Therapy 4

It was another two months before I heard from her again. Then I got a message asking if we could have a session on Skype. I don’t have Skype, but I was keen to hear what she had to say, so I opened an account especially for that. I’d had Skype once, but I’d got into it with someone too much, and it had become a bit like a drug, so I’d deleted it. I made a mental note to make sure I’d do the same again as soon as this conversation was over: I’m a bit weird like that – an all or nothing kind of guy who needs to totally sever my connections and supply lines if I want to break free from something I’m addicted to. The last thing was getting involved in retarded conspiracy theory interactions in the comments’ sections on youtube videos. You think you can educate people by pointing out the blindingly obvious, but it just doesn’t seem the case: they go off on lunatic tangents; they disappear and someone else steps into the fray, repeating the same old nonsense; they never listen, nor learn. Meanwhile, my number of comments ramps up, and all these notifications keep coming in of new responses, which I don’t quite have the gumption to ignore, much as I’d want to – then I finally cracked it: I went through them all, one by one, deleting every single comment I’d ever made – it took me like three hours, each one needing to be selected individually: edit; delete; confirm – but, when it was done, it was like…it was over. Now I don’t get any more notifications. And now, if I ever watch another youtube video, I have a reason to refrain from commenting on it – I don’t want to reopen the can of idiot worms. It works for me, you know: same as quitting sugar or my other myriad addictions. All or none: that’s me.

But, anyway, we set the appointment time and I settled down in my good chair with the laptop and a lovely fresh pot of jasmine green tea. The computer made its little Skype call noise, and there she was. It was good to see her face again. She looked really, really well.

“Hey,” she said, beaming at me from the screen. “You hear me all right? I can see you. It’s good to see you.”

“I can hear you,” I said. “Can you hear me? I can see you; nice to see you too.”

She laughs. “Nice,” she said, “hearing you loud and clear. Pretty cool. I never normally do the Skype thing but maybe I should. Seems to be working a lot better than the last time I used it.”

“Same,” I said. “So where are you?”

“I’m in Spain,” she said. “I live here now. Got a little place, a rental by the sea – well, a twenty-minute walk. There’s plazas, churches – it’s beautiful. Really suits me, you know?”

“Wow,” I said, “what are you doing there?”

“Listen,” she said, “that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I mean, I know you don’t need to hear it, but I just thought it would be good to do a little update. I said so much…I feel like it would maybe give me some closure – by updating you, perhaps I get to update my own brain a little too – and…oh, I don’t know: I’ve just been thinking about you a bunch – about the things we talked about – and since I’m having conversations with you anyway, in my own head, I figured I might as well talk with the real thing.”

“Gotcha,” I said, settling down into my chair. “I’m all ears. It’s a bit different, doing it like this but…go ahead, I’m all yours.”

I took my tea and pressed it to my lips. Having something to occupy my mouth would maybe help me listen better – would help me to not talk – in lieu of having the vibe of an actual person sitting there speaking, reminding me I was in the listening chair. Kind of like the way when somebody’s on a roll and I notice that I’m automatically holding my hand in front of my mouth, as though my subconscious is telling me: no, not your turn to speak, stay quiet. Something like that.

On the screen, I saw her unfold a sheet of paper.

“I made a list,” she said, “to help me stay focused, and make sure I cover everything.”

She put on some glasses: I’d never seen her wear glasses before, had no idea she needed them. But then, I’d never seen her read before: it all added to the sense that a totally different person was sitting there before me.

“Number one,” she said, “I just wanted to touch on what happened immediately after I left you that last time. It was weird. Strange. I’d been feeling all that stuff, been so full of thoughts and emotions…and when I walked out of your place it was like I’d been emptied; was fresh; sort of pure. I took the bus out to the woods and walked the exact same trail I’d walked the day before – I’d been a mess; I’d felt wretched – and I was like…wow, everything seemed so calm, so lovely, so alive. I felt happy! I felt happy like I used to feel. All that awful stuff was gone – I mean, I still had this very slight niggle about ‘what if I get found out?’ – but it was almost nothing – it’s unlikely – and I just couldn’t believe that I could feel so good, so easily, just for getting stuff off my chest.

“I felt positive, too. Optimistic. And like I finally knew what to do – which I suppose brings me to point number two, and all that stuff about concluding that I was ‘mentally ill’. I mean, I do think there’s maybe something there – that at some point in my life, whether in childhood, in the early imprint of my first few days and weeks and months, or – who knows? – in goddamn utero, something kind of went wrong, and made me weird in the way I interact with others and the world; in the way I struggle with romantic relationships; in my inability to knuckle down, make a career work, do, even, the things I love – like those DNA-twisted fruit flies – but…I dunno: it didn’t seem to matter, and there were two parts to that. One, I thought: so what? So what if something I didn’t get from my parents made me screwy and unable to be like all the happy coupley types? I figured it was a bit like being handicapped – it’s not so much about figuring out where it comes from, but learning to live with it, and, you know, people have much worse handicaps than that, and they still go on with their lives. Like, it’d be daft if someone born with no legs spent their whole life being miserable because they wanted to run, weren’t able, kept trying – they’d just find other things to do. Acceptance, you know? And my dear old granddad, God bless him, always told me – always tried to tell me – that acceptance was the key to living a happy life. So I figured I’d try and do that, and focus on what’s there, rather than on what may or may not be missing.

“The other thing was…it was like the scales fell from my eyes. I’d got myself into such a rut, and concluded I was nuts and fatally flawed, all because I couldn’t make it in this world, in seemingly the smallest of ways, and somehow totally forgotten that, man, I don’t give a fuck about making it in this world: I think this world is daft. It’s like that quote, you know: ‘there’s nothing sane about being well-adjusted to an insane society’ (I can’t remember how it actually goes – the real one’s much better, no doubt – but something like that; you get the gist). It was like I’d woken up from a dream. I mean, nothing wrong with the world really – and not that much wrong with me either – it’s just that we don’t fit. Like I’d been trying to walk around in a perfectly good pair of shoes that were two sizes too small: no wonder I was hobbling and feeling weird and thinking, I dunno, there must be something wrong with my feet. Change the goddamn shoes! Go some place different! So I moved to this little city in Spain where I’d been like eight years ago and just felt awesome and promised myself I’d live there and now I do and…whaddya know? Suddenly, I don’t feel so weird. Suddenly, I’m happy again – like, almost miraculously so: it only took like two days, and all those months of weirdness just fell right off me. I really must remember not to underestimate the power a bit of change in geography can have.

“It’s great here,” she said. “It’s pretty. It’s laidback. The weather’s good. There are all these artists and nobody’s busting a gut to rush and sit in little boxes so they can pay the rent on some other box, and all the time be a nicely turning cog in the well-oiled machine, and living for the weekend. It’s like every day’s the weekend here. I’ve been napping loads. I don’t have to wear makeup and, hell, half the time I don’t even wear shoes. It makes me wonder what the hell I was doing – as though I was trying to live someone else’s life, and no wonder I went weird. I really must never do that again. Try and make this work. Live simply, you know, and forget all the bullshit. Just be myself. Live in alignment with what I really feel, rather than being bullied by whatever social construct pressures I’ve allowed to infect my brain: about squirreling away money; about having ‘nice stuff’; about doing what the general mass are doing. Screw them! It’s not like they ever had what I really wanted anyway – a bit of happiness, a bit of freedom, a bit of doing what was in my heart to do. It’s like I’ve been shaken out of some weird hypnotic state. Got back to who I was eight years ago, before I got sidetracked on some dead-end journey. Broken free from a prison cell I’d put myself in, and no one had bothered to inform me that I was free to leave any time I pleased.”

It was then that I noticed pictures on the wall behind her, and that her arms were spattered in paint.

“You’ve been painting, I take it?”

“I have,” she grinned. “You want to see one?”

She stood up. Disappeared off the screen. Came back holding a rectangular canvas which she moved first too close to the camera, then back a few feet. It was a painting of what I presumed was one of the local women selling jewellery in front of the church. A child clutched around her knee and starred intensely at the artist. The woman was laughing as she handed something to someone off frame.

It was good; I was impressed. I mean, maybe it wasn’t incredible and amazing – and I’m certainly no judge of art – but it was good, there was no denying that.

“Great colour,” I said, “so vibrant, so full of life. Look at that sky.”

“I know,” she said. “I couldn’t paint skies and colours like this back home – but this is what I love. A change of geography and a change of weather – it does wonders for the soul.”

This got me thinking about a conversation I’d been having with a friend of mine. He was of the school of thought that says: ‘Wherever you go, there you are. You can’t run away from your problems, they’ll just be there waiting for you when you get there, so you might as well stay where you are and master the lesson you’re there to learn.’ I disagreed: I too believed in changing one’s geographical location from time to time, and felt that environment had as powerful an effect on one’s inner-life as pretty much anything else. Plus, if you put yourself somewhere that isn’t ‘you’, how could you hope to associate with ‘your kind of people’? Sure, you can’t escape yourself – but I didn’t see the point in persevering with a place – perversely persevering, if you will – merely on the off-chance that there’s some sort of ‘lesson’ to be learned – other than the obvious one of getting the hell out of somewhere if it’s very clearly no longer working for you. It’s like me and my arguing with youtube conspiracy theorists: I went out of my way to wrestle with them, in their world, and it was little wonder I ended up with something of their madness on me, when it was just so easy to walk away and go some place better.

“I just think,” she said, “my time is limited. I’m tired of trying to squeeze myself into a lifestyle that simply doesn’t work for me. I want to do what I really want to do, and to hell with everything else. Maybe it won’t work out, you know, financially or as far as material security goes, but at least I’ll be doing my thing, and being happy. It seems such a no-brainer I can’t believe I’ve wasted so many years doing the opposite. What was I thinking?”

“It’s understandable,” I said, “it’s what most of us are doing. Society has a powerful gravitational pull: it’s not easy to break away from that. Maybe some find it easy – I’m thinking of some of my favourite comedians, for example, doing ‘nutty’ things, and sticking at it, through those lean, early years – but…”

“In any case,” she says, “I’m here now. It’s good. It’s like I’ve come out the other side, and I know being able to share with you was helpful with that. Being able to hear my own thoughts. Being able to clear away the debris so I could get down to the good stuff. It wasn’t too difficult. It just took…picking at it; moving one piece at a time; lifting it up and turning it over; then examining it, and putting it to one side, and moving on to the next. I didn’t ever imagine when we started this that…it would have such an effect. I thought we’d have to go right back into childhood. Get into some heavy psychological theory. But all I’ve done is say whatever I was thinking and…I dunno: it’s been like magic.”

We sat there grinning at one another for a moment. It was so good to hear this, to know that I’d been useful. That’s all we want, right? To be useful to someone else? To know our time isn’t wasted?

“What about that…all that ‘dying’ stuff? I said.

She laughed.

“Oh, that? That was…I don’t know: I think that was just me ‘playing’. I’d done the whole ‘atheist game’, and then the whole ‘spiritual game’ – and I guess I thought I’d have a few years at a bit of a nihilistic ‘everything’s completely pointless and meaningless so why bother with anything?’ game. Looking at my mortality. Trying to tackle the whole ‘mid-life crisis’ thing had on. I suppose mooning about death was the logical outcome of all that. At first it was really liberating, you know, laughing at everything and not caring, but I guess I got a bit bogged down in it those last few years and couldn’t move on, couldn’t figure any other way out. But what I’ve realised is…it was just the lifestyle and the feeling that I wanted to end, not the life. And then when I finally broke free it was like…oh, it wasn’t what I thought it was after all. Like I say: waking from a dream. Stepping out of a bad relationship. Quitting that miserable job. The moment it’s over you just think…what the hell was I thinking?”

“So…no danger?”

“No danger – and actually a great deal of liberation, if I can use it in the right way. I mean, having gone so deep in it, to the extent that I could very clearly see myself no longer existing, it’s almost as though…I did it, without actually doing it, so now I’ve got all this time and this life to do with as I please. No rules, nothing holding me back. I’m a ghost! Don’t you see? I’m totally free!”

She laughed – a little too eagerly, perhaps, for my liking. But maybe that was simply because I couldn’t quite relate to what she was saying. I’d never felt what she’d felt – never been to those places, and had no idea what they looked like. I guess I would just have to take her word for it.

“You know who I think about a lot?” she said.

“Little and Large?” I said. “Bob Carolgees?”

I could feel the end of the session approaching, and the end of our time together: it was time to be a little flip.

“Van Gogh,” she said, “and how he lived in mental institutions, and did all those paintings – just kept painting and painting – and how no one really cared, and now they totally do.

“I mean,” she said, “don’t get me wrong, I’m not comparing myself to Van Gogh – what I do is just my hobby, just because I love it – but the idea of him being nuts, and just dedicating himself to what he believed in, despite what the world would make of him – or didn’t – I just think that’s great. What does it matter? And now he’s gone they think he’s a genius. But imagine if he’d thought, ah, sod it: no one wants these paintings, maybe I should just go work in a bank or plough the fields and then maybe I’ll one day get to own a little house and some pigs like everybody else. A house! Pigs! And now everybody else is dead and forgotten, and Van Goghs are selling for millions.

“And not even that,” she said, “not the recognition or the fame or the money, just that…it makes me think you really can’t live your life for what others – and the world – think of you, or think you should do. Like I keep saying: you’ve just got to do your own thing. Or, rather, I’ve got to do my thing – everyone else is free to do whatever they want.”

I dug where she was coming from. They weren’t groundbreaking thoughts, and certainly weren’t anything I’d never heard before – but the point was, she was uttering them with real conviction and belief. Some change seemed to have taken place, deep inside her bones. I had no idea whether it would last but, certainly, she was a different person to the one I’d first encountered some eighteen months before, all stuck and going round in circles and confused. Now she lived on a different landmass. Now she was diving in to the paintings she’d for so many years held at arm’s length. Now she didn’t give a hoot about saving up for a deposit on her own little box in a city she was never more than ambivalent about, or a career that she, at best, could just about tolerate – and, at worst, had left her seeking solace at the bottom of a wine bottle and, for six awful months, losing clumps of her hair.

“Wow,” I said, “it all sounds so…good. You’ve done well. You really have. You’ve figured it all out. You’re doing what you really want to do.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m actually proud of myself: actually feel good about myself. I think it’s pretty awesome, what I’ve done. I just feel…I’ve got so much more confidence now, so much more self-belief, and that’s such a wonderful thing.

“And you know what else?” she said. “It’s weird but…now that I’m painting again, I just feel so much less strange, and…the oddest bit is, even though I don’t really have any more in the way of human interaction – and certainly there hasn’t been any romance since I’ve been here – I don’t feel lonely either, and aren’t craving human company and connection the way I was a few months back. I’ve been thinking about that and I think…just doing my paintings is giving me that, fulfilling something there – maybe even giving me a connection, to myself, and to something bigger than myself. Maybe it was just a misguided feeling – I mean, I do still like human interaction – but…actually, now, I just can’t wait to get back to my canvas, and so much of the time – unless it’s really high quality interaction (and it rarely is) – I find it just gets me itchy for getting back home and back to my brushes. Check this out.”

She lifted up the computer. She rotated it around her room. Canvasses were everywhere, of all different sizes. Some in process, many seemingly finished. People and abstracts and surreals and landscapes. She’d been busy.

“Wow,” I said again, “that really is incredible.”

Her face came back on the screen, much bigger than before. She beamed at me and positively glowed.

“It’s like a torrent,” she said, “all those years of ideas and build-up and…I guess I stopped holding it back, pulled my finger out the damn – or, more like it, pulled my finger out my arse.”

“If you’d pulled your finger out your arse…and a torrent came out…” I said.

She laughed. “Ha! I hear ya. You know what I mean. Fuck! All that time wasted. I’ve got to make up for it.”

“Wasted, maybe,” I said, “or…simply building pressure, so that when you did – ahem – pull your finger out, the torrent and flow was such that you could, er, ride that wave all the way to sea.”

“These analogies are getting weird,” she laughed. “I just hope,” she said, looking around the room, “it isn’t shit.”

She paused for a second.

“But you know what?” she said. “Who cares if it is? I don’t think it is. There are enough other people who don’t think it is. And there are enough other people making and even selling actual genuine shit, seemingly oblivious – art, books, movies – that it doesn’t even matter. Like I keep saying, I’m doing what I want to do, and I’m happy about it. What other gauge is there? Who, really, has the power to judge?

“Fuck it,” she said, “I’m just gonna keep going and let the chips fall where they may. It’s all good. I’ve seen what’s on the other side, and I’m done with that show – it really couldn’t be any other way.”

We shot the shit then, for a while. I asked about the weather and the people and her thoughts on England (not good) and if she had any plans to exhibit (she did), and she asked me about me and we seemed to make a fairly seamless transition from: bloke sat in chair pretty much just listening and nodding and saying “uh-huh” while troubled woman gets everything off her chest in a bid to stop feeling miserable, to: two fairly contented acquaintances having one last chinwag before they wish each other all the best and go their own separate ways, and maybe catch up several years down the line.

She was done, and she knew she was done, and there was nothing left to do except…live.