A few years ago I was standing on a platform at Clapham Junction and felt a new sensation – I felt bored of being scared. I tweeted about it and several hundred people told me I was depressed. I can take a hint.
I signed up for some talking therapy and I think that how it is supposed to work is as follows:
1. They identify some childhood trauma;
2. They help you recognise that the trauma damaged you;
3. They help you be kind to the damaged child you were; and
4. You heal and grow.
Thus far, stage one has certainly worked. Hoo boy. But I already knew my shape was one I’d been metaphorically (and occasionally literally) beaten into. I knew I had been damaged. So far, so pain-wrapped goodness.
The focus that the process demanded changed how I see my past. For example, I was pretty certain I’d enjoyed university even if I had, at times, behaved a little oddly. Forced to think about it, I can now see I was crunching around like a self-propelled bag of broken biscuits. This is the point I am supposed to clutch my younger self in a hug and tell him I understand. Instead I am rearing away from him and gulping air horrifiedly. Now I can see how unbearable I was both to myself and others. I can see all the pain I transferred because I was just incapable of holding it in. I am confronted with my lack of gratitude for those that stuck with me and the lives I made worse by being in them.
I’m fully signed up, in theory, to the idea of forgiving myself and growing into some evolved form, but I literally cannot do it. It’s been a sort of cringe-induced brain prolapse. I can’t take reassurance, or compliments or sympathy, not because I think they are insincere but because they are like someone gently patting the sort of sunburn you’d need to be bathing in the corona to achieve.
Is there some way of reversing therapy? Can I go back to blissful disassociation? If not, is there some way of wiping my younger self from the memory of those who knew me? I say again, hoo boy.
Wow, this is a blast from the past. I started following you years ago and enjoyed your musings. But for some reason they stopped coming – again, years ago.
As is the way of things, I didn’t notice and, no offence intended, you gradually slipped from my memory. Of course you did; I’ve gone through menopause since then, and almost the entirety of the 80s, 90s and the 21st century so far, has slipped from my memory.
And yet today, without fanfare or explanation, here is this post in my inbox.
Did WordPress temporarily lose my email address? Was I in time out? I will probably never know. But – it’s good to see you again.
And now excuse me please, I have a lot of catching up to do.
Hi Cathy good to see you! I mostly hangout on Bluesky these days but every 7 years or so there is something I want to say but not to broadcast. I hope all is well with you.
All is more than well, thank you for asking.
My husband and I are now (very youthful) OAPs and haven’t worked for a couple of years or so. I keep dreaming that I have to go back to my last job, but so far in reality they have somehow managed without me.
We have also achieved my 60 year dream of moving to Cornwall, into a small 1840s stone cottage set into a hillside above a valley, with country views and a cottage garden. Which proves, after nearly 60 years of evidence to the contrary, that just sometimes dreams really do come true.
I hope that the same is true for you.