Everything I have is now with the people whose job it is to make objective judgements about it. The weeks I have spent trawling through documents to compile my notification can stop. I should feel relief. Mostly I feel the opposite.

A case officer has been assigned to read it. My first reaction was to treat that as a sign, as if being picked up meant being believed. It doesn’t. All it really means is that the paperwork moved along a slow, grinding queue. The person reading it doesn’t know me. They aren’t reading it through my lived experience. They’re reading documents, and the documents don’t carry what any of it felt like, as much as I wish they did.

That’s how it should work, but it’s also the part I find hardest, because for years the only thing I had was my own account, and my own account was the thing that kept being questioned.

I put in the parts of my story that cut against me. I didn’t have to, but I felt that a complaint that leaves out the awkward parts isn’t reliable, and I wanted it to be reliable more than I wanted it to be comfortable. That choice is mine. Whatever happens next doesn’t change that I made it.

Here is the uncomfortable truth. I’m waiting for someone to tell me that what happened to me was below standard. I’ve noticed how much weight I’m putting on that. I want a stranger with authority to confirm what I experienced and what the documents show. The outcome can run anywhere from no finding at all to something much more, and if my sense of what happened depends on where it lands, I’ve handed the decision to the wrong person again.

The problem is that the process isn’t set up to determine that what happened to me was inherently wrong. The process is set up to protect the public from future ‘below standard’ conduct. As a result, if my clinician shows enough insight and undertakes enough professional learning to demonstrate she won’t repeat the behaviour, then a finding of no further action becomes possible, even if the conduct did fall below standard.

I’m working on being okay with any outcome. I’m not there yet, and I don’t think I get there simply by deciding to be. I think I will get there slowly, by practising holding the knowledge myself, without needing it countersigned. I need to trust my own experience of what happened.

I’ve also agreed with myself (and my counsellor) to stop checking up on the clinic. The pull to look is the same anxious attachment that underpinned this whole relationship, and I’m not going to feed it anymore. The push-pull doesn’t disappear just because I name it. That part will take time (and more therapy).

What I have decided is that I’m done editing. I spent weeks tightening, checking, correcting, rechecking, adding, subtracting, consolidating. At some point more polish stops being diligence and starts being a way of avoiding the fact that it’s out of my hands. The substance is there and no amount of polish will change the facts. Anything left over was never mine to fix.

I can’t control what the Board decides. What I can control is whether I already knew what I lived through, and whether anyone else’s decision gets to rewrite that.