Alice Goes on a Bender

Hello all!  Wonderland may be a magical and odd place, but that doesn't mean that its inhabitants don't have problems just like any Joe Blow that you may know.  And that's where I come in.  My name is Dr. Wyatt Rabbit and I am a licensed therapist to all those who need someone to talk to here in Wonderland.  I have quite a few patients, some who see me more frequently than others and you have just caught me before my regular weekly appointment with Alice.

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Alice is bored while sitting in the waiting room of Dr. Rabbit's office.  Her older sister, who has come to make sure Alice gets into no trouble, is nose-deep into a book.  Alice, unable to contain her curiosity and compulsive behavior, sees this as an opportunity to explore the many hallways of Dr. Rabbit's office.  After taking several wandering turns down the hallway, Alice came to a door with a funny-looking padlock attached to it.  She thought it seemed odd that this was the only door in the entire hallway that was locked and this fact only made her compulsion to enter it even greater.  She noticed a very small key sitting on an odd little table next to the door, a key so small that she couldn't manage to pick it up off the table.  Just as she was about to have a tantrum, she noticed a bottle labeled "DRINK ME" that she could have sworn wasn't there before.  Alice knew she was not to drink magical potions.  She had gotten in trouble in the past for abusing them, but her curiosity got the best of her.  She gulped down the bottle and immediately shrunk to the size of a penny, completely forgetting to grab the key before shrinking.
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I opened my office door and looked down to find a small blue dot next to an empty potion bottle.  "What in Wonderland!  Alice what have you done this time?"  I really wasn't surprised to have found that once again Alice had gotten into one of my magical potions.  Magical potions aren't out of the ordinary here in Wonderland, but most people have enough self-control to know better and that there are rules to follow.  Alice has been seeing me ever since she moved here to Wonderland with her sister a few years back.  Having not been born in Wonderland, Alice often finds it hard to restrain herself from letting her curiosity about this place get the best of her. 

I picked her up as gently as possible and took her into my office.  A small bite of growth cake should do the trick.  After I gave Alice just enough to get her back to her normal size, we sat down for our weekly session to discuss her problems, of which there were many.  Alice, you see, not only has substance abuse problems, but abandonment issues as well.  In fact, her substance abuse stems from the abandonment she feels from her parents leaving her in Wonderland and returning to the real world.  They visit her very infrequently and Alice is mostly left to her own devices. 

I started off the session as I always did, greeting her and asking her how her week had been.  Alice managed a few grunts, which I took as "OK."  After a while, I began to delve deeper into Alice's life before she had come to live here in Wonderland.  This made her smile at first, remembering how the good old days used to be when her family was still together, but her smile began to fade.  As we continued discussing this topic, she started to go from sadness to downright anger.  I could tell she was closing herself off and so I continued to try to get the the root of the problem.  All of a sudden she started screaming and leaped from her chair.

"AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHRRRRRRHHH!!!!!"

The next thing I knew Alice had stomped on my foot in a rage, grabbed what remained of the "EAT ME" cake off my desk, and was running out of the maze of corridors of my office. 

She kept running and running, knowing that a visit to the Caterpillar would fix her right up.  The Caterpillar was her drug dealer, who often hung around the sketchy Mushroom Patch neighborhood.  I'm sure she was thinking that a quick fix from the Caterpillar would make all the pain she'd just been reminded of go away.  I was not worried for Alice because as scatter-brained as she was, I knew she would be back next week for our appointment.  I simply made a note in her folder to be more sensitive when discussing the topic of her parents.  Coincidentally, I also made a note to hide all magical potions and cakes before she arrives!

Author's Note:  I used several chapters from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in order to create my first story on Alice's substance abuse issues.  I kept several elements from the original story, such as how Alice changes sizes, her curiosity to use the key and get through the door, and her visit to the Caterpillar.  Here is how the story unfolds in the original book:  Alice is sitting along the bank of a river while her sister reads a book.  She notices the white rabbit running along and follows after him only to fall down the rabbit hole.  Alice then comes to a hallway of doors and a small key sitting on a table along with a bottle labeled "DRINK ME."  After pulling back a curtain, Alice finds a tiny door to which the key belongs and because she is unable to go through the tiny door, she drinks the bottle she found.  She shrinks to a small enough size to fit through the door, but forgets to grab the key from the table, which is now far too high for her to reach.  She finds a box at the bottom of the table that contains a cake with "EAT ME" written on it and eats it in the hopes of solving her current crisis.  She eats too much of the cake and grows so tall that she bumps her head on the ceiling and begins to cry out of frustration.  As you can see, I took many elements from the original story, but I adapted them to my own story of Dr. Rabbit and Alice.  This is the first of three character examinations that I will include in my storybook.  I hope that with each story we will be able to better understand the motivations of the different characters, which we will learn through our central character, Dr. Wyatt Rabbit.