Doubleblog

Unexpected second post in one day. On reflection, although everything I said earlier about my therapist is 100% true, I feel like I wronged her by what I omitted. Today's session - it has been agreed - was indeed our last, and although I'm free to phone her and ask to start coming to see her again if I change my mind, and although I'm fairly certain that my reasons for leaving are sound, I left her house today and walked the eight or nine minutes back to my house in fairly constant tears. She has been a fantastic therapist and although we differ in many ways, the year I've spent seeing her has, without question, changed me dramatically, and for the better.

Therapy is a complicated beast. I've had two different friends tell me, in the last 24 hours, that they've had it with therapy, that it's not for them. I've been going, on and off, for six years. In that time I've seen five different therapists. All along, I felt like I've been utterly upfront, 100% honest, blunt, articulate, intelligent - in short, the dream client. But of course, I am a nightmare: so persuasive, certainly believing my own bullshit and sometimes even managing to fool them. I finished with my first (lovely) therapist after several months, claiming that I wanted to try a different type of therapy since I'd already said it all but was still feeling really sad. I was fed up with focusing on my past, I explained, and wanted to get better fast. I left her for a CBT therapist, who I didn't like precisely because she refused to focus on my past. But I also met a guy, and went out with him for long enough to persuade myself that I was now complete and not depressed. Then we broke up and I went back into therapy, this time with a Human Givens therapist who was great. He retired after six months, and I felt a bit better. Then I got worse again and went to a new lady. Then I met a guy and got so excited that I stopped going again. Then the guy vanished and I went back. Then I moved house, out of my parents' home and into my current flat, and felt better. Then I felt nagged - not depressed, but certainly like there were issues bubbling. I found my lady this time a year ago.

And, over the months, we've talked about stuff I've NEVER talked about with the other four. I admitted things I'd never even said in my head. It wasn't that this therapist was profoundly better than the others, or that I suddenly felt more able to be truthful: I'd never felt embarrassed about anything with the other four. I'd never knowingly lied.

Therapy is as much about timing and chemistry as any other relationship. It takes commitment and luck. With this lady, for a random convergence of reasons, I was able to get to the nub of the gist. After six years of on-off therapy, I finally found my core, and - with the help of a lot of concurrent reading and thinking and hard work - I let a lot of stuff go, and now I'm a new Jane, still the same, recognisable and true, but utterly changed. And part of feeling more normal is an absolute awareness that I am likely to dip again. I may go on a hundred first dates, all of them rubbish. I may spend two years writing my MA book and then realise it's crap. Or perhaps I'll lose both my legs in a freak burger van accident at Glastonbury tomorrow night. I feel tremendously lucky that I will always have the option of returning to therapy, should I feel like I need it again, and to have the confidence that it'll probably help. For now, though, I want to go it alone. So I am. Going it. Alone.

My therapist doesn't disagree - she can see I'm changed. But she believes that there's more to discuss, and I don't think she's just doing it for the money. As I said in my earlier blog entry, I see her point too: there's definitely more I could say, every week forever. But I want to take this leap and see what happens, and she understands that. She's sad because therapy means something different for her. It's about a relationship. "Don't forget, though, that this isn't a relationship for me," I chastised her. "We're not equals. You know what's going on in your head and mine, but I only know one side of the story. Yes, it's an open agreement, and we've sat in a room together for an hour a week, and you've helped me a lot, you've changed my life, but all along, I've been paying you to sit there. That's like a guy persuading himself that he's in a good relationship because he's got a regular arrangement with a prostitute. Sure, I care what you think. I wish it were deeper than just me paying you to listen. We all want our therapists to like us, to think we're the best client ever, just like Jane and Michael want Mary Poppins to stay forever. We all want to be favourites. But we know it's not possible. I learned early on with my first therapist that there's no point asking questions. You can ask, but you won't get an answer, it'll waste time, and time is money. So we stick to the accepted topic: me.

"You wear a wedding ring but I don't know if your husband's alive or dead - or whether, perhaps, you wear it for show or to see if it makes me react a certain way. I've come to this house every week for a year but I don't know if it's yours or if you just rent this room to do your therapy. I don't know if you have kids. I don't know anything. You know more than most people ever will about me, and I know next to nothing about you. This is not a relationship." She looked at me and I thought she seemed sad. I tried to end on an upbeat note, and we smiled and joked, but when we said goodbye, I felt guilty. I touched her arm, almost maternally, as if to comfort her, and it was only once I was out on the street, where I'd been mugged several weeks before, that I felt able to be upset. I don't think it's that I'm running from the truth, or that I'm in denial about another few layers of misery: I feel free to go back to therapy at any time. I think it's just that I like her and she likes me, and that we both know we'll probably never see each other again, and that that is sad. I know it's time for me to move on. I cried, and then I stopped, and now I'm going to Glastonbury.

Lodged.

So the 44 year old father of three got a new job in Leeds and it turned out that he didn't want to come and live in London after all, and I felt a bit outraged that he only thought to tell me this on the day he was meant to be coming round and viewing the flat, and once again it exacerbated the feeling I've had all along that looking for a lodger is a bit like looking for a boyfriend, except they move in straight away and pay you, so it's a bit like a really intense prostitution arrangement without the sex. OK, this analogy's never going to work.

But basically, you have to advertise your flat, and your room, and take really nice photos, and then, because you're looking for someone to live with you, you have to show a photo of you too, and I used one of me looking down-with-the-kids at a festival in an attempt to scare off all the old people who want somewhere impossibly quiet to live. My flat (me) received a LOT of attention, which made me feel good about my interior design skills (my appearance). But in the end I only considered now-confirmed-to-be-selfish father-of-three and one other man, who didn't ask me a single question in our hour-long get-to-know-each-other session, but who shares many of my interests and doesn't seem to be the kind of person who'll have noisy late night phonecalls (sex partners). So that's confirmed: I have a new lodger. I feel like I'm growing.

The ganglion update is as follows: as we all know, the skin on the back of one's hand is very wiggly and stretchy, you can push or pull it around a great deal, in comparison (for example) with the skin on the palm of your hand, which is stuck to the tendons or whatever there is below it, and can't move. The flexibility of the skin on the back of the hand is quite important as it allows you to wiggle your fingers and rotate your wrist and all sorts of other things. After I'd had the operation, the doctor told me that as the scar tissue forms, it tries automatically to fasten to the tendons etc. below it, and if left alone, the skin around the incision would affix to that point in my hand. He'd put a bit of some special doctor's fabric in there (probably a bit of old T-shirt) to stop the scar from sticking to the back of my hand, but he said that I would need to massage it with some moisturising cream or oil for a few weeks to try and encourage it not to stick. He was quite blasé about the whole thing and I felt unworried.

It's now nearly ten days later and the skin is definitely stuck. I've been massaging the whole freaking time, even though it does not feel in any way pleasant. I'm not sure if I'm meant to be rubbing gently to gradually encourage the skin to loosen, or if I should be doing a semi-invasive deep tissue rub to break down the tissue. Neither seem to work. My left hand is loving all the attention and increased oil: I will inevitably age dramatically differently on each side as a result and end up as an eighty year old, gnarled, veiny, hooked on the right and youthful, soft, plump on the left. While the cut looks to be healing very nicely and is now just an inch-long, rose-pink pale line, the scar tissue beneath (presumably still with a few undissolved stitches within) remains raised and ridgelike, leaving a small hump approximately half the height and interest of my original ganglion. Plus, because the skin is stuck, it means I can't bend my wrist very far in either direction, so yoga and/or violent waving are both out. This is a loss for my health, mental state, and the enjoyment of departing guests.

I am finding the whole thing less and less funny and, while I was never one to listen avidly to my dad's opinions of my appearance, in future I will be even less likely to take his advice if he starts suggesting I ought to get something looked at.

Anyway, I really wanted to write a perfectly-weighted, immaculately-crafted blog entry for a change, but once again time has run faster than I can, and I am leaving work in less than 1.5 hours to walk out in the bucketing rain towards what will hopefully be my last ever therapy session for some time. I've been trying to leave for weeks, but she insisted on a minimum of four weeks to summarise and wind down, and then she heavily implied that I would be missing a trick (making the biggest mistake of my adult life) if I didn't carry on, and that I'm only letting myself down etc. etc., and of course, child that I am, her resistance only makes me tug harder to get free.

She's been trying everything to make me stay, to the extent that I then said I'd stay if it was free but that I can think of a lot of other fun things I can do for £45 a week, and then she pounced on that with an alacrity that reminded me of that really sweet little dinosaur in Jurassic Park who gets angry and SUDDENLY these huge red wing-ed flaps come out of its head and neck and it's the scariest thing of all time. Obviously in real life all she did was shift imperceptibly in her chair but I knew that she was saying that I'm using money as an excuse to finish, that really I am scared of all the terrible truths I will uncover in future sessions and I'm running away from something that could be enormously painful but enormously beneficial.

But like I've told her over and over again, I am just FREAKING BORED OF IT ALL. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm sure there's more I could talk about with her, certain of it, but for now, I've had enough. I've said it over and over again for the past few sessions, and then dutifully paid her £45 for the experience, and now I'm going to do it one last time, and then take the tube to Tooting and get my eyebrows threaded, and then go home and pack for Glastonbury, and then leave tomorrow morning and get trench foot and liver dialysis. See you on the other side.

The Capital Lettters Are BACK

The bandages are off and what you can see if you look at the photo is the inch-long wound that's been left behind following my ganglion and metacarpal boss extraction/planing just under a fortnight ago. It is minging enough, but when you add in the fact that 1) the gash itself is slightly blackened with the remnants of the indelible marker line, drawn on by the surgeon to show him where to make the incision; 2) either side of the cut, there are weird, corpse-like, wrinkled splits of skin caused by the adhesive sutures that I've been wearing for two weeks, and 3) the clear lesson I think we've all learned about not sunbathing while wearing a rectangular bandage... well, I am sure you can agree that it is not a pretty sight. Still, it's done now and is unarguably a MASSIVE improvement on a bean-sized, mostly-painless lump that no one but my dad ever noticed. Definitely worth it.

During my recuperation, several things have happened to me, the most life-altering of which is that I have accepted a place on an MA course in Creative Nonfiction (think true stuff written in a narrative, story-like way: Bill Bryson, Jon Ronson, Lost Looking For Fish), starting in September. This will involve lectures on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings from 6-9pm, plus reading approx. one book a week, plus writing a full, long-form work of non-fiction, at least 60,000 words long, to be submitted in two years - or else I fail. I was offered the place a while ago and went through a fairly gut-wrenching process as I decided whether or not I could or should do it, the world doesn't need any more books, what right do I have to write etc. etc., but in the end, lack of a better idea pushed me over the edge and I paid my deposit on Monday. I'm now skint as all my savings are locked into a special account until next February, so I am getting a lodger. The one I want is a 44 year old man who lives in Yorkshire with his wife and three daughters, and only needs the room on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It's all go.

In the meantime, I have been wincing over the government's climbdown over the NHS (although OBVIOUSLY I'm glad that they've realised what a lot of mistakes they were making, the whole process has still been a sad waste of everyone's time and money); crying at Terry Pratchett's assisted dying documentary (Monday night - watch it on iPlayer if you missed it - I wasn't crying because I didn't think they should die with assistance, I was just crying because nice people dying before they want to is sad); eating doughnuts but not gaining weight (I appear to be in that cruel, all-too-brief, magic metabolism zone); spending many pounds having my hair cut and dyed to the point where absolutely no one has noticed; going to my favourite London night out of the year, the UK Beatboxing Championships finals, where the crowd is more genuinely diverse than at anything else I attend, a broad sweep of audience by gender, race, age and social group. Plus it's purely about talent - no interviews with the finalists, no sob stories, no Dead Wife Daniels, just young lads - still no girls on stage :( - who practice hard and are very very good at what they do. Tickets £11. Amazing. Oh, and I saw the ridiculously sad Senna, and was a bit ashamed when I admitted to myself that I wouldn't have been quite as sad if he hadn't have been pretty much one of the most attractive men I have ever stared at. Because apparently, in the appalling world of my head, ugly people dying in Formula One accidents isn't as tragic. Seriously, I don't deserve to say things out loud.

lower case update

ok well it was briefly quite fun being injured but i am v bored of it now. i cant write without looking like i am six and holding my crayon in a fist. i cant hold my book open on the tube. i start writing text messages and by the time i've finished them the recipient has died. it takes me fifteen minutes to put my bra on, a process that now involves yelping. doing up trousers is too irritating to attempt. typing seems briefly ok if i hold veeeeeeery very still but then suddenly i'll over-extend and i'll pull my stitches and it brings tears to my eyes.

still, on the upside, apparently even with my swollen hand covered in iodine, bandaged, bruised and hangng limply from a sling, my father said that visually it is a massive improvement from what was there before, so monstrous was my half-grape-sized ganglion. its unconditional love like that which is really something special, i think. young parents take note. love you daddy. for better or worse, the offending object has now been removed, along with a previously undiscovered metacarpal boss, which sounds like a leader of the fish mafia, but is in fact a bit of unnecessary bone that the nice doctor also planed off while he was digging around in there. the bullish, michael-winner-style anaesthetist wouldn't allow me to have a local anaesthetic because apparently i might flinch inadvertently, which was a disappointment, and in my pre-op excitement i forgot to ask for my presentation pot, but apparently i may be left with a scar so i will still have a souvenir and can tell people i was injured while doing something unspeakably cool like stage-diving at lollapalooza, rather than having cosmetic surgery on an unwanted cyst.

stitches are coming out on friday, all being well. i imagine iwill have a few sense of humour failures between now and then, but the whole living-with-only-one-hand-and-not-the-hand-you-write-with thing has been educational i suppose, and it's nice to have a break from the old routine. i did wonder whether my job satisfaction was at a worrying nadir when i realised i'd actually prefer to have an operation than go in to work last thursday, but i compared notes with kate who said that variety is all-important and that much as she loves her job, she was still looking forward to this wednesday's fire training with some degree of excitement.

i have much to say on several topics but nothing that cant wait until my touch typing is back to 100wpm. your patience will be rewarded at an unspecified future date.

Whatever next

The problem with doing something as accidentally funny as sending your boss to a strip club is that nothing else seems worth writing about. Also I have undergone a substantial, Nietzsche-driven epiphany over the past few weeks, and have become unimaginably calm about existence, which means that my usual ability to ramble on for thirty eight paragraphs detailing my intense self-loathing has evaporated. I'd explain what's changed although I think it might ruin it. Plus I don't think I can say it better than Gary Cox, and wholeheartedly recommend his concise, funny, life-changing book to anyone with a vague interest in a) facing up to reality and b) managing to be pretty happy while accepting the inherent absurdities. Am now whipping through the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, which is so good that I regularly start underlining a pertinent phrase and then, ten lines later, realise I should probably stop if I don't want to be drawing disappointingly wonky lines in black biro over the entire book. And, while the contents are amazing, there is also the added bonus that getting out an oversized cream-coloured tome emblazoned with The Denial of Death while standing on a packed Northern Line train - well, it does give one a bit of a frisson.

So yeah, I'm actually kind of happy. I'm in my own little world but it's the best one I've got. I've been off anti-depressants for several months, I've been through a (minor) break-up without completely breaking down, and following a period of intense vulnerability, I'm now in the process of winding up my therapy. It's been almost exactly a year since I started with my current lady and the journey's been extraordinary (for me), painful (for me, my parents and my friends) and worthwhile. I could obviously find many hours of stuff to blather on to her about each week from now until the end of time, but there's something in me that wants to go it alone for a bit. I guess I feel like it's now a luxury rather than a requirement, and besides, it'll be nice to save the money (read: buy more neon vest tops). I'm positive I'll be back at some point but right now, I'm counting down to Glasto and looking forward to life being a bit simpler for a while.

However, when you take into account the fact that I don't really have much to say about the inside of my head any more and that, post-AV referendum, my interest in politics has fallen like Cheryl Cole out of Air Force One (assuming of course that the Americans had strapped loads of those scuba diving weights onto Cheryl as otherwise she'd just waft gently down to earth like a sycamore seed), then you might begin to wonder (as I have) what in the name of all that is irrelevant or self-absorbed I will find to write about ever again. I know that issues like the NHS and the schools system are still vital, but somehow it's hard to care since the way that parties get elected is so very different to the way they have to govern, and such a small percentage of the country has the power to change anything. It's like getting emotionally involved with a heroin addict - you always end up getting hurt. We get the politicians we deserve, and I think I'm going through a period of educated stropping.

So I'm spending my time not reading the papers, not thinking about myself in particular, not worrying about very much at all, just getting things organised, hoping the sun keeps shining, trying not to eat pizza more than once a day, telling myself that my ganglion operation tomorrow will be fine and wondering whether asking if I can watch is a good idea. It's been inside my hand for so long, though - who can blame me for being curious about its extraction? I think it will be smooth and white, like a baby quail's egg. Ew. The amuse bouche from hell: ganglions with mustard salt.

On that delightful suggestion, I'll let you get on. Not sure when I'll be typing again, or what I will think of to write about given that my two main muses have left me, but perhaps I'll think of something and will be able to dictate to a minion. Alternatively if there's a topic you feel I should be addressing, inspiration is always welcome. Happy Wednesday.