She took the notebook and sat down at the kitchen table.
After a long day, the last thing she wanted was to start scribbling away. Even holding the pen in her hand felt strange. Such a weird sensation, it brought her back to her school days, now lost in the mist of fading memories.
She used to love writing then, and drawing. She smiled remembering a long forgotten test, when she had no clue what the answers were, so she just spent and entire hour drawing a most wondrous cube. She was ashamed to hand in the empty paper early, so she just stuck it out and focused on the cube taking shape under her pen.
The smile faded when she realized that, right now, in her life, she was doing something similar, she was focusing on creating the most perfect cube, refusing to do what she actually wanted and needed.
She had not even begun to write and she started to get ‘ideas’, maybe there was something to this thing in the end. Or it was just the silence, the time given to listening to her thoughts, to looking at her emotions, to being with herself.
The therapist said that she needs to start from the morning and write down everything that she did, bullet points, not getting lost in the details. She was meant to write down even the stupidest things, so she started:
Monday, 13 December:
Opened my eyes and wanted to shut them down back immediately … no lyricism
Got out of bed with bones creaking and stomach churning … stop
Went to the loo
Brushed my teeth
Went to the kitchen and made coffee
Went back up
Showered
Dressed
Kissed hubby
Left the house
Took the bus
Got to the office
Worked … worked some more …
Took the bus back
Got off at the shop and did some shopping
Came home
Had coffee with hubby
Made dinner
Vacuumed
Did the dishes
Writing in my journal
The therapist said that she should count how many entries she had put down.
21
The therapist then said that she should take her time and re-read the list and see how it correlates with her conviction that she does not do anything.
‘Is it true that she does not do anything? What more should she do for it to count as enough?’
Re-reading the list she had this thought that her sadness was not caused by the fact that she was not doing enough things and life was passing her by, but it was caused by the fact that she did not add among her activities things that she valued.
Although, she did not like thinking that, because it made it sound as if she did not value her life, which she did greatly. But, if she valued her life then why did she have that feeling of emptiness in her chest? That suffocating sadness?
She thought again about the cube. She loved her cube. The cube spared her the embarrassment of getting up and giving an empty exam paper. It did not earn her a good grade though, it just helped her hide and not face what she truly wanted to do.
What did she want to do?
She did not know.
And that made her sad. To get to this age and not know what would end the sadness.
She wrote this down.
‘What do I want to do?’
She leaned back in the chair and thought about it.
Food for thought.