For the past 18 months I have been in therapy. This is not particularly brave, or noteworthy. In the UK, 25% of the population will experience some mental health problem in any given year, about 6% will have generalized anxiety and about 8% will have mixed anxiety and depression. I was somewhere between those two categories. When I started therapy, I was looking to rebuild a sense of self. I had recently left a job that had been a big part of how I defined myself. The departure hadn’t been smooth or particularly professional. I was falling apart regularly, and unable to function with my new precarious financial reality. At first, the therapy allowed me to get my life under control. To do the most basic things again. After that, therapy turned into an almost intellectual exercise. A way to decode what I was feeling into something resembling a coherent thesis of the self.
For example, I have discovered that the way I show love to my friends and family is by attempting to solve their problems for them. I have discovered that the reason I have an aversion towards Airbnb - and the ridiculously named “sharing economy” in general - is because I spent my teenage years growing up in a surveillance state - where I’d regularly hear the clicks of the intelligence services latching onto our phone line - and still believe that every room I enter that isn’t in my house in London could be bugged or have secret cameras. When I had to ask for help from my parents aged 35, I felt enormous inner conflict because the British side of me couldn’t tolerate the regression, whereas the Lebanese part of me thought it was normal to fall back on family in a difficult moment. And I learned that last week, when I cried at an email from my local independent bookstore asking for help to keep going, then cried again at the sight of shut down pubs in Chalk Farm and the empty streets of Soho on the news, what I was feeling wasn’t fear over the sickness taking hold across the world - it was grief. I am grieving the social spaces that offer joy and randomness. I am grieving the fact that when they come back, they will not be the same. Whatever happens, we will have lost something. Grief is a difficult emotion to sit with. It makes me think of all the other griefs I have coming my way. Even though my rational brain knows that in a few months, some semblance of limited normality will return to some parts of the world and maybe I’ll be able to get on a plane, another part of me is terrified I will never see my parents again. (Yesterday I saw a HBR article echoing my therapist’s words, entitled That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief. But I haven’t brought myself to reading it yet. Maybe I will after I watch a bit more feel-good Brooklyn Nine-Nine.)
The weekly therapy appointment became a cornerstone of my life, holding everything else together around it. In my first session I was told that that hour on Wednesday was mine, and that if I ever needed to cancel I would still be charged. It’s a way of creating respect for that time slot and forcing regularity. When we moved it from 4pm to 1.30pm, it felt uncomfortable. Two weeks ago, we moved from in-person sessions to phone sessions. It was understandable, but I still wanted to cling on to my habit. So I decided I would do my calls in the park nearby, a safe distance from everyone. On this week’s call, my therapist told me she was shutting down her practice. By design, the therapist-patient information flow is lopsided, which means that it is not my place to ask why. I just asked if she was OK. And we moved on. I told her that when I was managing a team, I never took a professional departure personally. I had colleagues who took every resignation as a personal affront, but I always understood people had lives to live, careers to explore, themselves or others to take care of.
I feel some freedom - seeing if I can make it through this pandemic and the anxiety it has created - without the structure that has made the last 18 months liveable. Regardless, I recognize that is another layer of grief. Something has ended and I am entering this uncertain time without professional help. But there is something in the commonality of our anxieties at the moment that means I’m not worried. We all share similar fears right now, our ambitions are on hold as we clean ourselves and our houses compulsively. Although everyone is convinced that staying at home means they’ll finally write that novel (spoiler: you won’t, trust me), what it actually means is we’re all in a form of stasis. We want to stay safe for those we care about and we want them to get through this. Somehow because we’re all in this equalized moment, I don't feel I have any individual need for therapy. It is being done collectively. Through the knowledge of the things we have already lost and the fear of losing more.
Every video call is a message we’re sending out to the person(s) we are talking to, to ourselves and to everyone we share the screenshot with afterwards on an Instagram story - it says that even as we shut down our social spaces, we will remain a social species. And we will be here for each other, through both the certain grief and the unimaginable joy that will come when we emerge from this moment.
For advice and support if you’re facing mental health problems in the UK, reach out to Mind at www.mind.org.uk