The psychologist's room

What stops me from writing?

In the psychologist's room, I learn there is a triangle, with me at one point, my Dad at another, and a male friend at the third. But there is no connecting line between my Dad and the friend, not the first time it comes into my head. Why were we three all there together? More to the point, what was the friend doing there?

Turns out there were similarities between my Dad and this friend, and I have problems (how benign a word!) with my relationship with both of them. But my Dad is dead, and the friend is very much alive. My Dad is a ghost, and present everywhere.

Many things happen in the psychologist's room. The triangle links up. I feel small, like a pinpoint, while the two men are enormous. My Dad controlled more with silence than loudness; my friend is loud and aggressive and opinionated. (Why do I let him intimidate me?) I have a knot of tension in my forehead. My friend punches me in this knot, and I punch him back. We have a fistfight, then I put my hands on his shoulders, and calm both of us down.

At some point, the image of a pair of scissors appears. I snip the string (for that is what it is) that connects the three of us. My Dad tumbles off into the distance. I tie the ends of one piece of string around my friend, and we have a calm conversation. I start talking about my writing, about the memoir, and am not embarrassed.

More people come into the room, and my friend starts to fade.

At some point, my mother appears, and collects my father. They wave at me, and I wave back. It is goodbye.

The string is hard to be rid of, however. I put it in a bowl, and throw it out of the window, set fire to it, douse it with water. Finally, it becomes an infinity symbol, and I accept its presence in that form.

Now, the next day, I feel irritable and out of sorts, out of place. I want to scream and throw things around. It is, I know, an inevitable consequence of all that psychological and emotional work. I must wait for these feelings to work through me. I must write.

If only my parents, particularly my war-ravaged father, had had the opportunity to work through the scars of their sorrow too.

Travelling

She thought how strange it was to be sitting in an office with her eyes closed, thinking about something that happened twenty years ago. And then to not just think about it, but really dive into it, and imagine herself back into that moment, or succession of moments, that have never left her. To watch and listen as the self she was then, and the self her father was then, spoke to each other. They weren’t speaking, they were shouting, their mouths were making ugly shapes, their words hurt, their words flung sharp stones and ragged glass.

I need to leave this poisonous house.

You’ll end up in the gutter.

The psychologist takes her through these moments again, she is there with her, asking her to reimagine them. What would you have liked your father to say to you? What would you have said to him? How would you have liked him to respond? She didn’t think she’d be able to create this dialogue, and was surprised when she stumbled out a few words, then those words became stronger. Then she was there, her present self, with her younger self and her father; she was there, and she was talking to her younger self. What would she say to you now? What would your younger self ask you? What would you say to her?

She marvelled at the incongruous contrast of that inner reimagined dialogue, that time travel, created in that cocoon of healing and restitution, with the bustle of the shopping centre crowds, the random conversations, the smells of anonymous meat and fat, the scratched tiles. Babies in strollers. Pierced eyebrows. People who knew nothing of where she had just been.