A new courage was born in me that day, a reminder of the old me, the one who knew I was powerful.
When I got home, it was dark. Mum was waiting out the front, worried.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked.
Still huffing and puffing from my run, I said, ‘You’re not going to believe this: I just got locked in the cemetery!’
The look on her face was so confused, I could not help but laugh. And then she laughed. She laughed so much she had to run inside to use the toilet, and that made me laugh some more. Laughter! I’d forgotten how this felt! I like it, I said to myself. I should try and do this more often.
Although I now had a practical way of dealing with the symptoms of panic and anxiety, I hadn’t worked out how to stop crying. My mind still felt full of the sadness of Rowena, and Joffa, and the world at large. All the feelings I used to be able to keep at bay simply by keeping busy, and overeating, and dieting, were now present, demanding to be felt. My parents and I agreed that, as I was making progress, it was probably a good time to go and see a therapist. A family friend recommended Ron. Apparently, he had once studied at a seminary in preparation to become a priest.
‘Perfect!’ said Mum.
At our first appointment, it occurred to me that Ron looked familiar. He was an older gentleman. He had a mostly bald head, a white beard, and he wore a grey skivvy, grey slacks and glasses that made him look very much like my dad in his 1978 driver’s licence photo. But it wasn’t Dad I was thinking of. It was someone else. Then it came to me—of course! He looked like Graeme from The Goodies!
At first, every appointment I had with Ron felt like Groundhog Day. He’d open his door, invite me to lie on the couch and ask me how I was; I’d try to tell him, and then I’d just weep and spend most of the session trying to stop crying so I could speak.
Rowena, Joffa, Rowena, Joffa—my grief felt like a racetrack that I was cursed to loop again and again, with no exit in sight.
It was more than that, though. Up until this point, the only people I’d really spoken to about the thoughts in my head were, well, God. I had tried to talk to Mum and Dad but because I didn’t want to worry them, I wasn’t able to tell them the whole truth. I wasn’t writing things down either. That still felt beyond me.
Saying the words aloud—talking about the things I felt, how bad things had got—still brought with it a very strong sense of shame. How dare I feel, or have felt, these things? And one day, through tears, I managed to get this out: that I was ashamed, so ashamed, of how weak I was. I still could not quite believe that I—Clare bloody Bowditch, of the Sandy Bowditches—had had a bloody nervous breakdown.
Ron thought about this for a moment and then said, ‘What if there was a different way of thinking about what you went through? What if, instead of calling it a breakdown, you started calling it a breakthrough?’ A breakdown becoming … a breakthrough? I’d never heard of such a thing (although it must have been common language in therapist circles because, years later, watching Brené Brown’s famous second TED talk, I was surprised to hear her tell the world that her therapist had said exactly the same thing to her!).
A breakthrough? When he said that, I wanted to laugh, and I would have, were I not still weeping (with some force) all over his couch. How could this—the disintegration of personality, my inability to eat, sleep, think, read newspapers or even just stop shaking—possibly be thought of as a breakthrough? It certainly didn’t feel like one. Didn’t look like one either. Unlike in the movies, the start of my breakdown just looked like a young woman in the corner of a cafe in Oxford quietly weeping over a slightly dry but otherwise perfectly edible yoghurt-covered muesli biscuit. Nothing to kill yourself over, surely?
Ron explained that from what he understood, I had spent most of my life to date trying to live up to other people’s expectations of who I was, trying to please people, to fit in, to change myself in order to make sure I belonged, and to keep everything I really thought and felt, all my fears, to myself.
What if, he said, this is a chance for you to just be who you are? What if this is a chance for you to listen to yourself? And what if this is a chance for you to tell the truth, for the first time, about what you really want to do with your life? What do you want to do with your life?
Singing, of course. I wanted to write songs and sing. But … as if!
Like every kid everywhere, I had spent most of my life trying very hard to make my parents proud of me. And I don’t really know why, but I had always thought that if I pursued my dream of being a singer, I would somehow be disappointing them. They didn’t like pop music. They didn’t approve
