Dear A,
Tell me what to do! I’m menstruating again and my hormones are all over the place. We sat for an hour making uncomfortable conversation. He said my message had been a bolt from the blue, and I said I thought his delay in answering might mean he wasn’t going to. He asked me why – I had trouble explaining. Eventually I said I thought he would be angry with me, for maintaining silence for so long and then breaking it pretty much on a whim. He said that if it was anybody else, he would be angry. I said that I’m nothing special and he said he begged to differ.
We had 20 minutes before I had to leave. I said I felt sad, but I didn’t know why. He put his arm around me. Slowly, he kissed me and I kissed him. Bittersweet is the word that comes to mind. At the ticket barrier he didn’t want to let me go. A train guard who was watching us kindly suggested he saw me onto the train, but I declined. I’ve invited him to come and stay with me next week, however. Now I’m panicking about it. I want him but when I don’t want him I DON’T want him, and if he stays with me in a city he doesn’t know we will have to be together every hour of the day.
My mother called, several times. I usually call her when I’m on the train. Today I didn’t. She asked me what I had been doing, apart from seeing you. I told her nothing much. She was pleased when I broke up with M, and if I said I had seen him she would worry. When I ask you to tell me what to do, I suppose I’m asking you to be someone other to me than you are. Someone more deeply invested in my life than you are able to be. And when I really think about it, I don’t want you to tell me, because I assume you probably feel the same way about the situation as my Mum does. I assume that to be the case, but if I knew it to be the case the therapeutic spell would break forever and I would hate you freely. And yet, even if I believe you think differently to my mother you can’t win. I felt two very odd and seemingly contradictory things towards you when I was with M. Anger, linked somehow to a sense of abandonment. And guilt – as if I had betrayed you.
I want to correct what I think was a misunderstanding in our session today. I was confused when you suggested that my use of the word “brooding” implied self-absorption or self-interest on your part, because that wasn’t what I had intended. I presumed I had used the word erroneously so I didn’t challenge you. But according to the dictionary, brooding can simply mean “deeply or seriously thoughtful”, and by this definition its meditative quality is only as introspective as all thinking-words must be. In my use of “brooding”, it was the “seriously” bit that I was getting at. I do sometimes feel excluded by what I term your seriousness, but only because I don’t understand it. I can’t see your thoughts to make sense of them; I can’t place you, or track you. That doesn’t mean that I think you have lost me, that you are standing impossibly outside of me unengaged. Most of the time, on balance, I have to conclude that you are engaged with me, but in a way that I can’t identify. It is that which is so unnerving.
I know you will counter that by pointing out that there are certainly times when I don’t feel you are with me at all, and of course you are perfectly correct. But you suggested the distance today when I didn’t feel it particularly, which makes me wonder. Perhaps, probably, it is unfair of me, but I sometimes think you drag things into the room that aren’t there because you want me to keep them in mind regardless. You pretend to see things that may well be part of my wider “clinical” picture but are not manifest at that particular moment in time, in order to educate me psychologically. I know that pre-supposes that you are always aware of exactly what I am feeling, and exactly which way you should respond to it. All the same, it grates on me how in discussion we always seem caught between the same binary oppositions – all or nothing, inside or outside, alone or overwhelmed… You could say it’s because I am unable to get past the dualities within myself that they appear time and time again, but I wonder if the very idea of these oppositions is worth challenging. I’m not sure I do always filter my perception through such a ruthlessly divided lens. The binary may be internalised to some degree, but there’s an awful lot of external pressure to maintain it too. If I comply (and catching myself in the act of this is the most aggravating thing of all) it’s because firstly it’s such a tremendous effort to see beyond it, and secondly because it promises to provide at least some structure to contain that which I fear cannot be contained, and is essentially meaningless. It is a flawed structure but it is still alluring. Much like my relationship with M, which fails to make sense of me but insists on being revisited just in case. If I could only completely surrender to another, or another’s idea, and exterminate my individual consciousness - perhaps then I could be saved.
I was going to make some hideous joke here, to detract from the brooding – see what I did there? - tone of that last paragraph, but God forbid I be accused of trying to entertain you. Anyway. I’ll see you on Wednesday.
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