I keep hinting that there are ‘deeper’ things I want to write about, but that I don’t have time because the trivial everyday things take up my word count, and then I’m done and can leave whatever it is for another day. Except this morning I’m staring at the blank screen and empty Sunday-morning street and not sure how to set foot on this morning’s path, or where it’s going to take me, if anywhere at all.
Thursday’s therapy session was a bit like that. I hadn’t got any major rants to read out, or insights from the week, or anything at all that I could think of to say – not that it had been a perfectly blissful week, but in that moment I wasn’t tapping into anything in particular, so it descended almost into (very expensive) chit-chat. Sometimes it’s like that, but it never means the darkness has gone away for good, and I don’t suppose there’ll ever come a time when it will. There’s still the ongoing issue over housework, with the therapist (who of course has never stepped inside my house) obviously assuming that I’m exaggerating, and falling into the same pattern of people who don’t want to hear the truth as I see it. At one point, as I was trying to explain, she said: ‘that doesn’t sound like dyspraxia so much as you can’t be arsed to do it’ to which my reaction was: yes of course that’s what I’m saying, I can’t be arsed, I’m lazy and don’t take responsibility, how can you possibly not know that when I’ve told you a million times? I didn’t put it in quite those words, but my heart did sink a little to think she really wasn’t getting me at all. When we Skype I sit on the sofa and all she sees is a blank wall behind me, I was going to try doing it in the study last week but remembered at the last minute that there’s no webcam on the PC so that’s no good, maybe I’ll bring the laptop up here next time.
Well, so I did find something to write about which isn’t about causality, creativity, liminality, fate and destiny. Or Women Who Run With the Wolves. This week I read her analysis of the story about the Crescent Moon Bear, which is a version of the Grail story, that the point of the quest is not about the ostensible object, but the lessons you learn from undergoing the quest itself. This is hardly an original thought, but it is an interesting one to reflect upon. When I came back from my original travels, I felt I hadn’t learnt anything at all, that nothing had changed, that I couldn’t run away from myself; and the only lesson when I came back from Prague was there no way on earth I could ever be a teacher. Or maybe the lesson is: you can keep chasing rainbows, but make sure you’re enjoying the chase?