I perched on the edge of a beige chair, staring at a beige collection of files, lining the purposefully nondescript beige walls. Inevitably I would be greeted by a therapist that almost seemed like a Dickensian character match for this office – beige suit, blank personality, indifferent gaze. My friend once dressed as a guru, sat cross-legged on the lounge floor and with a serene, knowing look on her face said nothing more than: “And how does that make you feel?”.
It was not an altogether dissimilar experience to spending an hour in this beige world, except my friend had a sense of humour.
If there’s one thing on which Scientologists and myself can agree, it’s our distrust of therapists. Perhaps I am just too British, too afraid to tackle my emotional issues head on. But, to me, there’s something incredibly hippy about spending vast sums of money to lie in a dimly lit room, venting your feelings to a stranger trained to reply so neutrally, that you will eventually reach your own conclusions about the origins of your inability to commit (or whatever ails you).
That is not to say that I do not know people for which therapy has been a lifeline and genuinely helped them out of depression, I just know that if I spend too long sifting through the darkness of the past to see how it will affect my future, I will forget to exist in the present.
It was the head of my department at University that suggested I needed a therapist, or a Doctor, or perhaps I should consider taking some anti-depressants. This was our first and only meeting; I was already bristling with existential worry about my future without a degree, and now an unqualified stranger was diagnosing me as mentally ill because I wanted to drop out.
After months spent justifying my decision to finish education in my head, I couldn’t be bothered to explain that I was riddled with anxiety because of the debt I was getting into for doing a course that I hated. To me it was illogical to continue.
Luckily, she seemed unnerved when I began to cry; she visibly recoiled in her chair, a fearful look crossing her face like a shadow, as if I had barged into her room drunk and exploded in a racist slur, before threatening to throw up on her shoes. I was clearly too unhinged for her to deal with so, to my relief, she let me go without further questioning.
I did take her advice though; I signed up for therapy.
Naturally, in my head, I romanticised the whole affair. I imagined myself in a smoky room, decadently sprawled across Freud’s olive leather chaise longue, perhaps a hand flung up to rest delicately on my furrowed brow, whilst my troubled psyche was intricately decoded by a bearded man. He would hold up placards of ink blots and whatever my mind rearranged them into would result in a diagnoses of penis envy, or something equally ludicrous. It would have made a far superior read than what actually happened in the beige room with no natural light.
My first task was to write my anxieties on a blank piece of paper. I snatched the sharpie from my therapist’s unsuspecting grasp and committed wholeheartedly to scribbling my worries down, as if my life depended on it. God knows, I was not short of things to write; if I had failed at University then I would succeed at getting
my life together. I wanted to be better, it had been so long since I had felt human and I would do anything to be happy.
Every point spider-diagrammed off in a mad wiggle to bubble around another problem, until I had a page full of bad thoughts in fluffy clouds of black pen. Money worries, body image worries, future worries, family worries, I was ready to offload them all onto this beige witch doctor who was here to answer my prayers.
I was so intrigued – was she going to perform some voodoo and make them disappear? What would my life be like without all these issues? I would be a new woman. What an exciting idea.
That was the very moment the fire alarm went off. The walls of the building were stuffed with straw and had the capacity to burn to the ground within seven minutes, so I quickly scrabbled together my things. Just as we were leaving, my therapist shouted over the shrill bells that as I was no longer an official student I would not be able to continue my sessions after this initial first meeting, and that she hopes it all works out for me. I stood dumbstruck in the doorway, staring down at the piece of paper that I had worked so hard to complete, bulging with everything I was afraid of. I had drawn a page full of storm clouds. First they were in my head, now I could see them in front of me, laid out in all their depressing majesty.
Biting back tears, I walked against the flow of people streaming out of the building and ducked into the sanctuary of the bathroom so I could sit in silence. I have always felt safe in toilets; I spent my childhood accidentally locking myself in them, so I know how secure they are. This one was a tiny room painted a brilliant white with daylight spilling in through the sky window. I slid my back down the wall and rested my head against the cool, white porcelain basin, shutting my eyes to fully appreciate the warmth of the sun on my face.
At the time, I thought this was my worst moment, which shows how young and naive I still was. I had no idea that throughout the next few months my life would be flipped upside down and shaken until the very last loose change and bits of fluff would fall out of my pockets.
I would lose one of the most important people in my life, develop a rare immune disease, get conned out of my savings, work a job that I hated, and generally strip my life back until the only thing vaguely human about me was my ability to cry. And that seemed to be a superhuman skill.
But the whole year of being twenty left me with only two options. Sink or swim. I kept asking myself that question. Sink or swim? Sink or swim?
I’m not going to pretend that I did not allow myself to sink right until the tips of my fingers were the very last things left above water. Or that when I finally started to get it together that I didn’t relapse constantly. But slowly, slowly, I began to kick.
Sometimes we need someone to figure out what is wrong with us, to connect the dots and pull us back into the light. In my case I just needed time to heal, so instead of getting therapy, I booked flights to Italy with my two best friends.
Stepping off the plane, the heat of the country encapsulated me, and I knew that this was the beginning of change. The stories that follow are ones that I’ll savour.. Bit by bit, through laughter, ice cream and beautiful people, I began to come back to life. I decided that all I could do was live every day in the present, not focusing on what was, or what will be, but simply what is.
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