Choose Life

How to be your own personal psychiatrist.
First of all, choose life.
Choose to give yourself another chance, then decide what way you prefer to have a dialogue with yourself.

Myself, I find drawing therapeutic - up to a point - its all very well to doodle lazily or sketch furiously but I end up with more questions than answers. So, I came back to writing, which I gave up it seems because it drew out the truth from within me. I gave up writing a diary decades back, then I gave up writing short stories, once my great passion.

I guess writing just does not allow one to bullshit around, if you ain’t saying what the bottomline is - you ain’t saying nothing at all.

And that’s the problem with writing letters - there’s always many things you cannot write, and the list just grows with years. Such as, my sister (who is in Canada) and I (in the UK). We used to sort of communicate through letters, she scarcely - me, more often. At least we used to communicate, often in letters our deepest fears and emotions could emerge. It is easy to do that when the correspondee is faceless and far away without the complications wrought by physical proximity.

Nowadays, when I wish to do the Eliza/Turing thing (see Alan Turing, scientist; see 'Eliza' psychiatrist computer program) with myself, I’ll do it the question and answer fashion...

ELIZA: Why do you feel unable to write?

ME: Leaving home and coming to live with my husband. In a foreign place, a cold unfriendly city. There's a growing wreckage of broken expectations and shattered dreams within me. With every rejection letter, every failed job application it grows. At least, we have our love. Yet I feel this nagging fear as if all love and all relationships have become just so much sand in my hands, trickling away, and I cannot do anything about it. And this fear paralyses me.

ELIZA: Why do you put heart and soul in a place where it will be burnt again and again?

ME: Its just that, the combined losses these past years of people and places, of love and security, I had gotten used to having around forever, built up to this desperate need. The unthinkable and unbearable - my grandmother dying. I still cannot accept it - I still find myself inventing fantastic theories of the afterlife and ancestral spirits watching over the living. Somehow I have developed this frightening certainty that those we loved are still among us, in a form we cannot perceive. To lose them completely is unacceptable.

ELIZA: What about losing yourself in work and exorcising that fear?

ME: That is an enduring problem. Work. Or the lack of it. My non-earning, non-happening career. It has not been happening for so long now that I find myself forgetting what it is I do. I have already passed the point where any remnants of arrogance or pride in my work were ripped away from me, leaving me a flayed ghost facing the bitterest cold of any winter in my life.

Thus I stopped dreaming, hoping, wanting. And that is the essence of my character, to dream, to look forward, to bounce back with hope. Not any more. Nothing I had wanted seems within reach now, nothing I could have seems worth having.

ELIZA: Why have you lost confidence in your dreams?

ME: I see every day irrefutable proof, of aging, my body giving up on me. My hands shake, my eyes peer unattractively, my skin sags on my face after just one night of partying, I am no longer nice to wake up next to. Luckily, appearance was never a very huge deal with me. Life is. Living is. That makes it more frightening - this cold, dark, silence growing within me. When I reach out for a purpose to hold on to in whatever I am doing, I find no straws to clutch. There’s nothing in there. Only the corpse of my dreams.

ELIZA: Who do you see as being responsible for this?

ME: No one. Everyone. I can close my eyes and visualize no one villain, no one murderer of my dreams.

Life, in the living of it has been responsible for it. The gradual revelation, the learning, the maturing. You would have to be superbly protected and cushioned against reality not to reach the point I have reached after you have been through that.

ELIZA: So, what would you call happiness ?

ME: My definition of happiness has got whittled down over the years to a minimalist simplicity. Under the greatest of pressure and when feeling the most unbearable pain, what I then long for - to get that would be happiness.

Also, happiness is the sun, the green grass, warm sweet smelling air, an open green landscape for miles around, noone with me but my love and we have no pressure to make any judgement nor be subjected to one for choosing to stay there.

Happiness is also complete trust and a feeling of being comfortable with someone. This we have. But have we managed to stay cocooned each in one’s own selfhood, need and independance, all somehow neatly balanced? It is too early to say.

Finally, happiness is to be able to, just once more, feel that complete oneness with my imagination, a pure creative impulse unstained by current emotional experience, that innocent Dreamtime of childhood. A merest glimpse of it is what would make me happy.

And so I wait...