Handling Disruption

One of the jobs I do is write answers to random questions posed by people who are struggling with some aspect of their mental health.

Mostly they write asking for advice about their anxiety, how to overcome imposter syndrome, or why they might have an inability to focus on their work.

Sometimes they ask about their relationships, and sometimes they are writing as a bridge to doing therapy because they aren’t really sure if they are “worthy” of it, or that their emotional disruption is “important enough” to spend time on.

Earlier in the week, I received this question,

“I’m so so sad.”

That was it.

I walked to the clinic thinking about how to answer and was still wondering when I walked back again.

On my way, I passed the row of wheelie bins outside each house waiting to be taken away.

One particular bin was so full of rubbish that it spilled over and was strewn across the ground around and near to it.

Piles of clothes, shoes, old books, boxes that must once have held the collected bits and pieces of a life.

The man who lived in the house was very sick with Covid in the early days of the pandemic and he never really recovered, the long-form attacking one organ after another until he was unable to walk his little dog, get out to pump up the tyres on his car, or feed his cats.

He died recently and his family has left his clothes and all these other possessions to sit in the white heat of the summer waiting to be dumped.

Apparently, although I only heard this third hand, some of them were unhappy that he had not left more to them in his will.

If it’s true I can’t imagine that any of them will be writing “I’m so so sad,” to a therapist.

“I’m so so sad.”

To write only four words and repeat one of them for accentuation feels like unbearable and bewildering pain.

I thought about my own experiences of unbearable sadness, and how I would not and could not be pulled from it by anyone else.

I felt that emotional disruption needed to be smoothed down rather than agitated and some of my early experiences of therapy amounted to being taught things that I wasn’t ready to learn, and encouraged to encounter feelings that I could not face.

Most of what I have learned about emotional disruption was learned as a patient and not in training as a therapist.

I wrote to “I’m so so sad” and I told them my own story in the hope that they would see some possibility of liberation in someone else who once had no clue about what to do and where to go.

I told them about the man along the road whose relatives never visited, until it was too late, and how, as long as we have a breath, there is time to deal with what we’re facing even though we may not really want to.

I wrote that handling emotional disruption rather than turning our backs and trying to pretend it doesn’t exist is the best way to make sure that it won’t end up strewn across the pavement in an unwieldy and unseemly mess.