MANTALK: Everybody needs therapy

I went to therapy. I wasn’t sick or lonely or anything. I went because it was offered. Plus I was curious. The therapist - a woman in her early 50s, from my estimation - sat on a blue sofa while I sat on a brown sofa. I wondered why she had to get the blue sofa when the person in therapy is the one in need of colour in their lives. She asked me questions and I answered. For example, she asked me what I feared most. I mentioned cancer, poverty and my children not liking me.  She smiled and crossed her legs like most therapists do in the movies when the client has mentioned something they think has potential to offer more insight into their lives. She had on a dress, a long flowy dress with little pink flowers. On her feet were comfortable rubber shoes. She looked more like a hipster than a therapist.

MY DAUGHTER

“Do you worry that your children might not like you?” She asked. I had asked for green tea when she had offered something to drink earlier because green tea seemed more sensible than whisky at 11am. It tasted terrible!

“Children are weird,” I told her. I told her about how my daughter wants to fit in school because one of her friends lives in Runda and does these fancy sleep-overs and she wants to keep up with these Joneses, and I stopped her in her tracks and told her that life doesn’t work that way; that there are rich people and there are the rest.

“We are in ‘the rest’ category,” I told her, and this means that I work harder to keep her in a good school, and she also needs to work harder to stay in Runda in future and have sleepovers with her daughter’s friends.

RICH FATHER

 “This is who you are,” I told her. “Be proud of who you are, embrace who you are, you can be anything you want if you work hard and not compare yourself with other people. “ Then I asked her if she had questions and she said she didn’t.” I said to the therapist, “I could tell she was disappointed and she wished she had a rich father who didn’t bang on about hard work, and I think she disliked me a little.”

The therapist smiled again. She was always smiling and it was beginning to irritate me. “You want to be loved or liked?” She asked me. I almost rolled my eyes; “I want to be loved and I want to be liked by my children. If you didn’t like me, for example, I’d not mind much but if they loved me and didn’t like me as a person, as a human being, it would break my heart because liking your parents is a more active choice because they are nice decent people, but loving them sometimes feels like a default.”

She also asked me if I was feeling some angst that I was turning 40. We were in her home office at the back of her palatial home in a leafy suburb, one of those very old municipal like houses that seem to have been handed down families for generations. Maybe the ghost of her father walked the hallways at sunrise. Her home office was very cozy. There was a massive oil painting on the wall. Outside a tree branch peeped inside the room through a large window. A heater hummed across the room, chasing away the cold.

“It’s not angst,” I murmured. “It’s certainly not angst. I’m in good physical shape, I’m healthy, I’m producing work that I like but I’m struggling with purpose.”

You know, I had initially thought that I’d be lying in a couch to be in therapy and that would have been better to tell you the truth, stretch my legs out and fold my arms behind my head and stare out the window.

“I have this daunting feeling that I can do more with art,” I continued, “that perhaps there is some latent talent in me that I’m not pursuing and I will die without pursuing it and that would be a shame.” She wrote something on a pad and then without looking up asked, “And what do you think that talent is and why are you not pursuing it?”

 I stared at her proper rubber shoes and said, “I watched a video of Jim

Carrey talking passionately about his love for painting and I thought, damn, how can he do two things so beautifully? I admired that courage. I want to make short films of everyday people and things. Of sunset, or a cancer patient lying down after chemo, of a mother soon after giving birth, of what I see outside my hotel window when I travel, of a child waiting for a school bus… I’d ask him, hey little man, what are you thinking about now? And I’d pursue that thread until I find a point of confession, of revelation...look, they are a bit mad, these ideas...”

EXPRESS EMOTIONS

Then I stopped and she protested, “Oh no no it’s interesting, but why don’t you do it then?” I wondered about that for a bit and then said, “Because I’m afraid it would steal from the heart of my writing and then as a result my composition as a human being, as an artist, will change.”

Anyway, I don’t want to bore you any further with what happened in that room but although I went in with such cynicism, I ended up enjoying it tremendously - the terrible green tea notwithstanding. In therapy, I realised, you end up expressing emotions that you didn’t think existed in you. Things you can’t tell anyone else over a drink. Or after sex. They are things that surprise you, light you up and challenge you. You go into therapy to talk to the person inside you.