I always promised myself I would never be in a room like this. But I didn’t know where to be but there. I had run clean out of other options. I was twenty-seven and I felt like I was toppling from a gale of anxiety. It was nine months since I went freelance and I had spent nearly every day alone with my thoughts. I had pushed away the concerns of my friends and family; I was always on the verge of tears, but I was unable to talk to anyone. I woke up every morning with no idea of where I was or what was happening; I came round to my life every morning like the previous night’s sleep was a punch in the head that left me bloody.
I was there because I had to be there. I was there because I had put off being there; because I always said I didn’t have any money or time; because it was indulgent and silly. I told a friend that I felt on the verge of an implosion and she gave me a woman’s number to call. I had run out of excuses.
‘I think I’m going to fall and die,’ I replied. She – Eleanor – peered over her glasses and then back to her page, furiously writing notes. She had a dark, semi-parted seventies-style flicky fringe, brown, feline eyes and a strong nose. She must have been in her early forties. She looked like a young Lauren Hutton. I noted that her arms were muscular and tanned and elegant. I thought that she probably thought I was a silly crybaby. A big, fat loser. An over-privileged girl, needlessly spaffing all her hard-earned cash so she could blabber on about herself for an hour a week. She probably saw women like me coming a mile off.
‘I can’t open or close any windows in my flat, I have to ask someone else to do it,’ I continued, clipped and quiet to hold in tears that felt like they were pressing up behind the back wall of my eyeballs like water to a flood barrier. ‘Sometimes I can’t go into a room at all if a window is open because I’m so scared of falling out of it. And I have to stand with my back pressed against the wall when a train pulls into a tube station from the tunnel. I see myself falling in front of it and dying. I see it happening every time I blink. Then I’ll spend all night replaying it over and over again in my head and I can’t sleep.’
‘Right,’ she replied in an Australian accent. ‘And how long have you felt like this?’
‘It’s all got really bad in the last six months,’ I said. ‘But on and off for the best part of ten years. The drinking gets bad when I’m very anxious. Same with the death obsession. The flavour of the month fixation is falling.’
I guided her through The Greatest Hits of My Recurring Emotional Turmoil. I talked about my weight that had been as ever-changing as cloud formations – the fact that I could look at every photo taken of me since 2009 and tell her exactly to the pound how much I weighed in each one. I told her about my obsession with alcohol that hadn’t waned since I was a teenager, my unquenchable thirst when most people my age now knew when to stop, how I’d always been known for knocking it back at record speed, the vast black holes in my memory from these nights over the years; my increasing shame and distress over these lost hours and that unrecognizable madwoman running around town who I was meant to be responsible for, but who I had no recollection of being or knowing.
I told her about my inability to commit to a relationship; my obsession with male attention and my simultaneous fear of getting too close to someone. How difficult I had found watching all my friends, one by one, ease into long-term partnerships like they were lowering themselves into a cool swimming pool on a scorching day. How every boyfriend I’d had has asked why I can’t do the same; how I’d always feared that I was romantically wired wrong.
We talked about how I had spread myself like the last teaspoon of Marmite across the width of as many lives as possible. I told her that I gave almost all of my energy away to other people when no one had asked it of me. I described the control I thought this gave me over what other people thought of me, and yet it left me feeling more and more like a fraud. I told her how I fantasized about what people said about me behind my back; how I would probably agree with almost any insult thrown at me anyway. I told her the lengths I had gone to for approval: spending all my money on rounds of drinks for people I’d never met and not being able to pay my rent the next week; starting Saturday nights at four p.m. and ending them at four a.m. to attend six different birthday parties of people I barely knew. How tired and heavy and spineless and self-loathing this had made me feel. The pathetic irony that I had the greatest circle of friends around me and yet I felt I couldn’t tell them any of this. How deep-rooted my fear of dependency was. That I could cry in the bed of a stranger I met in New York, but I couldn’t ask my best friends for help.
‘But none of this is having a visible effect on my life,’ I said. ‘I feel silly for coming here because it all could be so much worse. I have great friends, a great family. My work is going well. No one would know that anything is wrong with me from the outside. I just feel shit. All the time.’
‘If you feel shit all the time,’ she said, ‘it’s having a very, very big effect on your life.’
‘I guess.’
‘You feel like you’re going to fall because you’re broken into a hundred different floating pieces,’ she told me. ‘You’re all over the place. You’ve got no rooting. You don’t know how to be with yourself.’ The back wall of my eyeballs finally gave way and tears poured out from the deepest well in the pit of my stomach.
‘I feel like nothing is holding me together any more,’ I told her, my breathlessness punctuating my sentence like hiccups, the stream of my tears on my cheeks as hot and free-flowing as blood.
‘Of course you do,’ she said with a new softness. ‘You’ve got no sense of self.’
So that’s why I was there. The penny dropped. I thought I had a fear of falling, but really I just didn’t know who I was. And the stuff I used to fill up that empty space no longer worked; it just made me feel even more removed from myself. This overwhelming anxiety had been in the post for a while and it had finally arrived, fluttered through the letter box and landed at my feet. I was surprised by this diagnosis; there I was thinking my sense of self was rock solid. I am Generation Sense of Self, this is what we do. We have been filling in ‘About Me’ sections since 2006. I thought I was the most sensiest of selfiest of anyone I knew.
‘You will never know what I truly think of you,’ she said, just as I was about to leave, letting me know she had already sensed how I work. ‘You might be able to guess from my demeanour if I like you, but you’ll never know exactly what I think of you on a personal level. You need to let go of that thought if we’re going to make any progress.’
At first I was filled with an uncomfortable paranoia; then an almost immediate sense of total relief. She was telling me to stop making crap jokes. She was telling me to stop saying sorry for ploughing through her Kleenex supply on the table next to me. She was telling me that this was a room where I didn’t have to labour over every word and gesture and anecdote to accommodate her in the hope that she would like me. This woman with no sense of self, no self-regard, no self-esteem – a shapeshifting, people-pleasing presence; a tangled knot of anxiety – was being given permission to just be. She was telling me I was safe to let go in this room just behind Oxford Circus, with the cream carpet and the burgundy sofa.
I left her office and walked the five and a half miles home. I was both liberated with the relief that I had finally found my way to that room and unbearably heavy with the weight of what was to come. I told myself that everything could be ironed out in three months.
‘She thinks I’ve got no sense of self,’ I told India as she made our dinner that night.
‘That’s bullshit,’ she replied indignantly. ‘You’ve got a stronger sense of self than anyone I know.’
‘Yeah, but not that kind of sense of self,’ I said. ‘Not, like, how I will vote in the EU referendum or what my favourite way of serving potato is. She means I break myself off into different bits to give to different people, rather than being whole. I’m so restless and unsettled. I don’t know how to be without all the things I use to prop me up.�
��
‘I didn’t know you felt like this.’
‘I feel like I’m falling apart,’ I told her.
‘I don’t want you to be sad,’ India said, holding me, barefoot in our kitchen, as the spaghetti boiled on the stove with a gentle bubbling sound. ‘I don’t want you to do this if it’s going to make you sad.’
The following Friday, I told Eleanor that India said she didn’t want me to go through this process because she was worried it would make me sad. I told her that I half agreed.
‘OK, well, news flash,’ she barked in her reassuringly plain-speaking, sarcastic tone that I would come to crave as the year went on. ‘You’re already sad. You’re really fucking sad.’
‘I know, I know,’ I replied, reaching for the Kleenex again. ‘Sorry for using all these. I bet you really get through a lot, in your line of work.’ She assured me that was what they were there for.
And so the process began. Every week I went in and we did detective work on myself to answer the question of how I came to be who I was in twenty-seven years. We did a forensic search of my past, sometimes discussing a thing that happened the night before, sometimes a thing that happened at school in a PE lesson twenty years ago. Therapy is a great big archaeological dig on your psyche until you hit something. It’s a personal weekly episode of Time Team, a joint effort of expert and presenter – the therapist, Mick Aston, the patient, Tony Robinson.
We talked and we talked until she posed a cause-and-effect theory that fitted; then, crucially, we worked out how to change it. Sometimes she set me tasks – things to try, stuff to work on, questions to answer, thoughts to mull over, conversations I had to have. For two months I cried every Friday afternoon. Every Friday night I slept for ten hours.
The big myth of therapy is that it’s all about pointing the blame at other people; but as the weeks passed, I found the opposite to be true. I heard about some people’s therapists who took on a sort of defensive, deluded mum role in their patients’ lives, always reassuring them that it was not their fault, but the fault of the boyfriend or the boss or the best friend. Eleanor rarely let me pass the accountability on to someone else and always forced me to question what I had done to end up in a particularly bad situation, which is why I always dreaded our sessions. ‘Unless someone dies,’ she told me one Friday, ‘if something bad happens in a relationship, you have played a part in it.’
A couple of months in and me and Eleanor properly laughed together for the first time. I came in – a mess – after a bad work week. I was low on money and self-esteem and I was worried about paying my rent and I was worried my career was going nowhere. My paranoia was spinning out of control; I had imagined that anyone I had ever worked for thought I was incompetent, untalented and useless. I didn’t leave the flat for three days. I described a vivid fantasy to her in which a boardroom of people who I didn’t know talked about what a terrible, incapable writer I was. She stared at me while I talked, then her face contorted in disbelief.
‘I mean –’ she breathed out and raised her eyebrows – ‘I think it’s insane that you think that.’ I noticed that she got more broadly, brashly Australian the tougher she was being. I looked up from my tissue; not the reaction I was hoping for.
‘Whole boardrooms of people you’ve never met?’ she said, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘That’s INCREDIBLY narcissistic.’
‘Well,’ I said, managing to snort with laughter. ‘Yeah. When you put it like that. It’s ridiculous.’
‘No one is talking about you.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, patting at my tears with the tissue, suddenly feeling like a character Woody Allen would play. ‘You’re right.’
‘Seriously!’ she said, still flabbergasted, flicking her fringe away from her high cheekbones. ‘You’re not all that interesting, Dolly.’
When I got into my third month, I had my first tear-free session. The box of Kleenex went untouched. A therapy milestone.
While my closest friends were encouraging of the process, soon it became apparent that self-examination made me boring to the wrong people. I started to drink less and less – always questioning whether I was doing it to have fun or doing it to distract myself from a problem. I tried to put a stop to people-pleasing, aware that giving my time and energy away so freely was what was chipping away at the void that I didn’t want to turn into a quarry. I was more honest; I told people when I was upset or offended or angry and valued the sense of calm that came with integrity, paid with the small price of an uncomfortable conversation. I became more self-aware, so inevitably I made a tit of myself for the amusement of other people far less.
I felt like I was growing week by week; I felt my insides photosynthesize with every day I put new habits into practice. I developed an indoor plant obsession; a sort of verdant pathetic fallacy. I read up on what I should put in every corner of light and shade and I filled my flat with an abundance of green; pothos plants crawled down bookshelves, a Boston fern sat on top of my fridge, a Swiss cheese plant fanned against my bright, white bedroom wall. I hung a perfect philodendron above my bed and at night the odd cold droplet of water fell off the heart-shaped point of its leaves and on to my head. India and Belle questioned how healthy this was for me, comparing it to Chinese water torture. But I’d read that it was guttation – a process where a plant sheds unnecessary water at night; it works hard to get rid of everything putting pressure on its roots. And I told them that meant something to me. Me and the philodendron were doing a thing together.
‘Any more plants in here,’ Farly said one day, looking around my bedroom, ‘and it’s going to turn into Little Shop of Horrors.’
When I didn’t drink as much, I experienced the brand-new sensation of waking up with a linear recollection of the night. The things people said; the way they looked; the signals between each other that they thought were discreet. I noticed that whenever I turned up to a social event, people wanted the bad stuff. If it was at the pub table, they wanted another bottle of wine, they wanted to call a drug dealer, they wanted to sit outside and chain-smoke, they wanted to drunkenly trade nasty gossip about someone we knew. Without realizing, I had become a black-market tradesman on a night out. I was everyone’s green light for bad behaviour – and I hadn’t realized until I stopped.
Eleanor’s most brutal and brilliant takedown was delivered when we were talking about this one Friday afternoon.
‘People want me to gossip, I’ve realized,’ I told her. ‘It’s the thing they expect of me when I arrive somewhere, particularly if they’re getting wrecked.’
‘And did you gossip?’
‘A bit, yeah,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realize how much I used to do it.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘I don’t know. To feel close to people? To make conversation? Maybe to feel powerful,’ I said. ‘That’s the only reason people gossip. I obviously did it to feel powerful.’
‘Yes, you did,’ she said with the slight smile she reserved for when she was pleased I had got there before she did. ‘It’s putting other people down so you could feel big.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
‘Do you know who else does that?’ There was a pause. ‘Donald Trump.’ I burst out laughing.
‘Eleanor. I have come to really appreciate your brand of tough love,’ I told her. ‘But even for you, that’s a bit of a stretch.’
‘Fine, a Nigel Farage then,’ she said, shrugging slightly as if I was being pedantic.
‘My therapist compared me to Donald Trump today,’ I texted Farly as I walked out on to Regent Street. ‘I think I’m making real progress.’
Then around five months into therapy, I suddenly felt like we’d hit a brick wall. My development plateaued. I found myself being defensive with her. She told me I was being defensive with her. In one session, I proposed that perhaps there was no answer to be found in dissecting the events and decisions of my life; in going over and over the thing that happened with that boyfriend once or the thing that my
parents did or didn’t say when I was growing up. That perhaps it was a futile exercise; that perhaps I was just born this way. Did she think there was a chance I was just born this way? She looked at me blankly.
‘No, I don’t,’ she replied.
‘Well, obviously you don’t,’ I said in a surly fashion. ‘Because otherwise there would be literally no need for your job.’
If I fucked up that week, I sometimes worked out the story I was going to give her so she’d go easy on me. Then I remembered how much I was paying to see her; all the masses of extra work I’d had to take on to afford it; what a privilege it was to be able to afford it at all. And what a complete waste of money it was if I didn’t tell her the truth. I spoke to some friends in analysis who said they got nervous before their sessions because they tried to come up with something juicy enough to tell the therapist. I felt the total opposite. I always contemplated what I could keep from her or what positive spin I could wrap a story in so it didn’t seem as bad as it really was.
But, of course, she always saw right through it. Because I’d let her in on how I worked. And I always resented how well she knew me and I always burst into tears when she challenged me. Not because I disliked her for questioning something I’d done but because I disliked myself for doing it in the first place.
At six months, I got to the point where I nearly said: ‘Well what makes YOU so fucking wise about all this stuff? Come on. Tell me how perfect YOU are,’ in a session. And I realized I needed a break from it, but I didn’t tell her. She told me she ‘sensed some anger’; I told her I was fine. I started cancelling sessions. I missed a month and a half.
When I returned to her, I found she was far more understanding than I remembered and I wondered if I had invented her dogged and unforgiving line of inquiry. Perhaps she had become the blank canvas at which I threw all the anger and judgement I felt towards myself. In the middle of our hour, she asked me why I’d stopped coming regularly without discussing it with her. I thought about making an excuse; I thought about the money and time I was spending on this; how it was too late to back out now.
Everything I Know About Love Page 17