And at this stage in my recovery, it was still hard for me to imagine I would ever regain the confidence to be able to do that. My sense of self was still very small.
That is okay, said Ron. Slowly, slowly.
Then he said something very, very interesting. He said, ‘Have you ever considered that these fears you have, these stories you are telling yourself, are actually just that—just stories? Have you ever considered that this experience—the breakdown—could actually be a new starting place?’
Week after week, on his couch, crying—I can’t tell you how pointless I thought it all was. I tried to cancel almost every appointment.
But every time I walked out of Ron’s office, I felt a little stronger, a little closer to who I was, and who I wanted to be. A little more confident about telling the stories I longed to tell, even if just to myself. And the truth is, if I was being really honest, what I still wanted more than anything was to one day do all those things I’d sung about in that half-finished song of mine called ‘Amazing Life’.
Even though sleep was still proving elusive, now, at the very least, I had a routine in place; one that I followed to the dot, every single night.
After dinner, I’d take a shower, put on my pyjamas, put on a relaxing CD (of Canadian loons singing. Ka KAAAH). Then I’d do some stretching, something approximating yoga, make two hot drinks (valerian tea, then a Horlicks malted drink). Just before hopping into bed, I’d dab marjoram oil on my pillow, add a splash of lavender oil, do a little light reading, and then turn off the light and tell myself, ‘Goodnight now. Sweet dreams.’
Did I sleep?
No, I did not.
But I was now at a point where I had realised, thanks to The Weekes and Ron, that sleeping itself wasn’t really the point. The point was learning not to give so much of a fig about whether I slept or not. I mean, this had been going on for months now, this non-sleeping business, and I hadn’t dropped dead yet, had I?
Night after night, I used my awake time to experiment with the possibility that maybe Ron was right—maybe there was great power in deciding what story I was going to tell myself.
Was my lack of sleep going to be a big deal, or not a big deal? When Ron had first proposed this theory to me—that we have a choice in what we feel, because what we feel is based on how we think about things—it had felt radical, and wrong. Absolutely wrong. What choice did I have in feeling sad about Rowena, for example? Anything else would make me a monster. He gently urged me to pull out my little shovel, and dig a little deeper. In detail, he explained that there are some things we get to choose, and some we don’t. Those we can’t choose are circumstances. I could not choose whether or not Rowena lived or died, for example. But I did have some choice in what meaning I made, based on those circumstances.
When he said that, I cried and cried. ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked. I choked it out: ‘Because I feel like I should have been able to help her, and I didn’t.’ Slowly, over time, I came to understand that there is something comforting about guilt. It sounded bizarre to me when he first suggested that by choosing to feel guilty about Rowena’s death, to think guilty thoughts, I was in fact trying to exert some modicum of control over my situation. I was trying to contain, somehow, the horror of her illness and death. I was also using my guilt to keep her close.
I hated hearing that. But I came to realise, over time, he was right. For years I had been carrying a big sack of bad feelings, one that acted in a way as a proxy for my missing sister. Although this is a deeply common grief response, in my case it also proved deeply destructive. My sack of rocks was just too heavy. Now, because of my collapse, I had been given a chance to look at what I was carrying and work out which parts were mine, and which parts I could leave behind. As I allowed myself to feel the grief of my childhood, my resentment, my fear, my horror, I began to see that underneath it all was one simple truth: I loved my sister. I didn’t want her to die. And if I was going to get well, I was going to need to find healthier places to put all this love I was still dragging around for my big sister, Rowena.
I make it sound simple when I say it like that. In truth, it would take years. And it is still hard to this day. I can’t tell you how easily I default to this habit of grief, of powerlessness, of refusing to accept what was left.
But this lesson with Ron would have far-reaching implications—this lesson that although we cannot change circumstances, or the weather, the thoughts we have about them creates our feelings. If I wanted to fight that, I could. But there was another way.
Now, as I lay awake at night, my mind running its fake-news-banner of all the things that scared me the most, I would remember what The Weekes said: that every supposed failure was an opportunity to practise. As my mind presented my greatest fears, I started to use them as an opportunity to practise not fighting, just accepting. At night, my fears didn’t travel in any order I could make sense of, they just rolled out randomly, jumping from one to the other, like this:
You will
