediocre Mother on Substack",
    "supporting subscriber",
    "donation",
    "Twitter",
    "Facebook",
    "LinkedIn",
    "Bluesky",
    "Hattie Fletcher",
    "Anna Hall",
    "Stephen Knezovich",
    "“Dig”",
    "“Birds I’ve Known”",
    "Explore the entire Short Reads archive."
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  "textContent": "When you say _That makes sense_ , does it actually make sense? Or do you just say that when someone says something so crazy you don’t know what else to say?\n\nDo you ever think that anyone is truly crazy, or have you been trained to think of us as something else?\n\nWhat is it? Can you tell me?\n\nAnd then can we be friends when this is all over? Because you make me feel like things will be okay.\n\nBut will they, really?\n\nAre you allowed to lie to patients?\n\nWere you drawn to this field because you too fell off the deep end once? Or was it because you never have, but from the safety of the lifeguard chair, you saw someone slip and believed you could do something about it?\n\nOr was there someone you held once but couldn’t save, and now you try to save us to make up for the one that got away?\n\n​​​​​How does it feel to pull out someone who is drowning?\n\nDoes it give you a high?\n\nWhy else would you put yourself through all this? All the listening to someone talk about what it is like not to operate correctly, not to function in the brain sense, to stall out in the human sense. To stop working, like a deeply soaked thing that was never meant to get wet and is now impossibly heavy. ​ ​\n\nDoes it get old, all the brokenness?\n\nIf you ever meet my mother, will you tell her she should have gone to you, decades ago, and still could? Since we are friends now?\n\nCan you tell her how you will listen and nod and look to the ceiling as if there are answers up there, in the panels, and then look back down with an idea, something to try to make everything hurt a little less?\n\n​​​​​​​Tell her there are so many roads to better without having to leave her family the way I always feared she would, trading us for the quiet of a snowdrift.\n\nTell her she doesn’t need to drive a car into a lake like her grown baby brother did, in the daylight, looking for answers under the water.\n\nShe doesn’t talk about him much.\n\nCan you tell her she can, and that it makes sense if she does?\n\nThat it makes sense if she doesn’t.\n\n* * *\n\n**Shannon Dale** is the mother of three young boys, a retired farmer and educator at thirty-nine, and an intrepid explorer of life with inflamed joints and eyeballs. She publishes a monthly advice column for fellow beleaguered parents as the Mediocre Mother on Substack and is proud to be one of the founding members of the Unreliable Narrators writing group in her home state of Montana.\n\nThis essay is a _Short Reads_ original.\n\n* * *\n\n****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.****\nBecome a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation.\n\nShare this essay on: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky\n\nThis issue of __Short Reads__ was ❓🙋💭 edited by Hattie Fletcher; ❓🙋💭 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; ❓🙋💭 designed by Anna Hall; and ❓🙋💭 delivered to our 2,483 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich.\n\n### **From the archive**\n\n\nFeb 26, 2025\n“Dig”\nby Lorri McDole | A spy in the house of God.\n\nFeb 28, 2024\n“Birds I’ve Known”\nby Yelizaveta Renfro | Parakeets, owls, and rooks. Oh my.\n\nExplore the entire Short Reads archive.\n\n* * *",
  "title": "Questions I Want to Ask My Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-02T17:39:42.814Z"
}