The University of the Self #95

High Intensity Therapy Session 2

High Intensity Therapy Session 2

This article follows on from number 1, which can be found here.
Number 3 can be read here.

Image description: I have made a linocut print on a piece of white paper. The linocut is created using black ink. There is a sun/moon in the top right corner and a landscape beneath created using wavy lines of different widths and lengths.

Content warning: this article discusses a therapy session, stress, mental health issues such as Passive Suicide Ideation, life and death.

Running late for this session due to a road closure and diversion – though this is not my fault, my stress spikes massively as I am one of those people who are never late, unless circumstances beyond my control intrude on my carefully made plans. In fact, I am always way too early and end up hanging about, looking for toilets. I make an even bigger mess of parking. There are no immediately obvious spaces – plenty of parking which might have allowed for more cars if other drivers hadn’t left three-quarters of a car space between their own cars. Why don’t you just…I mutter. Bloody-bloody-bloody. Why is it always? I eventually decide there is enough room along the side in front of another car and after a sort of backwards 280-point turn I hope for the best and leave the car there. There is a sign which says CAR PARK AT THE BACK, but I haven’t found that yet – it is still the best my head can do to find this place – it is not quite established as part of my familiar mind map. I don’t want it to be. All I want to do is forget this place as soon as possible.

This time, I notice a small area of lawn and flowerbeds on the side of the Tarmac. One bench, at least. A charity clothing bin (I must try to remember that, and maybe put in some of my garment surplus, as I get thinner). Inside, the uncovered food still sits in assorted stained cardboard cartons. The box of silicone moulds has gone, as has the bric-a-brac box. The box of sanitary products is still there. I don’t go to sit in the café today – I sit in the closest chair to the door in the computer room and read a couple of the notices – no making roll-ups next to the computers, photocopies one-sided, 5p, do you need help with your CV? X comes down the stairs to fetch me and I go up to the room in the lift.

This time, things seem even more homely. On the front left (as I face it) corner of the table/desk is a roll-on deodorant. My head tells me a joke – careful, dear, this might be a test. Does one mention the deodorant or not? And will your reaction define you? Like a Rorschach Test for armpits. The glass Umbro phial is part of the more familiar landscape this room accidentally (or deliberately, I don’t know) achieves. The battered rucksack crammed into a corner, unzipped. The scattered pens, a drink, small moments of irrelevant paraphernalia, patched and repaired walls thickly painted with a slightly-too-cheerful sickly baby blue, archipelagos of stains. It’s not a tidy room. It’s not a try-too-hard room. It’s not clinical. It’s a room where temporary lives hook on for a short while – a holding room, a nothing room disguised as a something room. Of all the forgotten cells my mind could conjure up, this is probably the closest and most accurate depiction of a contemporary oubliette. It is so nulled a space, I actually feel the odd urge to burst out laughing and award it some kind of medal.

X makes the mistake of asking me how my week has been. I don’t really understand what these sessions are for, I tell them. Am I meant to spend them talking about how I am right now, what has happened this week – that sort of thing? Or I am meant to talk about the past? Half an hour passes by in an awkward blur. X wants to set goals. What do I want? What do I want to achieve in these sessions? There is so much I want to understand that I don’t know how to answer. I don’t know how to pick through the mess in my head to pinpoint anything. X and I use up the bulk of the session spooling verbal circles. I guess I wish I could live without the episodes, I eventually admit. I wish I knew why they happen. I wish they would never happen again.

We discuss the devastating effects of a lifetime of masking, and of self-monitoring, of ingrained habits and how they exert unpleasant control. X explains that it is difficult to find ways to be or let yourself be your authentic self. Have I ever been my authentic self? Who or what is my authentic self? Is it possible to access it? Or am I sometimes the me me, as well as the me? Am I already all the authentic self I will be?

I mention a little bit about how wearing it is to have always been disliked – by family, and by non-family. A lifetime of being disliked, hated, excluded or avoided because of who and how you are – none of which you can help no matter how hard you always work to be better, more acceptable to others – has a way of grinding you down to nothing. I thought this painful ostracization would lessen after I got away from school, but it has just carried on in different, equally hurtful ways. And then I found the poetry world and thought that I had finally found a way to be. But too many still find ways to dislike and exclude me there. I have got to the end of trying. I can’t solve the reasons why and the hurt this has caused me, added to the strain of trying to understand the motives has taken away the last shelf of strength I had (and it wasn’t very full in the first place). It’s my fault. It’s my fault for being like I am, and doing what I do and what am I to do about that? If you love me, or like me, no matter what, you have no idea how grateful I am for that (I thought I’d put that out there). Maybe X has the superpower to transform me into someone entirely different. I ask them, as a half joke and they offer me a half-smile in return.

X ends the session by writing some of the potential goals we discussed on the board. Understand episodes. Monitoring myself. Worry. Mental shutdowns. Withdrawn inside. Masking. Trauma. Change (oh how I struggle with that). Fear and feeling afraid. Habit and routine.

An ambulance passes me by as I drive home, heading in the direction I just left, its blue lights flashing. The Weird Thoughts immediately grip my brain. Has it happened? I wonder if I am actually dead. Did another car hit mine as I tried to peep and creep my way out of the difficult-to-negotiate car park exit, as I have begun to fear one might, and wipe me out? Maybe this ambulance is on its way to gather up my body, and I am already haunting myself, driving on as if all is as it has been, and have no idea that I am actually gone. Maybe this is hell, I think.

Maybe I died twenty-four years ago. Month on month, I used to stand on the edge of the Metro platform hating myself for not having the courage to jump. What if I actually did jump, and none of the life I have lived ever since is real? Hell would be worse than this, I tell myself. But would it? I used to assume (if indeed hell actually exists) hell would build me a world from childhood memories – school, bullies, isolation, abuse. Then I thought that the entity in charge of hell might be a lot more subtle than that. It would wait until I had finally found a means of expression which made a true difference to my life (poetry and creative writing); it would wait until I had practised and practised, studied, learned and worked; had some small successes and begun to nurse a small flame of hope; then it would build me a hellscape where I am eternally rejected by agents, am made unwelcome in groups, fail to fit in, struggle to place my work, am endlessy told my work ‘is the wrong fit for us’ and am slowly consigned to a thick, smothering treacle of mediocrity. It is revealed to me that I was never that good a writer. I slowly become more bitter, lose increments of confidence, stop believing in myself, doubt everything about my writing. The whole scenario lasts an eternity. I don’t need a hell to punish me. I do enough of that myself.

How do you know if you are still alive? Eventually, after twenty-seven hours, I made myself something to eat. I made myself scrambled eggs with butter and they tasted so good that it couldn’t possibly be fake. Unless, of course, this was a moment of false recognition, to lure me into thinking everything is real, only to pull the rug from under me another time. I have told X about these loops that I get stuck in and can’t get out of – like this endless am-I-alive-or-actually-dead-loop that adds to the general mayhem of my days. I could certainly live without them.

When I get home, all is wating as I left it – the far left-hand seat on the sofa with the large grey cushion for my back, with the smaller rectangle cushion on top for my neck – all waiting to reabsorb my body. My laptop is open, hoping for some of my keyboard bothering. My nature diary, on the seat next to mine, is as crumpled and worn as any best friend of mine must end up being. Its eye, made from the circle left by a carelessly placed water bottle meets mine. I sit until the corners of the day become less sharp, until they stop digging into my skin. Sometimes I sit for an hour. Sometimes I sit until I realise, with a shock, that it has become quite dark.


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