Therapy 2

When she came into our next session I thought she looked lighter than before, though still with an air of pensiveness about her. A mind mostly at peace, but with a slight yet constant sense of discontent which flavoured everything else. It was like too much salt had been added to a meal: there was no ignoring its taste.

“How are things?” I said. “How have you been?”

“I’ve been good,” she said, “some things did happen after our last talk. Like, immediately after. I mean I left and, one, I felt better – a little better – and, two, I felt like my thoughts moved on, like all that stuff I said had been circling round in my head, repeating, playing over and over – not like a stuck record, but…like a song I’d got to know, learned the lyrics by heart, but heard enough – and talking it out…I guess it was like I took the record off, changed the tune, and started playing the next one down in the pile.

“Same genre, though,” she said, smiling.

“That’s what I find too,” I said. “As though my brain can only hold so much, go so deep, and I have to let it out before I can reach the next layer, penetrate to what’s beneath. And so on.”

“But when does it end?” she said. “I feel like I’ve been doing this for years. Doesn’t it ever just stop?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe it never did end. I was past caring about that. Used to want it to, but wanting it seemed to make it worse. Now I just tried to enjoy the ride.

“So what happened?” I said. “What’s the ‘new song’?”

“You know,” she started, “first thing I thought when I got to the end of all that splurge was that I probably want to be with someone. I’ve been single more than five years. I think that’s maybe not been good for me. Too much time not being able to share. Too much time not being held and reassured. Too much time spent just thinking in my own head instead of giggling and messing about and making love and having a laugh.

“I feel like, for some silly reason, I’ve spent the last two or three years trying to be a nihilist. It was kind of fun at first – just dismissing everything, saying everything is pointless, embracing that. It was liberating. But, ultimately, it doesn’t seem to work, in the sense that it hasn’t brought me to happiness or peace. It seems to have sucked the joy out of life, much as it makes me giggle, the philosophy and the theorising and that. But – I’m getting sidetracked here: I want to stay on focus. I feel that’s something that happened last time too – that I kind of went down alleys I didn’t want to, that there were other things I would rather have explored.”

“Are you saying the things you expressed weren’t true?” I asked. “I like to think the conversation goes where it will. That everything will out, in its own time.”

“You know what it was?” she said. “I just felt…kind of embarrassed. All that talk about death and dying and maybe wanting it, and maybe even hinting that I could one day make that happen: I felt kind of stupid about that. Yes, embarrassed. How dramatic! How attention grabbing! That’s pretty much the first thing I felt when I left that session: like I wanted to run back in and make you understand that it wasn’t real: scrub the record and erase the whole conversation and pretend it never was. I don’t want that. I could never want that. I just…it was just a thought that I’d picked up one day, chewed over, and liked the taste of, so…I nurtured it – treasured it, even – and pulled it out to show off whenever I…I don’t know. I don’t want to analyse it too much. I think it just became a silly habit. I want to move on from that now – and try and keep my thoughts and talk from going there. Not because it’s bleak or dangerous or whatever, but simply because it isn’t true, at the deepest part of me – it’s just like some goddamn game I was playing with myself, and I didn’t even know.”

“And you’re saying now you do?”

“I think so. Something happened the next day to sort of shove the reality of my feelings in my face. To show me that I do want to stay alive, that I do value life. I think the truth is, I just want to stop feeling the way I feel, and a part of me – call it a lack of imagination – couldn’t figure out any other way to do that. Plus, like I say, the melodrama, the embracing of all those pretentiously ‘deep’, frivolous nihilistic thoughts, the comfort in the justification of it. It gave me something, I guess. But it’s time to move on.

“The other thing that happened,” she said, “is I met a guy – like literally a couple of hours after leaving here. It was fun. It was beautiful. We only spent like twenty-four hours together but…I guess it was confirmation of that feeling that I’m tired of being alone. It was nice to be with someone. I felt like I liked myself more, in that situation, and I liked life more too. You know? It just kind of takes the edge off things, gets me out of my head. He was fun, uncomplicated. Circumstances prevent anything more, but…well, I guess we’ll have to see what follows.”

I smiled inside here. I’m always going out on a limb when I say things like “wait and see what comes, expressing yourself in a deep and real way can actually change reality” – it’s my hope, for them; it’s been my own experience many times in the past – so when it actually comes to fruition, so suddenly…I guess it’s a relief, and an endorsement, and allows me to trust these beliefs more. Every moment is a choice to say or not say the words that appear in my brain. This is one of my own great challenges: to pick the right path through that. And it looks like I may have picked it right this time.

“So a lot happened,” she said. “The moving on, the new layers of thought, the…guy.”

She paused then, looked down at her hands, and a smile spread across her lips, eyes soft in remembrance.

“But, also,” she said, suddenly snapping to, “I feel like there was so much I didn’t say. Like that whole thing about how I started – ‘I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m mentally ill’ – like there was a whole train of thought there that I thought I would talk about, and that I went down some other tangent, and maybe now I want to loop back around and see where that other one would take me. After all, that’s been playing in my head a long time too. I’d love to see if letting that out might have similar results. I just…

“It’s all kind of embarrassing,” she said. “Everything is. I feel like such a…failure.”

The word kind of leapt out of her throat, and tears rolled down her cheeks. She began to softly weep. She looked impossibly sad.

“Oh my,” she said, wiping her face. “I didn’t expect that. I had this whole speech planned: I thought I knew where it was going. And then I said…that.”

She sniffled some more. She was smiling and crying at the same time. I’d learned to dig her ability to do this – that even in expressing her deepest sadnesses, there was always something of joy behind it. She’d explained to me once that she enjoyed crying: that, to her, it was just an expression of emotion, something inside wanting to come out, just the same as a laugh or a smile. Why suppress it? And more: that she’d learned the power in letting her tears flow freely, the way she felt cleansed afterwards, the way stuck emotions seemed to be let go – so that, having deeply experienced the benefits of a good cry, she now welcomed the tears to the extent that, even in the moment of sadness, there was gratitude and happiness, for the now ingrained knowledge of exactly what these tears meant: that something was being touched; that something was being released; that something very real and very beautiful and, indeed, very useful was happening. So why not let it flow?

I’d seen in my own life how people suppressed their tears. How they sought to wipe them away, even before they’d left their eyes. How they were embarrassed, ashamed. I thought this was a great pity – as I thought it was a great pity that I didn’t cry more myself. I would love to experience the release these tears appeared to be doing for this woman, and for others. It looked amazing. They always looked so beautiful afterwards. They were the lucky ones.

“Whenever I say that word,” she said, “I remember being about ten years old and breaking this huge old vase we had in our living room. I was horrified. I tried to hide all the pieces but it was hopeless. How would it go unnoticed that the vase was missing? How could I lie my way out of it? And then my mum walked in in the middle of me stuffing shards of it under the sofa cushions, and she went ballistic. I didn’t know what to do. And I remember I started bawling – like wild, uncontrolled – and she took me on her lap and shushed me, like she always would when I was crying – I loved that; they’re some of my fondest memories – and I actually said to her, out loud, ‘I feel like such a failure’. I was ten years old! There’s got to be something weird in that, right? For a ten-year-old to say something like that? And you know the other weird thing? Even right then, in the moment, I had the sense that all my tears and the expression of those words…I dunno: like there was something phoney about them. Like I was just pretending, so that I didn’t get into trouble. And yet…it must have been real, right? I think, deep down, that thought is always with me, maybe driving me – maybe more of me than I could possibly realise. How could it be phoney? It just can’t be, right?”

I looked at her. I didn’t know what to say. I wished then I knew more about attachment issues and the importance of the formative years of the parent/child relationship. I knew enough about her situation to know it hadn’t been easy – that, in fact, it was downright screwy in places – and I knew there was maybe something important in this, that less of a gap in my knowledge could maybe touch on. I made a mental note to learn more. To do some reading. To come back with something useful.

I said: “maybe both were true. Maybe your expression of emotion and your awareness that there was something…maybe ‘phoney’ isn’t the right word – maybe they were both real. It sounds like you had a knowing that this would get you what you wanted – get you out of trouble – but that doesn’t necessarily mean your emotions weren’t real too.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but I think it was more than that. I think…I think maybe I ‘ramped it up’. Turned up the volume. Made it more than it was. And I definitely remember this other time – probably around the same age – where I totally faked being upset to get out of trouble. I knew what I was doing. I was a good actor. I’ve always been a good actor when it comes to situations like that.

“God,” she said, “this is going all over the place! There are too many things going on. Two minutes ago I wanted to talk about how I just feel like I can’t make it in this world – with people, with jobs, with the way the whole thing is set up – but then I get this blurt out of nowhere – I can’t even say the word right now, it feels so shameful – call it the f-word – ha! – and also this other thread about not being okay with getting into trouble which, yes, totally relates to something which has been going on these past few weeks: something totally big and mind-overwhelming, and really goddamn bothering me.

“I’m a mess,” she said. “Too much. Too many things. Where do I even start?”

“Hey,” I said, “you’re not a mess, you’re just digging into stuff. And it’s not too many things – it’s three things. It feels like a lot, but three’s not that many. Yes, I know there’ll probably be more, but you can handle it. One at a time. But…let’s take five. Have a drink of water and breathe a little. Come back to it. What do you think?”

“I think…” she said. “I think I need a break. Take a walk outside. And then see how I feel. Maybe I need to let these things settle, live with it a while. Maybe I just need to go back out into the world and see what’s what. Or maybe we can get right back into it. One step at a time, you know? See how I feel in a minute.”

Smart cookie, this girl. I dig everything she says.