The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

head-on

"head-on" 

I cancelled the therapy appointment that I'd had scheduled for tonight.

I didn't do it for any other reason than I can't afford to indulge myself in 'myself' right now. It's expensive, the mutual analysis of the thing I call 'my life', and I wanted to have the talk, I really did, but I reasoned out that it represented a week's worth of groceries and couldn't bring myself to do it. Jo will understand. That's why I pay her the big bucks.

I haven't been proud of myself in ages. I used to, quite often actually, but lately I'm feeling extremely substandard in every facet of my life. I have been reactionary and short-tempered the past couple days, mostly because my patience is wearing thin. I am feeling unattractive; I need a new hairstyle, I think, and my skin needs one of those sapphire/diamond abrasions. I need new clothes, I need to find a skin cream that can flatten the cold, dry winter air. I hate my stomach which twists in knots at its own whim. I hate that I am still lost in my head when it comes to a job, and I hate that I am a materialist because being poor would be much easier if I didn't have the nagging need to keep up with the Joneses. Literally. My best friend is a Jones.

Cognitive behavioural therapy...I do that. Yes, it works. If you think it doesn't, it's likely because you have issues, or because you haven't actually tried it. Obviously it works or it wouldn't be such a common practice for people with emotional issues. In fact, I don't know anyone who has gone to therapy who hasn't ended up either completely 'healed' from whatever was bothering them, or at least eighty per cent reformed. I say it works even though I am far from 'cured' because I am further still from the beginning. I leave the house, I am content more often than not, and I have a fairly decent grasp of why I am the way I am. The biggest thing, though, is that the reassurance I get from hearing someone speak who has been in my position but who is completely 'cured' is worth every penny spent on discussion. I spent thirty years being a neurotic who eventually fell into the panic well and therapy is the bucket that is pulling me out. I take no pride in admitting that I am one of Jo's most challenging clients. She says it makes me interesting, and I say it makes me a slow-learner.

Everyone I know who has been plagued with emotional issues who hasn't tried therapy are actually each fairly consistent with their misery. In other words, without an attempt to really understand their situation, they live in a world of half-truths and distorted thinking which keeps them running stationary. Their legs move but they're getting nowhere and they can't figure out why they're always tired and winded. Go figure. The thing is, most of us with 'issues' either inherited them or learned them from people who probably should have gone to therapy. See how that works?

I know it's not easy to give in to the hype. The very idea of going to therapy embarrassed me like nothing else when it was first suggested that I go. I refused it, took the card that was given to me as a referral and I wedged it in my wallet under the video rental card I never used. I then cried at the realization that people thought I was helpless and crazy, because happy, sane people are never given the business cards of therapists. I cried, I hid in my house, I got angry, but after about three weeks of unrelenting anxiety, panic and depression, I decided I had very little else to lose. I dialed the number and I made the appointment.

There was no couch, there was no pseudo-Freudian sitting in a leather chair with a pair of reading glasses and pensive stare. Instead, I had Jo, a very proper English lady with bright red lipstick who made me tea for every appointment. She'd been there, you see. Jo used to be a fashion model in France. She had been married to a man with money. One day, everything imploded when she had a panic attack, and she instantly became agoraphobic. She stopped everything, including walking outside her front door, and she lived like that for two years or so. When I would come close to crying about my situation, she would share details of her time as a recluse and it soothed me, because I knew she was recovered, and if she was, I could be too.

I don't want to go into the reasons why I have such trouble with things that most people don't even think about. I write about my reasons a lot, and most of the time they are reasons with expiration dates. The major one, though, the reason that has the least amount of chatter around it is that I've learned to be a nervous, frightened person, and now I'm trying to unlearn it. It is one of the hardest things one could possibly do. I feel no pride in where I am now, because I like to be at the finish line of every race, and right now I'm in the middle, and I am walking, not running. No matter, though. I will try to keep walking until I get to where I want to go.

My sister was depressed and suicidal from the age of nine to the age of twenty-four. It started out in spurts, and then eventually it got to the point where she never came out of her room, often wrapping herself in a comforter and sleeping until she couldn't sleep anymore. After two half-attempts at killing herself, she went for number three with much more planning and precision. I'd felt it coming, had read all the signs but misjudged her projected execution date and was very caught off guard when R. found the note on top of his work boots on a cold, snowy morning. I've written about that day a few times before and it never gets easier, but it did turn out okay, and she's alive and well today. What changed after that attempt? Well, I've asked her, actually, because there was a fear in me for about three years that she'd try it again and I needed to be reassured that she was past it. She told me that it was her new therapist, that this woman was able to communicate with her in a way that no one else ever had, and that she discovered the confidence to create her own life in a way that was authentic to her. She didn't make it easy, but a good therapist never will, and my sister cried a lot in those days, mostly purging all the garbage that had been in her body and in her mind for so many years. I don' t know everything that was said, though. She has always kept that part of herself private, and that's the way it should be. Rather than being suicidal or sad now, she recently went through an angry period which had her begin seeing a new therapist (her old one had moved), and again, she said she felt so much better after speaking with her. She has stopped going again, feeling more in control and less enraged about the past, and she tells me that if she ever needs to go again, she won't hesitate.

My point of view on people who refuse to contemplate seeing a therapist when they may benefit from it is that they don't know enough about it. First, you have to want to be better, but the problem with this is that someone who is genuinely 'depressed' doesn't want anything for them self. They often battle feelings of futility, the 'what's the point of life' thinking that keeps them down, so how could they be bothered to want to fix themselves when they've lost their grip on hope? I've felt that. I've known that emptiness and it's more frightening than panic is. What gets someone to act is logic. Though they may not be able to figure out why there's any need to keep life going, logic sometimes invades the darkness, making it seem possible that the twisted, pointless cyclic thinking is no more real than Santa Claus. That's when they go looking for ideas and possible solutions. That's when they hunt for light. Also, a lot of people with anxiety/depression issues tend to be fairly bright, and because they identify with being someone of moderate intelligence, they often incorrectly assume that they understand the reasons as to why they're feeling what they're feeling. How is it possible that your mind isn't warping your perceptions when your body and emotions do it on a daily basis? How is it reasonable to assume that anyone can fully understand all the confusing messages the body is sending after being tricked by unknown triggers? We're complicated beings. Even Freud suffered from panic disorder and had trouble curing himself. At the end of the day, most of us need an objective point of view to help us through. To me, this is common sense. All you have to do is look at your life, the way you are living, the circumstances that surround you, and ask yourself if it would make sense to you if you were an observer rather than the one living it. If it doesn't, if you know that your habits and thoughts are unproductive, dangerous or blatantly abnormal, then it's time to try to figure out what the deal is. At the end of the day, you're responsible for your own happiness, so why not go get it?

Jo tells me that I need to accept what I'm feeling, that I need to stop 'what if-fing', that I need to just 'do'. You'd think it would be easy for me. Let me just say that you have no idea how hard it is to do any of these things when your mind automatically takes the same roads to the same destinations.

What I hate, though, what really, really gets to me is the way so many people seem to enjoy having emotional/mental issues. It's like being a victim is more comfortable than surviving with honour. I have the good sense to hate it, you see. I know that there is a weakness associated with these problems and it isn't a natural weakness. A lot of people choose to be weak, whether it be conscious or unconscious, but every time we identify with the victim role, we wrongfully choose to believe that's what we are. I know how easy it is to believe, though. I've been feeling like a victim forever, and I've only just recently discovered that I don't have to always choose it.

I have Jo to thank for that. She helped me realize that most of the time, I'm looking for someone to save me. I am not ashamed by this, but I will accept that I will have to learn to save myself at some point. I will probably always want a pair of arms around me, but that's okay, as long as I can hold myself when the others aren't available.

I like to call this progress.