I went to see my counsellor last week, for the first time in about 6 weeks. I no longer feel I need to see her every week, but I’m reluctant to cut the cord, so I had arranged to go back again.
I said at one point that I had found a kind of contentment, and she said ‘Contentment, that’s a new word for you’. And I thought, well, no, it’s not, not really. It’s only new in the context of the time she’s known me. I have had periods of ‘contentment’ in my life before, and I started to think what characterises them, and what it is that brings them to an end. And I decided that cross stitch is a good indicator, if I have a cross stitch project on the go, and an evening spent cross-stitching feels like a good evening and makes me feel happy, that is a sign of contentment.
But what are the things which disturb this? Thinking that things could be different, that life could be different, that I COULD have been a writer, or an academic, that I COULD be out there knocking them dead. And the thought of having contact with people who make me feel that I’m wonderful and special is scary because I might slip back out of this ‘contented’ phase and back to the place I was in this time last year, when nothing could make me feel happy. Far easier to think ‘No, no, this is me, this is who I am, this is what I’m good at and what I’m fit for’. And when I spoke to her about this (though not in such a coherent way, because I’ve now had a week to think about it), she used the words ‘tragic, in a way’, and I thought, what does she mean by that? Because if I start thinking of my life being ‘tragic’ that is what will drag me back down again, far better not to even think about it.
There is this tension between accepting myself as I am and the world as it is and striving to be something more and to make the world different. And how do you balance that, how do you find some kind of equilibrium, if you always have the feeling that you are capable of being someone else but you just can’t do it? Isn’t it better to be ‘a happy idiot’ (Jackson Brown, ‘The Pretender’)? I started to think that there is this box, or cupboard, that as long as I keep the lid on and the door shut I can keep going and be ‘content’, but if I start to open it and look inside then all kinds of things might come out. And so I thought about Pandora’s box, and I remembered that the last thing to come out of Pandora’s box was hope, and maybe it’s worth all the shit just to hang on to that hope.