Last night I broke my personal record for insomnia by falling asleep at 7.15 AM only, after my husband had left for class. Needless to say that aside from being immensely tired, I was also extremely distraught emotionally. Fortunately, I did not post the blog entry I had started writing, because it connected only marginally with the reality of my everyday life and was otherwise observed through the lense of nighttime pessimism.
Unfortunately, that means I also missed the time-window for calling the psychiatrist. The practice had been closed over the last few days because of carnival, and today they were only open in the morning… Will have to try tomorrow again, when they also open in the afternoon.
After I had finally drifted off, I dreamt that my therapist had done a new assessment questionnaire with me, and my results exceeded 100% in some categories. “That’s great,” he exclaimed, “now we finally know which parts of your brain we can cut out!”
Tag: struggle
A Bad Day
And I do mean bad: not-sleeping-until-5-AM-and-crying-after-waking-up-bad. I have been talking to my therapist about starting antidepressants again; even though he is also a psychiatrist, he must not treat me as such because legally therapy is “aftercare” for the clinical trial I was part of, and he is only allowed to see me as a CBASP therapist. With the kind of health insurance I have, I cannot see him as a regular patient, and I don’t have the money to cross over to his regular patient pool.
He said the antidepressants will not be able to replace the psychotherapeutic work (which I did not mean to do anyway), but might be able to aid it. He also recommended a psychiatrist to me, which makes things a lot easier as I do not have to do research and worry about whether I made a good choice or not.
… And Little Strokes Fell Big Oaks
(Not that I’m a big oak. More like a weeping willow. Or one of those windswept, crippled conifers.)
On my old computer, I used to have a .pdf-file of a text-book on personality disorders. Unfortunately, I do not remember the title anymore, and so this source of information remains lost until I gain access to my old hard drive again. Said text-book not only gave me plenty of insight into the mechanisms of my own mind – many of the characteristics of avoidant personality disorder can also be found in my own avoidant behaviour – but also educated me about my mother’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies (my family displays an abundance mental health problems, namely depression, social anxiety, OCD, and borderline streaks – we’d make for some fantastic study material).
From this book I know that my mum’s rules are just a way of coping with what she perceives as threatening. Her constant criticism is born out of an urge to make a chaotic world appear controllable: for example, by blaming the gastritis on something I did wrong – “you are eating the wrong stuff / cooking unhealthily” – she reduces the emotional helplessness for herself, because in a world where I get gastritis just out of the blue and nothing can be done about it, she is helpless and at the whim of fate.
The problem is, I already am “out of control”: I am depressed and have a plethora of symptoms which come and go seemingly randomly, leaving me unable to function at times. Of course, my mother worries, and tries to bully me onto a path which she believes will keep me safe – oblivious to the fact that her criticism drives me even deeper into depression.
This phenomenon is not so rare, actually: whenever some outrageous crime happens, like a child being abducted and getting killed, you will hear comments from other people afterwards, blaming the child’s parents for something they did wrong or neglected to do – because if they admitted that we are living in a world where such cruelty can happen at random, without anyone who could have prevented it, they would have to face the fact that the same could happen to their own children. This, however, is too painful; it would destroy the illusion of absolute safety – it is so much more comforting and easier to believe the other parents failed and that they are doing a better job.
So, whenever something happens to me, my mother blames it on some shortcoming on my side, because that means she did not do anything wrong and that she is still in control.
From an unemotional point of view, I completely understand her behaviour, and it is obvious that my mum is not aware of the patterns herself. But that does not excuse the fact that my emotional well-being gets thrown under the bus time and again: it’s hard enough to live with what I’ve become, without having to deal with all those other flaws and failings I supposedly am responsible for.
There are a few things I will have to do to ensure my own well-being: short-term, I’ll have to talk to my mum about all of this. The problem is that either I’m in a state of anger about what’s happened, which makes me snappy and defensive – not a good basis for a discussion. Or I am not angry, which by default makes me lack the guts to breach such a difficult topic with her.
Long-term, I need to gain some more distance from my parents, emotionally as well as geographically. And financially. I just want to get to the point where I can have my own life at my own terms, without feeling guilty or pressured all the time.
Constant Dripping Wears The Stone
(Source: Dan Piraro)
I am not entirely serious about the comic strip; it’s more of a hyperbolic comment on my life, but I need some humour and the chance to vent in order to deal with today. My mum has been cavilling me since the morning, a constant trickle of criticism and petty jabs. And even though I am fully aware that I am not the reason for her jibes, but merely the most convenient target for her projections, it still hurts. Drip.
The individual remarks are trivial, not worth getting upset over, one should think: one was about my doormat having been dirty for “at least three months”, when the handymen who are currently renovating the flat next door had left the crumbs of mortar and concrete only 36 hours ago – which have been cleaned away since Friday night already. Drip. One was about me relating a news article of local interest I had read online which according to her was “old news” – despite the publishing date being yesterday. Drip. One was a degrading remark because I had to take a nap this afternoon, “just because you had to go shopping at 10 AM” – even though I’d had a really bad night with only 5 hours of fitful sleep (when I need 9 hours because of the depression) and still had gotten up without complaining. Drip.
What upsets me the most is that my mother makes these comments because she is upset with another person, and then takes it out on whoever crosses her path. I’ve been through this in therapy so many times and know exactly what I should do and say, but she triggers an automated behaviour in me which just makes me sound sulky and defensive instead. We are not really interacting with each other, but acting parts in a pre-determined script. There is so little self-reflection on her part…
My sister is between jobs right now, with another month to go before her new employment starts. Being divorced and unemployed, she and my mother spent a lot of time together: eight, ten, twelve hours a day, for the last three months. My sister also has started seeing a psychiatrist and taking antidepressants; generally speaking, a very good development. So I understood that my mother would be preoccupied with all of that, since it indirectly concerned a large part of her own day.
My mother has strong tendencies towards OCD-behaviour, with a myriad of unwritten rules one better not crosses. Doing something in a different fashion than the one she uses will give her a very hard time. She is also “orthorexic” in so far that she is obsessed with nutritional properties, minerals, vitamins, and whatever positive qualities an ingredient might have. So when my sister decided to try a vegan challenge, or go at least vegetarian for a while (she took a break for Christmas), my mother was all over that.
Now, I don’t have anything against vegans or vegetarians. I understand and even agree with a lot of the reasons why people would choose to eat this way. In fact, I try to have a vegetarian day or two every week, but I could not go without meat for a longer time, and my husband is quite the carnivore. I respect the choice others made, and want mine to be respected as well. But once my sister embarked on her vegan adventure, my mother’s occasional negative remarks on what I am buying / cooking turned into a steady stream. Drip, drip, drip.
Thanks to the antidepressants, my sister had the urge to walk a lot, and so they would go out together, walk two or three hours every day – and are now bragging about the weight they lost. Some days, they make me feel like a fat, blubbery pudding; the German word I have in mind is Trauerkloß, literally a “mourning dumpling”. The idiot who is too slow and pathetic to get on with her life, the fat fuck who always sleeps. Of course they do not use those words, but this is the effect their little verbal needle pricks have on me. Drip, drip, drip. And it took two years of psychotherapy just to come to the conviction that the problem is actually on her end, not mine.
Not only are they together 90 % of the time these days, but on the rare occasion I see my mother without my sister, she incessantly talks about her. And while I understand that this is on the forefront of her mind due to the many hours they spend in each other’s company, I would very much like to talk about something that is important to me once in a while. I feel like I am going to have a melt-down if the situation goes on for much longer.
Come A Little Bit Closer
The news about the TV appearance were not the only unusual part of the last session. Two years of therapy mean that eventually, the appointments start to resemble one another; the discussions are important, but you know the routine and after a couple of weeks you recall brief scenes rather than the whole meeting.
Over the course of spring and summer, the hospital wing where my therapist sits got renovated and he had to move out of his office temporarily. He’s been back in the old location since September, but had decided to furnish the room differently: the set-up of desk, armchairs, file cabinets and the exam table is mirrored now. All of this was reason enough to break the routine and to make me feel uncomfortable at first. I got so used to always having the same perspective in that room that the familiarity of sitting in that armchair gave me a sense of security. Before that background, the last session took place.
Practicing alternative behaviours is a huge part of our routine: my problem is that I tend to do nothing at all and just remain silent when I should speak up instead, and so my therapist lets me reenact scenes we discussed, but where I behave the way I should have for getting a more desirable outcome. He lets me repeat phrases until I get the words and intonation just right, and then some more to “hammer” them in.
This is by far my least favourite part of therapy as it goes completely against my instincts of hiding myself away. When the acting was still new to me, I would occasionally break out in giggle fits due to the embarrassment, but that wouldn’t let me off the hook. My therapist would just sit there with a smile on his face, wait until I calmed down, and ask me to try again. Of course, I could just refuse and sit in my chair for the rest of the appointment, but that’s not what I go to therapy for… So, the best way to handle this for me is to get it over with as quickly as possible – the more I concentrate and the sooner I get it right, the fewer repeats we’ll go through.
Last time, however, my therapist decided to take it a step further: he had me stand up from the chair. I repeated my little speech two or three times, then he said:
“Come a little closer, please.”
I made a small step towards him.
“And even closer, please.”
Eventually, the distance had shrunk so much that I could have reached out and put my hand on his shoulder; since my therapist was still sitting in his chair, I had to look down on him – a position which makes me feel extremely uncomfortable, and he knows it. I had to repeat my sentences again, then he asked:
“What did you just think?”
“I was thinking about my arms, about how I have been clasping my hands at this really weird, crampy angle.”
“Your arms looked just fine. Why don’t you try a different position?”
I tried to relax my limbs and folded my fingers in front of me, but since I had also inched back a little in the process, I had to step closer again.
“How does that feel?”
“Ok. Better than the crampy clasp.”
“Try something else – why don’t you just leave your arms hanging?”
I did, but immediately felt like they ceased being a part of my body and turned into two dead appendices rather. I stretched and flexed my fingers nervously, hid my hands behind my back and then let them hang down again immediately.
“How does that make you feel?”
“Nervous. Extremely uncomfortable.”
“But you look more relaxed and more approachable. If you fold your arms, you are creating a barrier. And to me, these positions are comfortable. I don’t feel threatened by you at all.”
In the past, we had talked about how this particular constellation – he sitting, me standing up – made me feel like I was being this huge mass ready to bulldoze him. Like a gross, obese entity crushing him under my excessively large body. I am (by now) completely aware that a lot of the negative self-image and negative thoughts exist in my mind only, and that they are very much over the top, but that does not make them go away.
“How do you feel now?”
“Still nervous.”
“Look at my face. What do I look like?”
“Neutral. Relaxed.”
“How can you tell?”
“There are no signs of stress in your face. No creased forehead, relaxed eyes and mouth.”
“It’s good that you can see this!”
We talked a few moments about how I hardly ever relaxed when sleeping either, that I often woke up with my hands clenched into fists, and the muscle pain I had from that.
“How do you feel now?”
“A little better. Still uncomfortable, but not as much anymore.”
“Good! It’s very important that you experience this!”
When I was finally allowed to sit back into the armchair again, I felt fairly exhausted. We have done similar exercises before, but never that long and intense. Rationally, I know what this is all about: by exposing me to an uncomfortable situation and having me observe that the effect on my therapist is not a negative one, my self-image gets altered. Physical proximity is not a bad thing, and I am not causing negative emotions in another person by standing close to them. At the same time, I am forced to endure a situation I’d usually avoid, so that I can experience how the discomfort starts decreasing after a while.
Strangely enough, despite experiencing mostly negative emotions, thoughts, and despite how stressful this was, I felt really good after the session. In my family, nobody would ask how I felt, and if i talked about it, the standard response would be to pull myself together. In fact, that is what I used to do – so much so that I always downplayed all of that or ignored it even, and it felt good to acknowledge the existence of those emotions and having them taken seriously.
Going Public With Depression – On TV
In the first session after my recent participation in the student class, my therapist paid me a compliment on that. He said he could see a huge difference between the way I carried myself in April and November respectively. And then:
“I think it would look pretty good when filmed, too.”
I didn’t know what to make of this comment, assuming he was talking about having a camera roll in another, upcoming student class:
“You think? I don’t know – and can’t really tell; it’s not like I’d ever watch that anyway.” (We’ve had discussions in the past about whether I wanted to see footage from the early sessions, which were all filmed. I always refused.)
“We are planning a featurette for [news show on TV] next spring and I could imagine you making an appearance as a patient.”
I was rather dumbstruck after that and don’t quite remember what my response was, something very non-committal in any case. We dropped the topic afterwards and it was only after a night’s sleep and some serious thinking that I sent my therapist the following reply via email:
“After giving the TV featurette you mentioned yesterday a lot of thought, I came to the following conclusion: should you really do this and by that time still be interested in having me in it, I would participate.
My biggest question was whether I’d be willing to have relatives (likely), neighbours (possible) and fellow uni students (unlikely) recognize me in the feature and asking questions about it. The result is that I am willing to accept that.”
And he emailed back:
“Thank you. In such a featurette, the main focus is on the treatment method and on what you learned through it. It’s great that you are going to be a part of it!”
I know the news show he was talking about very well; it’s on every day except for Sundays, in the early evening. Each region within the federal state has their own version, where they focus on what is going on in that particular area. It’s certainly not nationwide. Once per week they have reserved broadcasting space where they highlight a medical topic. One week it may be the latest development in terms of laser surgery for cataracts, the next week the specific problems of teenagers with diabetes mellitus, and after that it might be migraines or heartburn or coronary heart disease or hearing aids or dentures etc. They tend to focus on health problems which are common among the general demographic here in Germany and on treatment methods available in the area, including mental health issues, and one of the episodes planned for next spring is going to be about chronic depression and CBASP.
Generally speaking, the filming process shouldn’t be much more difficult than talking in front of the student class. It’s going to be a little different, but it does not spark any more anxiety in me than being in a presentation in front of an audience I can actually see.
However, since the exchange of emails with my therapist, I had time for contemplation and realized that the underlying issue is not so much going public, but rather relinquishing control over who knows and who doesn’t. Right now, I recall exactly whom I told about the depression and psychotherapy, and I have a pretty good idea of who told somebody else. In total, it should be about 25 people who are in on it, give or take a few. Once I appear on TV – with my real name, my face clearly visible, my voice saying the words – it will be impossible to tell who has and who hasn’t seen the feature.
For people who suffer from anxiety, it is very important to be in control of problematic situations, because that is what keeps the anxiety at bay. If I decide who is being informed or not, I also control for whom I’ll be vulnerable and who is excluded from knowing that “secret”.
There has been a similar situation in my life before: when I was in my early twenties and had to decide whether I wanted to come out of the closet or not regarding my sexual orientation. Before I came out, if I got into an argument with someone or somebody hurt my feelings, it comforted me to have a secret. They did not really know me; there was a part of me hidden from them which they could not reach, which they could not hurt. With the depression, it is the same mechanism at work.
Coming to this conclusion doesn’t change my position. I said I’d do it, and I will, but it’s always better to be clear about what is happening emotionally and to adjust one’s behaviour accordingly. I do not want my mood to tank afterwards because suddenly I feel exposed and vulnerable. And everything else is a challenge, I guess.
Looking Back At Two Years Of Psychotherapy
Exactly two years ago, I was officially accepted into the therapy programme and started sessions. I still remember the relief when signing my name under the contract – finally an official diagnosis, finally a glitter of hope.
Psychotherapy is a long process, at least when you are talking chronic conditions. At the age of 30, I had a depression history of almost two decades, and you don’t wipe those away in just a few short weeks. There were aspects of the depression which vanished within a few weeks, and others which I am still labouring around with. But generally speaking, a bad day now still is better than a good day two years ago.
Psychotherapy also is a lot of work. Hard work. You revisit a lot of bad memories. You get confronted with your own shortcomings. You have to practice both in the session and outside of it, relentlessly. I won’t lie: there have been days when I got fed up with all of this. Days when I cried, when I got frustrated with myself, when I didn’t want to do my homework. What’s worse, the majority of people you meet will never know how much effort you put into recovering from depression – be it because they don’t know you are suffering from it, be it because they don’t have enough empathy to put themselves into your shoes.
However, I do believe it was worth absolutely worth it, not only in terms of symptom reduction, but also because it made me grow. I changed more in those two years than in the ten years before. I feel like I am much more in charge of my reactions than I used to be: where I would just run a “standard response programme”once triggered by certain emotional stimuli, I am now actually aware of what is happening, of how I react, and why. I am more confident, more secure of myself.
I already wrote a post exclusively dedicated to my therapist in August 2011, and everything I said there still rings true. However, almost a year and a half later, I find that our relationship has matured. For a while, during the first therapy year, I was under the spell of transference regarding my therapist – not that I was in love with him, but I saw something like an ersatz-parent in him. He gave me the kind of emotional response I would have liked to get from my parents: protective, but not smothering me, and at the same time encouraging me to try myself out.
I think that kind of transference is not only the rule in CBASP, but actually accounted for as part of the therapy process. After all, chronic depression originates in the childhood. I believe my therapist was both expecting and aware of the transference, but never mentioned it to me, and I didn’t breach the subject either. Maybe I was more susceptible for it because at the time my husband was back in the United States and I was feeling lonely without him, and I could talk about this situation much better to my therapist than with my parents. That actually still is the case, but since my husband and I are not geographically apart anymore, the need to talk about this has naturally vanished too.
Back in the day, I would email my therapist at least once every week, to keep him up to date about my life – which had been his idea, not mine. Every other week, I’d have a session and see him in person.
Now, I have sessions in intervals of six weeks, and I email him maybe once per month, if something really important happens. The therapeutic relationship mimics that of parent and child again, and it looks like “I’m growing up” now and become independent from him. In fact, I do not need him anymore for my everyday life. The transference has faded away.
Does that mean I could do without him? Absolutely not. I am still looking forward to every session, but now in a strictly professional way, because I still want and need to work on myself. I still need the “security net” he provides, take great comfort in knowing that I could get in contact whenever the need arose. If shit hit the fan, he’d be only an email or phone call away. And I’m not quite ready to let that go. Yet.
The Jubilee Post
Today, I celebrate the 100th blog post. If the counter didn’t keep track of the statistics, I most certainly would have missed the milestone, but I’m glad I didn’t. When getting started, I had no real direction to follow and was more concerned with not running out of steam early on than with developing a writer’s voice or any long-term goals for “Lugubrious Layara”: I simply talked about what was happening in my life, in therapy and in my head.
There also was (and still is) an educational facet to the blog, even though from a strictly personal, non-professional angle. I get a fairly consistent number of hits through people googling CBASP, and I’m really happy that I can provide links, information and my own opinion – when I was about to start the therapy programme, there was very little to be found online, and nothing in regards to other blogs. Even now, the situation changed only marginally. And despite knowing that there are other people being treated with CBASP all over the world, and even at the same hospital, I have never encountered any other CBASP patient, neither online nor in the real world. If I have accomplished nothing else with this blog, at the very least it added a new voice to the plethora of mental health blogs out there.
Blogging means walkig a tight rope. How much of yourself do you put out there? And how much of the people you write about? I try protecting the privacy of everyone I mention as much as possible, even if it means that my writing sometimes suffers from the vagueness. Occasionally, I don’t post because it would mean discussing the personal history of another person more than I’m comfortable with – I can decide to put my own history out there, but not my husband’s, for example.
Sometimes, I want to post, but don’t have the energy for writing. There’s a good deal of regurgitating going on when developing a new blog post – I type, erase, type again, erase again, scratch certain formulations, phrases or entire paragraphs. And there were a few incidents where I had an entire post ready for publication but never chose to put it out there – because the situation described didn’t exist anymore, or because it had taken so long to jot the story down that I had already moved on from it by the time I was done.
And then, there are the blog posts I would like to write, but that are too emotionally exhausting to go there: for example, my sister’s “borderline meltdown” the day before my wedding. Or the post about my husband’s immigration process I started writing back in September, but the 800 words on that which I got so far only covered everything prior to our marriage day and revisiting the events make me feel depressed, so the progress on that is very slow…
Despite and because of all of that, blogging is very beneficial for me. My therapist always urges me to become “more visible”, to put more of myself out there, and the blog is one way of doing so. My friends and my husband not only know of its existence, but some of them even are somewhat regular readers. This allows me to talk about my feelings and problems at length without pushing them on anybody – they can decide when to visit, and how often.
There is a similar effect to writing about depression as visiting the student classes had; it gives me a sense of not only dealing with it, but of making it a little less like I wasted all those years with the illness. At the age of 32 years, I have spent a minimum of 20 years with the condition, about ten of them severely depressed. By sharing, it does not feel like I wasted those.
Being A Guest Speaker Again
Last week I was a guest at my therapist’s student class again. Unlike the first time in April, when he’d asked me weeks ahead of the event, this time it was on very short notice, less than 24 hours before the class. I gave a positive reply without hesitation. Appearances like that make me rather nervous, but I am a firm believer in doing something for the greater good. If my appearance helps students to see chronic depression as less abstract, if they can put a face on textbook knowledge, it makes me feel a little better about my own mental health history – one positive aspect among so many negative ones.
The class was about the same size and gender ratio as last time (women vastly outnumbering the men); very well-behaved and quiet. The April-group was maybe a little more engaging, but then, they had only seen one other in-patient before me. This month’s group had already met an elderly in-patient with treatment-refractory depression, a bipolar patient and a young woman with chronic depression in the very early stages of therapy. I was meant to be her counterpart, who could talk about the changes which happen when you go through psychotherapy in general and CBASP in particular.
I was with the students for 25 minutes only, so naturally we didn’t go into as much detail as last time, and focused less on my personal history and more on the importance of trust and the professional’s behaviour: that in the long run psychotherapy is more successful if time is allowed for establishing a trusting relationship between therapist and patient first. More often than not, patients battle anxiety in addition to the depression, and they are easily scared away for good if not handled carefully or not taken seriously by therapists and hospital staff.
It is rather ironic that despite my social anxiety, I am a somewhat capable public speaker. I know that you have to enunciate clearly and speak with moderate tempo, that you have to talk louder than in a normal conversation and that eye contact with the audience is important if you want to come across as competent. I have held a number of lectures in university in front of up to a hundred people, and have almost always been congratulated on my “professionalism” afterwards. But it is just a mask I wear and afterwards, I am terribly exhausted and crash, and it takes weeks to fully recover from this.
Generally speaking, I was not as worried this time around, even though there always is this phase a couple of minutes before actually getting started where I become somewhat panicky, cursing myself for saying yes and badly wishing I had avoided this situation. And I’m always afraid of “forgetting” crucial facts, of not being able to access the memories of the early treatment days properly. Fortunately for me, my therapist knows me so well by now that he can anticipate problematic situations and guide the conversation around them, or take the edge off by moderating.
The chart of my depression indices was shown again – I noticed that this time, it had the title of an article printed on the bottom, stating it was “in press”. (For those who are not familiar with the rules of scientific writing: an article being “in press” means it has been accepted by a journal for publication, but has not been printed yet at the time being.) From the very beginning I had known that my anonymised data would get published sooner or later, and in the beginning I was itching with curiosity. Now that I had stopped thinking about it altogether, that silent announcement took me somewhat by surprise.
I can’t help but wonder whether this obsession about the article in the early days had something to do with the urge to chronicle my own life, as mentioned in my last blog post. As if my own thoughts and ideas and feelings about the topic don’t count if I can’t back them up with written proof.
Decluttering: Part II
In the last post, I mainly focused on recounting a chronology of events; in this entry, I would like to highlight the emotional and psychological background of the decluttering process I am still going through (even though I must admit that I’ve been slacking on that front since I wrote the last entry – it’s definitely time to get back in gear).
My household chores consist of cooking and grocery shopping as well as doing the laundry and, once in a while, cleaning something. My husband is responsible for most of the cleaning / vacuuming, he does the dishes and makes the beds. I am now in a state where I can fulfil my share regularly, at least preparing our meals and shopping. The laundry and cleaning get put off sometimes, unless it is really urgent, but overall it is not too bad either and never for longer than a day or two. I actually enjoy the cooking and grocery shopping, which undoubtedly helps a lot.
Decluttering, on the other hand, is a highly stressful process. Every box I open contains a plethora of keepsakes, memorabilia and knickknacks which are ten to fifteen years old: fountain pens, postcards, key rings, fashion jewellery, notebooks, candle holders, foreign coins, bookmarks, rubber bands, hair clips, dices, and pebbles. There are a lot of pebbles and pieces of rock in my flat – picked up at various destinations of my travels as well as just in my home area. This might sound odd to some people, but those pebbles are not only souvenirs, but also bring me aesthetic pleasure. I like looking at them and the way they feel to the touch. However, I got to the point where I just had too many of them and they were sitting on too many surfaces. There are only a few I will keep, but 90% are in a plastic bag now, which I’ll empty into the local river one of these days.
The popular advice to put something into a box and throw that box away unopened after a year if you have not missed any of its contents just does not work for me – it actually creates anxiety for me. Instead, when I “attack” a new box or pile, I have to take a look at every individual piece in it and decide whether I want to keep it or not. It is almost like saying goodbye to the objects that won’t make it.
The more personal the item, the harder it is to let go of it: for example, I had two pieces of rope tied into nautic knots which I had made on a sailing trip to the Netherlands in 1996. They served no purpose, not even a decorative one, anymore. They took up space. They actually bothered me, I wanted them to be gone. And yet I could not bring myself to throwing the ropework away. Doing so just felt wrong. For several minutes, I stood there, holding them in my hands, remembering the day I made them and the time which has passed since, until finally I tossed the rope into the trash bag. I had gotten so stressed out over the process that I had to take a break for half an hour, and that is what it is like every day that I actually find the energy to organize.
Just where does the sentimental attachment come from? In some cases, where we’re talking about souvenirs from vacations, the answer is obvious: they are tokens of happier days. But just as often, they are just remains from the past and don’t evoke particularly fond feelings – sometimes even the opposite happens. Like with the retainers I had to wear as a teenager, which only remind me of all the physical pain they brought and the scars left inside my mouth by the braces and retainers.
The only explanation I can come up with regarding why I kept all those objects is that I tried to keep an inventory of my past. As if little parts of me would cease existing if there was no tangible proof of them. My wish of becoming an archaeologist could just as well be interpreted as a diagnosis – I tried to chronicle my own life.
Lugubrious Layara 